Hello, I’m Ahna.
Sleep found me long before I ever imagined making it my life’s work.
When I was young, I would lie awake at night—anxious, or buried in a book that took me far away.
I felt things deeply and absorbed the stress around me. I didn’t know how to settle myself, and those close to me weren’t able to help.
Sleep remained difficult for more than a decade, into my early twenties.
By then, I’d reached a breaking point.
I was diagnosed with two autoimmune conditions and told I’d need medication for the rest of my life. That compelled me to look more deeply at what was happening in my body and how I was living.
I began studying natural medicine and changing the way I lived. In the process, I regained my ability to sleep well, my health improved significantly, and I no longer required medication.
My search also took me inward.
During a ten-day silent retreat, something happened that changed me.
For the first time, I experienced myself as separate from my thoughts.
It was an extraordinary kind of freedom. It fundamentally changed my experience of being in my body, and my relationship with stillness and sleep.
What I’d learned had changed my life, and I felt it was something we should be taught as children.
I began by sharing it with young people in schools and workshops, and later with adults. In 2003, I opened my private clinical practice.
Over the years, I studied counselling, botanical medicine, nutrition, bodywork, meditation and other approaches to human health and consciousness.
But my greatest education has been people.
Thousands of hours sitting with people. Listening. Observing. Becoming curious about what wasn’t being said as much as what was. Watching what helped. Watching what didn’t.
Refining. And refining again.
Eventually, that way of working needed a name. I called it Holistic Sleep Therapy™ in 2010, and it was formally recognised as a modality in 2018.
Over time, I felt increasingly called to bring this work to more people than I could reach one-to-one.
This led me into speaking, workplace programs, sleep resources and Sleep to Thrive—each a way of making sleep care more widely available.
The Sleep & Dream Foundation grew from something more personal: a deep healing of the child I’d once been.
I began by writing and donating The Sleep & Dream Book for children affected by trauma. As requests continued, I established the Foundation as a registered Australian charity in 2017 so this care could reach further.
Today, we work with women’s shelters to help children affected by family and domestic violence find their way back to sleep. My wider intention is for sleep care to become an integral part of trauma recovery.
My STAR Loop model, which explores how sleep restoration and trauma recovery may support one another, helps guide the Foundation’s work.
After all these years, sleep still feels miraculous to me.
We cannot force ourselves to sleep.
When sleep comes, we let go. We stop doing. We stop trying to hold everything together.
And in that surrender, our bodies repair. Our minds integrate. Our nervous systems recalibrate. We are restored.
To me, sleep is a gift filled with grace—a communion with the life force that sustains us.
Aliveness is what I love most.
I feel it dancing at the ocean’s edge—sun-drenched, surrounded by wind and water. In those moments, I’m alive in every cell. Elemental. I remember who and what I truly am.
It’s also what moves me most in my work: seeing people emerge from exhaustion and struggle—more fully themselves, more fully alive. It makes my heart swell.
