ABOUT LISA
Lisa Fellowes is co-creator of stop restarting and co-host on the Sofa Chats. She brings something to this work that no amount of conversation alone can reach, helping people see the beliefs that have been quietly running their lives, beliefs formed early, often in childhood, that feel so familiar they've become invisible. Her work sits at the meeting point of the body and the mind, where insight doesn't just arrive as a thought but lands as something felt and known. Her clients don't just understand something new. They feel it.
My way of working
My background spans counselling, mindfulness and meditation teaching, non-dual understanding, and deep body-based work with clients, helping people release what has been held physically, the contractions, the old emotions, the deeply held beliefs about themselves that have been sitting in the body for so long they feel like facts.
What I bring to every session, more than any qualification or training, is presence. Being genuinely and fully present with someone, not just listening but being there completely, changes what becomes possible in a conversation. People feel met. And when someone feels truly met, something begins to ease.
I work at the level of the body, where the pattern is being held physically before it has been named or understood. For me, understanding has never arrived through thinking about something. It arrives when it lands in the body. When it's felt. When it's known rather than worked out as a conceptual understanding. That's how it makes sense to me, and that's the kind of knowing I help people find.
I've run women's groups, retreats and workshops over the years, and I work individually with clients who are ready to explore what's actually being held beneath the surface of things.
A moment in a hairdresser's chair
I had been living alongside Marcus and his understanding for years, and I could follow what he was pointing at. It made sense as a conceptual understanding. But for me, understanding something in the mind and actually knowing it are two completely different things. I needed to feel it. To know it in the body. Until that happened it was just an idea.
One afternoon I was sitting in my hairdresser's chair, the usual noise and activity going on all around me, when everything shifted. I watched my hand reach for a cup of tea. I heard my own voice speaking. But none of it felt controlled or directed. Everything was simply happening on its own, and I was watching it from somewhere quiet, without being at the centre of it in the way I usually was.
It lasted about an hour. It was entirely unexpected.
For years I had argued with Marcus about free will, about personality, about whether there really was no separate self. In that hour, with all the noise of the salon around me, those questions simply dropped away, because something had been felt directly rather than worked out. It was a knowing, not a thinking. And that kind of knowing doesn't leave.
It arrived in an ordinary moment, in the middle of everyday life.
On grief, and what I found
Life brought me something very painful. In the most difficult period I have ever been through, I learned what it actually means to sit with something rather than run from it. There was simply no other option. And what I found, in the middle of something genuinely unbearable, was that the sitting itself held me in a way that nothing else had.
The pain didn't go away. It doesn't. But my relationship to it changed completely. And that distinction, between the pain itself and what the mind builds on top of it when left unnoticed, became one of the most important things I have ever understood.
Years later, around a difficult anniversary, I found myself lying on the bed one evening when thoughts began to arrive in waves, each one reaching back into the past, each one pulling the body tighter. I could feel the contraction building, layer upon layer, physical and emotional at once, the kind of spiral that on another night might have taken me under completely.
But this time I noticed what was happening. I watched the thoughts arriving. I felt the pattern clearly, the mind reaching back, stacking layer upon layer, pulling the past into the present. And in the noticing of it, without fighting any of it, it began to dissolve. Within a few minutes something that had been tight and overwhelming simply eased.
That is not the same as the pain going away. The pain is real and it remains. But there is a difference between the raw truth of grief and what the mind builds on top of it when left unnoticed. Feeling that difference, even in the hardest moments, is what becomes possible when the pattern is met clearly.
What I bring to a session
What I've noticed consistently across years of working with clients is something simple. When what the body has been holding begins to ease, something opens. The anxious searching quietens. A different kind of curiosity surfaces, about what has actually been going on underneath everything. That is usually where a conversation with me begins.
Sometimes people arrive with a real insight that hasn't shifted anything, because the belief is still being held in the body at a level that understanding alone can't quite reach. I can help bring people into the body, to feel what's actually there, to sit with it without agenda, and to notice what happens when it's met rather than explained away. And sometimes that belief needs to be released from the body before the insight can fully land. That's something I can help with directly, and for some people it's the most important first step.
I work primarily with women, and I tend to be a natural fit for people who are earlier in the process, where something doesn't feel right but the question hasn't fully formed yet. I like meeting people there, before the words have arrived, and being present as the curiosity begins to surface.
Marcus can meet anyone, from someone who has just found their way here to those who have spent years in deep spiritual inquiry. That's his territory and he's extraordinary in it. Mine is the body, the felt sense, the place where the pattern lives before it becomes a thought. Between us we cover a lot of ground.
As well as my own private sessions, I also work alongside Marcus in joint sessions, with couples and with individuals who find that having both of us in the conversation opens something particular. And I'm involved in training the next generation of Stop Restarting practitioners, which feels like some of the most meaningful work I do.
Clients tend to describe conversations with me as warm, grounded and deeply human. They feel heard before they feel guided. That feels exactly right to me.
A little more about me
I live in the South Devon countryside with Marcus, our two boys and our dogs. I love the sea and swim in it whenever I can. Time in nature is not optional for me, it is necessary. And the ordinary moments of daily life, the walks, the conversations, the quiet mornings, continue to be where the most interesting things happen.
I also work independently with my own clients through my energy healing and presence-based practice. You can find out more about that at lisafellowes.com.
If something here has resonated and a conversation feels like the natural next step, I'd love to hear from you.
If you'd prefer somewhere to start that feels a little less formal, come and join us on a Sofa Chat. It's a good way to get a sense of how all of this sounds in practice, with both Marcus and me in the room, before deciding whether a one to one with either of us feels right.