About · Natalie Southgate
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
— Carl Jung
Her story ↓
I came into this world feeling everything.
Deeply sensitive, intensely shy, more comfortable in my imagination than anywhere else. As a little girl I was always to be found hiding under the table, behind the curtains, in the quiet corners where no one would notice me. I heard music that no one else could hear. I felt things before they happened. I wrote stories that spilled out of me like water.
The outside world felt too loud, too much. But inside? Inside was extraordinary.
What I didn’t understand then was that this rich, vivid inner life — the sensitivity, the imagination, the deep feeling — was not a weakness to grow out of. It was the very thing I was here to explore, and eventually, to guide others into.
I just had a long way to go before I understood that.
Like most sensitive children, I learned to fit in. To follow the rules, do well at school, be the good girl. And I was — on the outside. But somewhere along the way I could feel myself burying the part of me that heard the music no one else could hear, that felt everything so deeply, that lived more fully inside than out.
At seventeen, a boyfriend introduced me to Reiki. And something blew wide open. It was like finding a room in myself I had forgotten existed — alive, familiar, more me than anything I had known for years.
Then I had a meditation experience so intense it frightened me. I had no framework for it, no guide. And so I did what I had learned to do with things that felt too big.
I buried it. All of it. Again.
I travelled. I worked. I built a successful recruitment agency in London and ran it for seven years. I was busy and social and outwardly fine. But the inner world I had always carried — that vivid, sensitive, feeling world — was locked away somewhere I had stopped visiting.
Until Linda.
Every evening at five o’clock, Linda, a woman who worked in my building, would light up — actually light up — and rush out the door. I stopped her one day and asked where she went.
“I teach at the College of Psychic Studies,” she said.
I walked through the doors of that College shortly after and felt something I hadn’t felt in years.
I had come home.
What followed was one of the most extraordinary periods of my life.
I discovered the chakras — and felt, for the first time, like someone had handed me a map of the human soul. I became obsessed. I read everything. I travelled to India in search of them. And then I discovered that Carl Jung — one of the greatest explorers of the human psyche — had been inspired by the chakras to create his entire process of individuation.
I had to study him.
I found a postgraduate Jungian psychotherapy training in London. They told me I couldn’t come in — no university degree. I begged for a meeting anyway, walked in, and I think I simply overwhelmed the founder with my passion. She bent the rules and let me in.
I was by far the youngest person there. Most were doctors and psychotherapists. There was me — this little Australian girl with no qualifications but a burning need to understand the human inner world.
What followed were years of the deepest, most transformative study of my life. Not just the philosophy of Jung, but twelve years of weekly personal Jungian analysis. I cried a lot. I was cracked open repeatedly. And I was more alive, more expanded, more myself than I had ever been.
The founder of that training looked at the practice I was creating — weaving the chakras, Jungian psychology, music and movement — and said something I have never forgotten.
“Papa Jung would be well pleased.”
That practice became Chakradance™
For nearly three decades, Chakradance™ has been my life’s work — and it remains so. A movement therapy modality that has reached over a million people across seventy countries. A Hay House book. A global community of hundreds of facilitators. The most profound teacher I have ever had.
But alongside it, something else has always been alive in me.
The depth psychology of Jung. The living myths. The archetypes that move beneath the surface of our lives whether we know it or not. The imagination as a doorway into inner landscapes. Vivid. Symbolic. Inexhaustibly rich.
In the work I am now bringing through nataliesouthgate.com, the imagination is the terrain itself. The archetypes aren’t concepts to understand — they are forces to be lived. To see the Black Madonna in Monday morning. To recognise the Storm when it moves through your life. To find the Wise Elder waiting in your own silence.
This is the work that has been waiting.
As this work was beginning to pour through me, life threw me deeper into my own depths than I have ever been.
My beloved partner Martin received a diagnosis. A rare form of leukaemia. And everything — everything — shifted.
I won’t pretend I knew how to hold it at first. You don’t. You just show up, day after day.
But then something extraordinary began to emerge.
I realised my dreams had been preparing me, they had been showing me this was coming long before it arrived. The archetypes I have spent decades studying began moving through my waking life — visceral, undeniable, alive. The shadow realms. The meeting with what cannot be controlled. The descent that is not chosen but must be made.
As I navigate this new terrain, I am living the very teachings I share.
The extraordinary inner world I was born with — that sensitive, feeling, imagining world — is the wisest thing I know.
It has never let me down.
Your inner world is waiting
…and it is extraordinary.
Begin with The Chakra Awakening — a free 15-minute guided journey through all seven of your chakras.