it is beautiful to be connected with you
Just like you, I have a curious, non-linear story that got me to where I am today. I’m sharing it with you here so that you can understand the nature of how I work and whether it feels like the right modality for you at this moment in your life. My story is about learning to trust a body I had spent years driving past its limits and a mind that was as wild and free-spirited as a stallion.
hello,
I’m tash straker
I grew up in rural Scotland - cold, long dark winters and spectacularly nocturnal summers. Planting trees, collecting eggs, crafting daisy chains next to the bumblebees. I’ve spent the latter decade of my life living in unfamiliar soils - Myanmar, England, Mexico, Kenya.
I accumulated experience the way that driven people often do, with a sense of urgency, with genuine curiosity, with one eye always on the horizon. My career was rooted in the sustainability and food systems, ranging from the very corporate to the very grassroots. Operating from within the vastness of the United Nation’s humanitarian sector brutally showed me how much disconnect there can be between salt of the earth humanity and the structures built to serve and protect. I had community, financial stability, interlectual stimulation and was striving to positively shape existing systems. It was a life that looked, from any reasonable vantage point, like it was going rather well.
I was curious about most things (perhaps too many things!) and committed to many of them. I was also (underneath the movement and the titles and the meaningful projects) running on something considerably less than full. I just wasn't stopping long enough to notice what was going on inside.
My body, to her great credit, has never been subtle about making herself known. When I get ill, I have a tendancy to get ill completely - the kind of unwell that has brought specialists in, that baffles conventional medicine, that leaves you lying in a room feeling rather alone and a little afraid at times. Dengue. Parasites. HSV-2. I seem to have had many moments where I am left encountering a conveyor belt of consultants who can manage but not resolve.
It was during a particular chapter in my early twenties where a healer - not a doctor - did something that conventional care had not. It took time, but when I sat in the aftermath of her care I held a particular quality of astonishment. The type that comes when the world reveals itself to be considerably more mysterious and more generous than you had been assuming. I have never forgotten that. It planted something in me that took years to fully flower.
Growing up, herbal remedies were simply part of our home. And across years living and travelling abroad, I had watched people tend their bodies with roots and plants and practices passed down over generations. I had always carried a deep reverence for healing traditions that Western medicine can't fully account for. he real unraveling (and beginning) came in early 2023. I had left the United Nations and my abundant life in Kenya as my system had accumulated more than she was able to carry. I seemed to be injured by the COVID vaccine, had a nasty parasite load that wouldn't shift and a lifestyle that was putting my body into overdrive. I was, at my core, a high-achieving woman whose body was asking, very clearly, for a slower life.
When I read The Body Says No by Gabor Maté something rearranged in me. It unashamedly names the relationship between what we suppress and what eventually becomes dis-ease. With something between discomfort and relief, I recognised myself across multiple chapters. A little candle in my mind flickered and urged me to begin listening to myself…in ways that I didn’t get know how.
I had heard of Ayurveda fleetingly during my many visits to India and my yoga practice had been gesturing toward it for years. And yet, it was in January 2023, during six weeks in a residential Ayurvedic centre, that I understood what it actually means to be seen as a whole person. To have your healing journey witnessed fully and attentitively.
An uncle had been to the centre before me and returned changed in ways that were quiet but unmistakable. I thought why not, knowing I needed to try a different approach than waht I’d been scrambling around with in Nairobi. At the time, my body was too depleted for the full classical process so we adapted protcols and went gently at the pace my system could manage. This restraint, was itself, part of the teaching.
Ayurveda offered me a new language and a permission to - at last - be slow. I began to understand myself (and my constitution as a living, responsive intelligence with its own rhythms, its own seasons, its own unique needs.
Since 2015, I have also learnt so much about my body and mind through working with clay. It teaches more than you can imagine! It’s brought personal insights that would have otherwise taken years to surface and the state that I move into when creating versus consuming has become a medicine in itself. Clay is one of the most loyal and patient teachers I have found and it remains central to how I understand healing.
Food has been another thread for as long as I can recall. My childhood home always had a book on the shelf called Foods that Harm, Foods that Heal. It’s never felt seperate to medicine. Shared meals have always carried the essence of being about something closer to repair versus entertainment. A time where we can grow in understanding and tolerance whilst breaking bread and sharing conversation. giveascrap, the community food experience I founded in Nairobi, came from the conviction that the table is one of the few places where real connection (an essential facet of healing) becomes possible without announcement.
Creativity, community, nourishment. These are all beautifully embedded in the very root of my personal healing story and the way I tend to others healing too.
I am still learning and will always be. I am in the clinical phase of my Ayurvedic Health Counsellor training and am a qualified ThetaHealer. I bring to this work a decade of systems thinking, a background in sustainability, years of navigating my own healing and a deep curiosity about the body as an intelligent, self-knowing system that inherently knows how to heal herself if we give her more patience and attention that we have been taught to give.
I did not grow up spiritual. I have been gently (and sometimes chaotically) developing that inner life consciously, with effort and intention in the thick of being unwell and beyond. I understand clearly what it takes to try and balance inner growth alongside a modern outer one that seems to move at a paradoxical rhythm. Every week that goes by, I understand more and more how much beauty choosing to live with depth and presence and mystery brings…and the healing potency of this too.
I am not a nun in a monastery. I have a corporate background. I still live a full, complicated life in Nairobi. But rather, I am someone who has learned to find another way without leaving this world entirely. I am here for the woman who is also trying to do that. Who suspects her body knows more than she's been giving it credit for; who is longing to reconnect with herself in a deeper way. And that inkling…in my experience…is always worth following, no matter how daunting it might feel.
Beyond Ayurveda; explore with me...
Beyond Ayurveda; explore with me...
earthyplates
Creativity is deeply embedded in the healing journey. Each piece I craft is flawed, chaotic and characterful as a mirror of what it is to be wonderfully and wildly human.
creative consulting
I have 10 years of expertise in sustainability, innovation, systems change and facilitation across corporates, the UN and not-for-profits.
giveascrap
I curate revitilising experiences designed with intentionality to provoke thought, build communities and gently create shifts in engaging, vibrant and playful ways.