If you’re here, you want to learn more about me and my work.
Let’s start with my name—Shirin.
It means ‘sweet’ in Farsi, the language of my ancestors hailing from the Zagros Mountains of Iran, and most people who know me would say it’s an apt adjective to describe my temperament. They would also acknowledge the presence of a sacred fire that burns fiercely in my heart.
I am a multi-racial, queer, chronically-ill friend, daughter, and community member. My pronouns are she and they. I'm also an avid reader, wild dancer, spinster beyond redemption, and cheerful anarchist.
I call a mid-size coastal town in Italy home, but I dream of setting up a small farm in the countryside with a chicken co-op and a vegetable garden. My greatest longing is to become the human keeper of a giant rabbit, two donkeys and a furry posse of cats and dogs.
Throughout my life I cultivated a devotion to tending to the wounds my ancestors entrusted me with and the battle scars I collected along the way. While I intimately know what living on the outside of one’s body feels like, I never turned away from the throbbing pain of the slashed flesh, which has gifted me with the capacity to hold the very tender parts of ourselves with reverential compassion and care.
Somatics & Facilitating Lineages and Education
I have studied Mind-Body Coaching with Staci K. Haines, Kai Cheng Thom, Dr. Rae Johnson, Manuela Mischke-Reeds and Dr. Scott Lyons.
I am a graduate of the Somatic Dance Institute’s Somatic Activated Healing Method programme, where I was a grateful scholarship student of Sah D’Simone.
While my work is not aimed at the treatment and healing of trauma, I received the appropriate training to provide a safer space for my clients and hold them in all of their human complexities. I have certified in Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy and completed Janina Fisher's Trauma Treatment Certification Training (CCTP). I also attended the foundational workshops for Nkem Ndefo’s first-stage trauma healing and real-time stress navigation methodology, The Resilience Toolkit.
For years I designed and facilitated expressive writing workshops for groups of sick and disabled folks. A long-time devoted expressive writer myself, I have completed more courses than could be listed here, most notably the intensive training based on the teachings of expressive writing pioneer James Pennebaker offered at Duke University.
I have attended intensive courses and workshops with Francine Kelley, Jennifer McKeever, Dr. Samah Jabr, Marika Heindricks, Prentis Hemphill, Jan Winhall, Deb Dana, Peter Levine, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Báyò Akómoláfé, Sonya Renee Taylor.
My deep commitment to the work of transformation prompts me to receive regular somatic coaching from my beloved mentor. I have previously sat in the analysand chair of a depth psychology-informed container held by a Jungian analyst. I also belong to communities of practice that sustain my efforts in sickness and in health with loving care.
In a previous life, I enjoyed the endlessly creative tasks required of my work for contemporary art magazines and fairs. I hold an MA in Comparative Literature and Criticism from Goldsmiths (University of London) and a BA in Persian and Development Studies from SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London). Within this traditional academic path, my research focused on feminist and decolonial praxis, autobiographical texts, and illness narratives.
My perspective on Coaching & Somatics
While both coaching and somatics are nascent methodologies, I maintain that their evolution occurred in the context of a humanistic landscape shaped by neoliberal ideology, capitalist values and colonial extractivism. Therefore, the intention animating my work is to reclaim the ancestral regenerative essence of these healing practices and compost all that fosters separation, scarcity, and oppression. The radical integrity I weave into my accompaniment I define as liberatory, to honour both the political and spiritual lineages that sustain how I show up in my life and with clients. This approach is inspired by the efforts of politicised somatics to integrate the social context within its framework of transformation and the decolonising praxis that has been stirring the revolutionary attempts of our age. It is also rooted in a personal practice that honours the embodied wisdom of someone who holds multiple marginalised identities and is committed to deconditioning from learnt shapes produced by the oppressive ableist imperialist-white-supremacist heteropatriarchy we’re embedded in as inhabitants of the global north.
Lineages & Teachers
With reverence I bow to the numerous teachers, both living and ancestral, that have stewarded my heart and practice in this one precious life. My revolutionary mothers, queer elders, disabled kin—this work is my attempt to humbly walk in your footsteps.
Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Marie von Franz, Marion Woodman, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Forough Farrokhzad, Kathy Acker, Pema Chodron, Mary Oliver, Emma Goldman, adrienne maree brown, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Jenny Odell.
May your powerful words and spirits rumble in the halls of the colonial, capitalist, suprematist institutions dragging our lush planet into the abyss of collapse. May the spells you cast dissolve the ties that bind us to these harmful systems.
What I practice
Most mornings you will find me meditating on my cushion, before I hop onto the yoga mat to stretch my sleepy body. As someone recovering from a state of functional freeze and experiencing life through the glorious filter of neurodivergence, settling my mind and accessing movement at the start of the day is essential to drop into the body and allow the energy to flow, especially in times of great uncertainty and upheaval. My yoga practice is fairly informal and I cherish it as a precious tool to play with embodiment. I am a student of the Thai Forest Tradition, a lineage within Theravāda Buddhism. Sitting meditation and the study of suttas, ancient scriptures with the teachings of the enlightened Buddha, alongside secondary literature, shape my formal practice.
During the summer months I leave the house in the darkness of the early morning to walk to the beach and see the sun rise. Admittedly, I visit Sister Sea throughout the year and I am grateful to be revelling in the nourishing company of the more-than-human communities that populate her ecosystem, the hooded crows and the sandworms, among many others.
I bake the kind of delicious chocolate-chip cookies that would have battalions surrender their war-faring to the indomitable power of afternoon tea. I say hello to (almost all) the dogs I encounter on my walks. I carry a book with me everywhere I go. I love to bask in the sweet release of oxytocin that is produced by a whole-body hug with a dear friend.
I write a newsletter called Press Pause.
It is a mindful archive of emergent reflections on tending to the inner life, looking for joy in the mundane, and being a seeker on a path to individual & collective liberation. The letters I publish are an invitation into slowness and contemplation.
“It’s clear a total transformation is needed. The question that burns is how, but maybe the how brings us back to the fact of the matter. It’s clear a total transformation is needed.”
—Lola Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise
The one and only Jenny Holzer.