Nyali turns her back on abuse to help others (From Gazette)

Nyali turns her back on abuse to help others

8:00pm Tuesday 19th January 2010

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SPEAKING to Nyali Muir fills you with a sense of calm and empowerment.

As a life coach and holistic practitioner, her job is to instil a perspective on what life has to throw at you and give you the tools to deal with it.

Yet, when you learn she suffered horrendous abuse and addiction in her early life growing up in South Africa, her own balance is all the more remarkable.

Nyali, 42, from Wivenhoe, is launching her latest Wow Woman course next week at Clarice House, in Colchester.

The course is aimed at helping women to achieve empowerment in their lives through increased confidence, assertiveness and improved self-esteem.

It was all of those attributes which Nyali herself called upon years ago when she turned her own fortunes around.

Abused as a child, she escaped her homeland at the age of 19 to travel. This brought her first to Belgium and then to Britain, but the horrors of her early experiences meant she turned to alcohol and drugs to cope.

“I had escaped, but I wasn’t free. I made a terrible mess of my early adult life,” Nyali admits. “By 28, I was married and divorced and hell-bent on self-harm in any way I could, through alcohol, drugs and smoking.”

Her turning point was when a partner physically attacked her in public.

“Before then all the abuse had happened behind closed doors,” she explains. “I could deny it was real.

“But this shocked me and brought things home to me.

“I had three choices – to continue as I was, which wasn’t really a choice; to take my own life, but I was too frightened to do that – besides, I wanted to live; or to stop at nothing to turn my life around.”

Nyali took the third option and ever since has studied holistic approaches to “heal her spirit” and enable her to live the type of life she always dreamed about – free from fear and addiction.

“This has become my passion,” she says. “Teaching other women the tools to empowerment and personal development and to free themselves from the constraints they, and the patriarchal society we live in, place upon them.”

As well as life coaching, Nyali is a trained masseuse and aromatherapist and a former adult education tutor for Essex County Council.

She also regularly writes articles on empowerment and motivation and writes a weekly motivational message for employees at Toyota, in Colchester.

The Wow course, which stands for Wonderfilled, Outrageous and Worthy, starts next Monday, January 25, at 7.15pm and takes place over ten weeks, costing £140.

“It is a fun and exciting course, but also challenging,” says Nyali. “We don’t grow as people unless we are taken out of our comfort zone.

“The ultimate aim is to create an awareness in the ladies that there is a direct link between their beliefs and feelings and the symptoms in their lives.

“Things, such as a bad relationship, weight issues or lack of self-confidence, all stem from low self-esteem,” says Nyali.

“Unconscious belief accounts for 95 per cent of our thoughts, so by making women more self-aware, they are able to deal with the beliefs that are making them unhappy.”

Nyali believes the pressures of modern life, with many juggling different roles, can also undermine the belief women have in their own abilities.

“I really want women to know they do not have to depend on others and we are equals,” she says.

“The more women understand about themselves, the less they hold back on the choices in their lives. I teach self-acceptance rather than self-improvement and how to turn your negatives into positives.”

l For more information on the Wow Woman course at Clarice House, Kingsford Park, Colchester, call Nyali Muir on 01206 822205.

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