A woman with long dark hair and tattoos on her arm stands on a beach with her arm raised. She is wearing a red dress and appears to be enjoying the moment as the ocean and a cloudy sky are in the background.

Freddy Johnston · Artist, writer, energy medicine practitioner + founder of Fredereka.com

Nature’s Wild Child

Ever since I was a child, I was in my element when I was out in the fields with the animals.

I loved to dance and roam free. It brought me joy before I even had words for why. But in the Christian household I grew up in, feeling good, especially physically, was met with suspicion. Pleasure was an indulgence to be suppressed, not expressed.

So, as I grew older, I stopped moving.

I learned to override my body's impulses in order to fit in, and in doing so I became sedate. I struggled with my mood, my self-esteem and my mental health throughout much of my childhood and adolescence, disconnected from the simple pleasure of moving my body.

Woman with curly hair practicing yoga or stretching on a black mat in a home room, wearing leopard print pants and a sleeveless graphic T-shirt, with a cat tree and window in the background.

Homecoming

Everything changed when I moved to London in my twenties.

I found myself at an endless buffet of movement practices, and I wanted to taste them all. Yoga. Qi Gong. Ecstatic dance. Feldenkrais. If it made me feel more me, I wanted in.

I was astonished by what I discovered.

Again and again, movement would transform my inner world in a matter of minutes. I would arrive at a class after a long day at work feeling overwhelmed, anxious or emotionally depleted and leave feeling clear, energised and connected. The more I moved, the more I realised that movement went beyond exercise. It liberated me. It gave me a new way of listening and healing. It became a doorway into entirely new ways of perceiving the world and experiencing what it means to be alive.

The Work Found Me

Something else returned too.

As I reconnected with my body, I rediscovered my relationship with Spirit, a relationship I had abandoned because of my religious upbringing.

My grandmother was a faith healer who worked with both people and animals, although it would take me years to realise I'd end up working in a remarkably similar way.

Over time I came to understand intuition and instinct were skills I could cultivate when the mental chatter settled and I learned to trust myself.

Alongside this personal journey, I had spent years working in mental health, got a First Class BSc in Integrative Psychotherapy and immersed myself in meditation, yoga, energy medicine and the healing arts.

My training taught me to appreciate the depth and complexity of change. But when I opened my Medical Qi Gong clinic, what surprised me was how quickly subtle shifts could compound.

Clients would feel lighter, calmer, more hopeful and more connected to themselves after a 20-minute session.

They started asking for their pets to have treatments too and I launched the Pet Project. Small changes accumulated over time for both animals and their humans and transformations nobody could have predicted at the outset began emerging.

A woman with short brown hair and green eyes, smiling slightly, is taking a selfie outside. She is wearing a colorful dress with yellow, blue, and black patterns and a gold necklace with a heart-shaped pendant. The background shows a rocky embankment, a metal railing, and a clear blue sky.

Helping Others Remember

Today my work weaves together psychotherapy, nervous system awareness, Qi Gong, healing arts, creativity and spiritual practice into a way of working that honours both science and Spirit, evidence-based practice and intuition, structure and spontaneity.

I don't believe healing is something we "do". I believe it is who we "be” when we remember our innate wisdom.

When we reconnect with the intelligence of the body, we don't simply feel better.

We rediscover our capacity to create, to love, to trust, and to become vibrantly alive… and that to me, is true healing.

A woman taking a mirror selfie in a bathroom, with a message written on the mirror that says 'You are enough' in pink marker.
A woman with butterfly ears wearing a black top and a floral skirt, holding her arms over her head, standing in front of a background with large pink, white, and purple flowers, a solar eclipse, and glowing pink text that reads 'Shake it Loose'.
A woman standing barefoot in a grassy field with small white flowers, spinning a hula hoop around her waist on a sunny day with a partly cloudy sky and trees in the background.