About Agni | From High-Pressure Environments to Psychotherapy

 

Understanding the human mind rarely follows a single path. Some people arrive through textbooks and clinical training; others through experience, observation, the frustration of not knowing, and the slow process of reinventing themselves along the way. My own path has moved between these worlds, shaped by both formal study and the less predictable curriculum of lived experience.

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Before beginning a five-year training to qualify as a psychodynamic psychotherapist — a profession I have now been practising and developing for the past decade— my life moved through two very different worlds: classical music and London finance.

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I trained as a professional classical musician for 17 years and performed for much of that time. Music shaped my early life profoundly. Long hours of disciplined practice playing the clarinet (and earlier, the piano) taught me about nuanced listening, precision, emotional expression, performance anxiety, dealing with daily frustrations, and the relationship between achievement and self-worth. This early experience of discipline, intention and performance eventually shaped how I began to relate to work, and the wider world beyond music.

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Later, my curiosity for the world beyond music led me to move to London and into its financial sector — another high-pressure environment, though of a very different kind. Before I knew it, I stayed in it for 10 years. Beneath the fast pace, the need to hold it all together, and the pressure to maintain a consistently high-functioning persona, I became increasingly interested in the emotional lives people carried privately: the loneliness hidden inside competence, the strain of constantly performing, and the psychological cost of living too far away from oneself. Over time, this curiosity became impossible to ignore.

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What drew me toward psychotherapy was not simply a general desire to help people feel better, but also a more intentional wish to do so through a deeper understanding of the intricacies of the human mind — how it functions, and how inner and outer worlds constantly interact and shape one another. Over time, this focus deepened into an interest in the unconscious patterns, hidden anxieties, and complex feelings that shape how we relate to ourselves and to others — whether in relationships with peers, authority figures, our romantic partners or within our professional and personal identities. It gradually shifted toward an interest in how these dynamics are lived and felt from the inside, and how greater understanding of them can support change that feels more conscious, freeing, and emotionally clear. My approach today is grounded in psychodynamic psychotherapy, which explores not only symptoms, but the deeper emotional history from which they emerge. 

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Alongside my 10 years of clinical work, my perspective has also been shaped by living across different cultures, including the UK, Spain, Poland, Singapore, and Thailand. Experiencing different ways of living and relating has deepened my appreciation for the complexity of identity, belonging, loss, and emotional adaptation.

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I hold Master’s degrees in Psychotherapy, Psychology, and Classical Music, and over the past decade I have worked within the NHS, British secondary schools, and private practice with people from many different professional backgrounds and stages of life.

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Outside the therapy room, music remains an important part of my life, alongside a long-standing daily yoga practice that continues to deepen my understanding of the relationship between mind, body, and emotional balance.

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Much of who we become is shaped gradually over years through relationships, experiences, adaptations, losses, and attempts to cope. Therapy offers a space to reflect on these patterns more deeply and compassionately. As self-awareness deepens, this often creates greater psychological flexibility and a wider sense of choice and agency in how one lives and relates to others. From this process, new ways of thinking, relating, and responding can begin to emerge — ones that feel less driven by old pressures or survival strategies, and more authentic, flexible, and sustainable.

 

If you’re ready to begin, I’m here to listen:

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