- ONE-to-ONE THERAPY & BREATH-WORK individually or as a couple – Sofia and Ardhan are skilled & experienced psycho-spiritual therapists also having trained together with Voice Dialogue for a number of years and breath-work (realising together they make excellent healing companions).
- THE WAY OF THE ROSE : We are committed to walking the ‘Beauty Way’, gorgeous sacred spaces which open the heart, which has now become our fragrant mission!
- VOLUNTEERING: At certain times of year, i.e. May & June for the rose harvest, WE NEED HELP. Apply through our contact form or via The Workaway Website.
- OPEN DAYS AND EVENTS for small groups from 2024 : Experience the harvesting and production of our beautiful rose and aromatic products with a visit to our mountainside haven.
- BOOK OUR VENUE for your own event ie markets, community events and other gatherings
Sofia Livingstone
Individual sessions – support for your journey of healing
N.B. Currently, during the height of the summer, I have limited availability for INDIVIDUAL SESSIONS. Use the contact form to enquire.
TESTIMONIALS
“Sofia is an incredible space holder and a real deal healer with such an extensive knowledge of trauma and sensitivity around it. Our voice dialogue session was extremely powerful and transformational and healing. It brought so much light into unconscious patterns and self-defence mechanisms and with that generated immense healing. If you ever get a chance to do any type of work Sofia offers- I would grab that chance with both your hands. Healers of that calibre are very hard to find. Thank you so much Sofia for your dedication to this work and the continuous support you offer me and so many other women across the globe” Ksenia ❤️
“Sofia’s guided voice dialogue session felt extremely safe for me to express one of my hidden inner voices. The clarity of how the session would be held and what can come up was explained simply and carefully. The gentle enquiry allowed me to release what felt stuck in my body. The most crucial aspect of the session for me was the quality of integration courtesy of Sofia’s expansive yet assertive space holding. Her knowledge from various modalities shines through. Thank you dearest Sofia for your sensitive, empowered and wise medicine. Love always,”
Aminah Sheikh
“Sofia’s ability to listen, hold space, uncover what hides in shadow, and to ground into one’s sacred power, is her true medicine….. Sofia is a gentle, fiercely focused guide for anyone seeking to re-member their own ‘satya vita.’ Her Pozzuolo healing centre is truly a piece of heaven on earth.”
-Deb
“Sofia that was extraordinary. you are such a powerhouse mystic and divine healer. Deeply blessed to know you and breathe under your loving guidance” Christina❤️
Hi Sofia, thank you so much for the session this morning. I can feel the transformation working already, and I deeply appreciate all the work you have put into your own transformation, as the depth of your healing sessions shines through. So all though it may not feel complete to you, the way in which you hold a space is beautiful and honouring of the pusher, refreshing. Alison
“Beautiful, soothing, healing and gentle. My session with Sofia gave me clarity and insight into areas that I have been struggling with.
Resistance melted to free up blockages and help me gain the confidence to finally give myself the permission to embrace my true path. A real elixir for the soul, of both softness and strength, that has given me the energy and enthusiasm to move forward on this incredible journey called life. Thank you Sofia”.
Hayley, Italy February 2021
“Sofia’s strength and wisdom created a beautiful, intimate and safe space for me to be vulnerable and connect with a part of myself that had been screaming for attention…. Her intuitive sensitivity also recognised the depth to which it was safe for me to go without re-traumatising or going unconscious.
Sofia is a master of this life-changing work!” With love and gratitude from Jane
“Best session ever was with Sofia doing voice dialogue. It was the moooost powerful session I have ever done with a healer/teacher. Thank you soooo much my love” Sarah xx
“Also wanted to thank you and Ardhan for your wonderful facilitation yesterday. For the first time, I realized that breath was facilitating all of us into an organic community while restoring my organic self. I’ve worked with many groups, from …….. to ……,(names withdrawn) yet they feel very superficial and manufactured. I am so grateful for each of you at Alchemy of Breath. You do bring your own individual lived experiences and it is truly beautiful.” Alison and Tom
“It is foolish to think that we will enter heaven without entering into ourselves” Theresa d’Avila
Sofia lives in Liguria, Italy with her partner Ardhan and four-footed animals, on an isolated olive tree farm, growing perfumed roses, golden helichrysum, oregano and lavender, creating beautiful, natural produce from the land.
Officially Sofia is a very quiet farmer here in Italy, but in her earlier life she used to be a conference manager travelling around the world, organising high tech groups for huge companies like British Airways which led her to burn-out. As a result of this, she embarked on extensive and long trainings in many healing and trauma modalities, too many to mention, but specifically with Person-Centred, Grief and Addictions Counselling, Voice Dialogue, Shamanic Ritual Family Constellation, Goddess archetypes, Spiritual Emergency/e coaching, Alchemy and other breath-work, as well as currently a very deep scent priestess initiation process with Rosa Mystica.
Living near to St Baume in the South of France and surrounded by innumerable perfumed roses, as an ‘elder’, Sofia is called to the Magdalena path, remembering her past life, devoted to the ‘Sisterhood of the Rose’ awakening, in a kind of love activism that is desperately needed and emerging strongly on the planet right now.
Sofia has been on a long journey to heal invisible, hidden, individual and intergenerational trauma with the ‘brutal grace’ of debilitating chronic illness as her initiation and greatest teacher, helping her to regulate her nervous system, reconnect somatically and come out of chronic self abandonment, find innate worth and return to more self-love and self-care.
She has a storehouse of knowledge and many tools from navigating early and ancestral trauma, as well as experiencing chronic fatigue and Lyme, but it is the ‘dark nights of the soul’ and ‘spiritual emergency’, that initiated her as a wounded and mystic healer, leading her to a path of spiritual embodiment and divine sovereignty. Travelling on a hero or heroine’s journey into the underworld is not for the faint-hearted, but there are many treasures to be found along the way such as humility, wisdom, resilience, self-compassion, fortitude, patience and awareness.
Sofia now calls herself a ‘trauma-informed, shame midwife’, and an ‘educated way-shower, as she knows that all light-workers and empathic souls have a wounded healer pattern, which is about making the darkness conscious in order to be a vessel of Mother’s holy grace. She knows in her own life, that it has been the integration of the shadow and a reclaiming of her golden shadow, that has helped her come into more radical embodiment and self-honouring.
Opening her heart has been essential but liberation and mastery has come through the ongoing, physical experience of grounding into her sacrum, learning how to listen and literally ‘digest’ her gut wisdom and creating nourishment and visceral safety through her body’s felt sense. Sofia loves Andrew Harvey’s description of moving through three distinct phases of en-lightenment, en-darkenment and en-realment which sums up her own journey of returning back to her body as a ‘living remembrance’, finding her own truth, listening to the innate wisdom that lives inside her own temple.
Relentless shadow work and belief in her own happy ending showed Sofia that we can transform our trauma into soul power, where radical self-trust and self compassion become the gifts of darkness. She is finally saying a full yes to life, committing to this whole-heartedly by facing what needs to be seen and bringing all exiled, disowned and lost parts back to love. Andrew Harvey also says that ‘grace posits that the individual is unlimited, if he or she comes from the heart’ and this has absolutely been Sofia’s experience just as the famous song ‘Amazing Grace’ expresses so clearly.
Sofia’s mission is to help people see how they can be gardeners of their own soul, how they can come into greater embodiment and how, using inner and outer resources, they can evolve beyond their story and re-invent themselves over and over. As an enlightened witness, holding up a lantern, she acts as a bridge to help jump-start other beating hearts, so that they reconnect with the intimate territory of their soul.
Because of her own lived experience, she guides others with tenderness and compassion, to reclaim their vitality, aliveness and sovereignty, to be the author of their own lives, from a multi-dimensional and cosmic perspective. As one who has walked this path from victim to mystic, seeing the alchemy that is possible when we re-frame our perspective, Sofia can help inspire others to see how their greatest wounds, these sacred obstacles, can and do become the golden treasure and the healing medicine they can offer first to themselves and then to this broken world.
If you feel inspired reading this, you can enquire further via the contact form.
Ardhan Swatridge
Individual Sessions – Support for your journey of healing
My personal website, with more about my therapeutic work, my philosophy of life and my creative writing: innerventures.me
This is the direct link to my Breathwork page on my personal website.
Born on a farm, schooled by nature and the harsh climate of English boarding schools, I am a talented but sensitive man who has spent my life healing and integrating those early experiences, bruised by patriarchy on the one hand and inspired by the freedoms of hippy youth culture on the other.
My rich life experiences include graphic design, craftsman & carver in wood, business partner, repairer, restorer renovator, builder of sheds; Psychosynthesis and Voice Dialogue counsellor, eco-Buddhist mystic, grower of food and healthy living, writer, photographer and student of drystone wall building on our sacred mountainside here in Liguria.
In 2019-20 I trained to be a Breathwork facilitator. I am active in mensgroups online. I bring gentle presence and empathy to all the therapeutic work I undertake, in service to a better world.
Use the contact form on this site (or via my personal website) to enquire about working with me.
VOLUNTEERING: Stay with us
Volunteer Support
At certain times of the year, we need help to get all the practical work done. Examples are:
- cleaning the land by hand or with our motor strimmer.
- mending walls, painting and restoring the land, feeding plants
- work in the garden and vegetable garden (orto)- mostly weeding.
- harvesting the roses and other aromatic plants….. harvesting the olives
See below for more information and also find us on Workaway website.
Accommodation
We have two yurts and two caravans, each with an outdoor but roofed kitchen for self catering.
There are also showers and toilets nearby to each area. We have an infra-red sauna to support de-tox and muscle pain!
The group space is available as a common area when not in use and there is a group kitchen and dining area as well with stunning views. We use cabled wifi in our house to keep the land free of EMF energy but we have a plug that enables wifi up in the group room and caravans/yurts when needed.
There are many outdoor spaces and bench seats for relaxing and enjoying the mountain views during the warmer months.
The work
We need help with maintaining the property/land with work like repainting structures, cleaning and tidying. We also welcome volunteers who can cook, to give us a break in the kitchen from time to time. Generally we like to do our olive harvest in October on our own but sometime we are grateful for help.
We grow vegetables in 4 different areas. During the warmer months, there is a need for weeding on a regular basis. Ivy grows everywhere on the land and has to be regularly cut back as do the olive tree shoots.
The Rose harvest. The main season for harvesting the blooms and making rose products is May, June and July although two varieties may continue to produce flowers right through to October. Usually, we manage on our own by August and with the heat need a break from visitors to re-charge.
The Helichrysum, Oregano and Lavender harvest. This overlaps with the roses a little in June and July, so help is very welcome at this time.
Open Days and Events
We expect to be opening more regularly to visitor days for groups in 2024. Events will include tours of the land and the rose/helichrysum/oregano field, to see how our products are grown and created. Early picking of roses in the morning, distillation demonstrations, drying of the petals, packing, bottling and presentation of the finished products, which will be available to buy and take away. Helichrysum and oregano, the harvest takes place for only a day or few days where the roses are of course ongoing for weeks.
As the webpage header shows, Satya-Vita is based in a most tranquil, peaceful and beautiful location, with fabulous views and wonderful walks around or down into the woods.
We have been restoring and creating new sacred spaces over many years and adding to the relaxing and healing energy that is offered by unspoilt nature here. Away from public roads and built-up areas, we are surrounded by wildlife, the air is pure and the earth is free of chemicals and pollutants. We know this to be true, as we are blessed that in May, the fire flies come with their lights to create more magic. More recently the established lavender is attracting many wonderful bees and butterflies which are an absolute delight.
