Cathy Coyle, women’s leadership mentor and (Irish Wise Woman), is swapping out pills and productivity hacks for plants and breathwork. And, she’s ushering in a new era that combats chronic burnout and reclaims what it means to be a woman in charge.
If it feels like things right now are very loosely tethered and rapidly unravelling, you’re not alone. In 2026, has observed a steady increase in press releases about the silent spike in mental health crises. The South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG) reports that more than half of the South African workforce is battling a mental health condition. According to SADAG, “the most common diagnoses include burnout, clinical depression, and anxiety.” Driven by unrelenting global crises, economic volatility and hyper-connectivity, the world is experiencing a pervasive sense of uncertainty. With it, profound declines in mental well-being – most acutely among younger generations.
It’s with this in mind that Cathy Coyle, a leadership guide with a Master’s in Coaching Psychology and a PhD in progress in Transpersonal Psychology at the California Integral Institute, shares her wisdom with women the world over. In her work, Cathy provides guidance to women who want to identify their potential and bring about a transformation in their lives and in their work. Her work sits at the intersection of psychology, spirituality, the body and nature. She also offers unique health insights and guidance for women navigating their own journey of transformation.
The Great Unplugging
Studying to be a clinical psychologist, Cathy found herself fundamentally at odds with the clinical healthcare approach. Through her experiences with nature – discovering medicinal plants and studying mysticism – she found that nature had a bigger role to play in healthcare than what a hospital setting could accommodate. “Moving through these experiences with nature,” Cathy explains, “that started to say to me: ‘There’s another way that we can heal ourselves; that we can approach consciousness, that we approach the body.’”
From her explorations, she discovered that clinical psychology wasn’t the only way to work with the mind. She also noticed the state of the world: how reliant on machines we are, and how much of ourselves is valued by what we produce. “We’re in this time where we can see that we’ve become really sick from this way of living,” says Cathy. “People are overworked, people are stressed. People are dealing with a lot of different kinds of physical sicknesses as well as mental illnesses as well.”
Just 1.4% of the health budget of a typical low- and middle-income country (LMIC) is allocated to mental health.
2025 WHO report, World Mental Health Today: Latest Data
Cathy’s Journey Into Folk Wisdom
Ultimately, Cathy experienced the calling to work as what the Native Americans describe as a ‘medicine woman’. “It represents a woman who is working with the community, but who’s also working with psychic abilities, intuitive capacities, different ways of healing, healing with plants, working with ancestral spirits,” Cathy explains. “I was having these experiences myself.” But Cathy, an Irish woman who values decolonial perspectives and intersectionality, knew that she needed to tap into her indigenous heritage. “What came to me was this word [pronounced bahn-dree],” Cathy describes. “It’s what we call ‘medicine woman’ in Ireland. These women exist in every single society. Every single land has their own stories and versions of these women, who were healers, bone setters, midwives, herbalists, lore keepers, storytellers, psychologists, for want of a better word.”
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Science & nature
Her professional journey – blending science with ancient wisdom – is unconventional and at the time, was incredibly lonely. Now, mysticism is popular on social media – but for Cathy, discovering her calling was lonely work. “There weren’t other people talking about this. None of my friends or peers was aware of this type of work or this type of world, and there wasn’t this type of community on social media, where it’s a lot more public,” she recalls.
Her work was also triggered by a health crisis, in which she experienced chronic pain in her spine. She was told to have surgery; that it would take six months to recover and even move her head. She refused and decided to seek out alternatives. “That was part of me coming to see there must be other ways of healing. And I have healed myself. I’m pain free. I’ve been pain-free since 2016.”
“I’m really working with women that understand, ‘Okay, I have a role to play at some level, whether that’s in my small community, in my home, or in a boardroom’.
Cathy points to ancient ancestral wisdom, where humans always worked with the natural environment. Now, in the midst of the mental health crisis, Cathy is witnessing – and a part of – a revival of nature-led wisdom. “We’re in this moment where we’re realising that we lost our way. And we’ve gone too far away from nature,” she says. The separation from what work and what many women feel inside. And part of Cathy’s work is to help other people realise that – and discover a way of living that resonates with them.
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The rise of nature-led healing
Returning to ancient wisdom and tapping into the transpersonal is growing among burnt-out, overstimulated workers everywhere. This is evidenced by the rise of mystical social media accounts and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. The science backs up that Cathy’s work is necessary. Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic Research has shown that “mystical-type” experiences (from therapeutic psychedelics) can create long-lasting positive mental health changes. Singing bowl therapy has been shown to lower blood pressure and improve anxiety. And if TikTok is anything to go by, traditional Chinese modalities like Qigong, Tai Chi and traditional Chinese medicine are skyrocketing in popularity.
The work goes beyond drinking warm water, microdosing and queuing up Headspace at lunchtime. Cathy focuses on personal transformation; women working through deep inner conflicts to identify their strength. “I work a lot with women to really help them to come into their identity, and also to train in certain areas of leadership,” she says. “I help them to become steadier in themselves and move out in the world. And sometimes people are having dark nights of the soul. Other times they’re building their business. They’re building spiritually informed entrepreneurial practices. And I’m there to mentor them, just to walk beside them as they need.”
Working With Nature
At the core of Cathy’s work is nature. “If we can come back to nature, then we can heal with nature. Nature can heal with us, and we can heal with it. And this was a big piece of my journey,” she says.
Tapping into the breath is one powerful method Cathy employs, a way of connecting nature to the body. “If we take that idea that all humans have the potential for mystical experiences and that there are plants on the planet that can even ignite them, we can also see that people can have mystical experiences through things like breath work,” she says. “Just working with their breath, they can have these types of visionary experiences as well, and healing can occur there.”
Healing Through Transformation
And it’s not all psychedelic trips: like breathwork, plants as simple as rose – or the many indigenous plants in South Africa – have healing properties. Cathy points to awe-inspiring experiences, like watching the sunset, as healing transcendent experiences. Being alone is another powerful experience Cathy points to; sitting in isolation for a few days is a transformative practice that many cultures have revered for millennia. “It’s just you and the wind and the trees or the mountain,” she explains. “But something happens in that process; when the person comes out on day three or four, they’ve moved into a new level of individuation.”
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Using plants, breathwork and mentorship, she helps women unlock their capacity to lead. “‘Lead’ is a pretty big word and also a pretty simple word, because ‘lead’ could be to lead inside your family dynamic. It could be to lead your children, to lead your husband. It could be to feel grounded and centred enough in your truth to support movements in your community. Or, when we have women who are involved in very big projects, who are spearheading different organisations.”
Ultimately, the work is inner transformation and an awareness that women are the ones to “support this shift in consciousness, because the way that things are happening in the world right now, it can’t continue this way.”
Meet the expert: Cathy Coyle is a breath worker and coaching psychologist. She is a candidate in integral and transpersonal psychology at the California Integral Institute, which was founded on the basis of bringing yoga psychology, somatic psychology and transpersonal psychology into mainstream psychology.
Source: https://www.womenshealthsa.co.za/health/feed
