Ochre House was originally conceived on a massage table in Glasgow in 2005. This seems evolutionarily appropriate since touch is the first sense we develop as human beings in utero. It took a decade of gestation until UMEUS Foundation was birthed in 2015 as a collaboration between me and Brighton yoga veteran Leo Taylor.
Leo and I spent an evening out at the start of the summer – our first in a while after having babies, my first, her fourth – at a community meditation in London, with one of the world’s most recognised proponents of mindful practice, Jon Kabat-Zinn. The night inspired us as our exchange of ideas and hopes for women as mothers propelled the creation of U-ME-US.
As the name suggests, our approach goes beyond the individual experience of mothers, crucially considering how we relate to our children, our partners and family, as well as our connection in community, asking us to look at the role of women as mothers in society as a whole.
It was our response to motherhood, the becoming, or being a mother, and the difference from our lived experiences of having a mother. It was what we needed at the time; a place to explore the changing nature of our lives after having children.
We knew evidentially, through our own study and personal experience, that connecting therapeutic mind and body practices, sharing experience and looking after one another in circles, made a difference to how new mothers and families adapted to the changes that new parenthood brings.
Research data was limited around yoga back then, but many were paying attention to the new wave of meditation through JKZ’s mindfulness revolution. Bessel Van der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps The Score’ had been published the year before, and I was researching trauma as part of my counselling qualification. Yoga had taught me how to breathe back in the 90s during a time of crisis, and we knew in our hearts and in our very bones that the world would come around eventually.
We decided that yoga and mindfully informed sharing circles with counselling boundaries would form our core offering at UMEUS with everything else emanating from that central tenet. Since then we’ve supported hundreds of families in circles, in therapy, in groups, on the mat, on the massage table and mattress, and online. We’ve held space, listened and witnessed their discovery of themselves and what they need, and many are still with us, practicing, developing, changing…being.
Timeline
Hyde Housing Association supported us by providing a home at The Pheonix Community Centre in Brighton where we held our UMEmamas groups and provided counselling as UMEtalk from 2015 to 2019.
We branched out to West Hove when UMEmamas Hove launched at the Pelican Cafe during 2016. A welcoming space, with lots of room for expeditious babies, it was also wonderful to have decent coffee and cake at arms length, but sadly Pelican didn’t make it and shut its doors in 2017. We will always be grateful to Simon and Gaynor who invited us to The Tree of Life Centre where we held the group until 2019.
UMEtalk Fair Rate Counselling
In 2018 we launched a counselling placement scheme for trainee therapists; UMEtalk ‘Fair Rate’ Counselling. Offering therapy at reduced rates with students completing their final year of qualification, we gave parents who couldn’t access statutory services, due to wait lists or ineligibility, or who weren’t able to afford long term therapy whilst on maternity leave, the opportunity to connect with therapists whose practice was intentionally focused toward supporting parents.
A Home of Our Own
Much as we loved being at The Phoenix, with our practitioner base expanding we needed our own location to experiment with new groups and extend our offering to include touch, yoga and movement therapies. Leo decided it was time to focus on her own yoga and massage therapy business, so I took the helm. This signified a big change for me and for UMEUS’ future.
It felt like a good time to update our logo.
The honeycomb pattern represents the chemical symbol for oxytocin, the “love hormone”, which when released can affect our behaviours, creating overall psychological stability, relaxation and trust.
We found a good pair of rooms on Third Avenue in Hove and opened the doors to a new era in August 2019.
Little did we know then what that era would turn into…
Early in 2020, as we attuned to a growing concern in the community, we listened to our clients and took our counselling services online. A month later we were in lockdown and our Third Avenue clinic closed without us knowing if we’d ever re-open. We returned in July 2020, but only to pack up and put everything into storage. We didn’t know how long it would be until we’d be allowed to see clients in person again…
As the world tried to come to terms with restrictions, vaccinations and isolation, we bore witness to anxiety, loss and division. We continued to offer online support for individuals and groups, supporting women through pregnancies and childbirth, providing grief groups to communities facing complex bereavements.
Stanmer Park and Funding
In the gorgeous spring of 2021 we began exploring how to support our clients in nature, and with a small group of practitioners we lifted an army parachute, erected fences and dug a fire-pit to create a therapeutic space at the Quiet Garden within Stanmer Park Wellbeing Garden.
Following UMEUS’ conversion from a community association to a CIC / community interest company, we successfully secured funding from Brighton & Hove Council to run groups in this new setting.
2021 was a landmark year for us in every sense of the word. Finding a home in the midst of a global pandemic felt vital to our continued existence and we couldn’t have arrived in a better place than Cambridge Grove in the heart of Hove. We were welcomed by the friendly neighbourhood, and opened our doors to invite clients to return to in person sessions in September of that year.