felt.

My story

Twenty years
learning to listen

Every lasting change in my life came through the body, not through analysis. This is how I found that out — the long way.

David Darch under the leaves of a cherry tree

01 · Where it began

Things fall apart

In my early twenties my body started to fail. My sympathetic nervous system became locked into a fight-or-flight response and I had no idea what was wrong. Constant tingling and numbness in my fingers. Aching and heaviness in my hands. Burning sensations up and down my arms. Neck spasms that left my head locked in painful positions.

The diagnosis was the blanket term RSI — repetitive strain injury. The root cause, at least according to any doctor or specialist I spoke to, was unknown. When they couldn’t diagnose carpal tunnel syndrome, one told me: “just stop whatever you are doing that is causing this.”

I was lost. So I read. A lot.

A grainy photograph of Dave as a young man by the sea

02 · The search

Twenty years of putting it right

I searched for people who might be able to help me — to explain what had happened and how to undo it. It became a twenty-year journey of listening to my body, of repairing and restoring: diet and nutrition, yoga and meditation, tai chi and qigong, acupuncture, the Alexander Technique, and several hundred hours of massage and bodywork.

I was lucky to find some incredibly talented therapists along the way. But I quickly realised that to heal my body — to undo years of habitual misuse — I would need to literally re-sculpt my muscle and fascia. And I couldn’t afford what I needed. So I learned to work on my own body. A few hundred hours received; thousands working on myself. Every spare moment releasing, unlocking, exploring.

The breakthrough was trigger-point therapy. It gave me a model for why general massage felt good but never lasted, why every muscle in my body was tight and shortened — and crucially, exactly where to focus to unlock each one. And I discovered something that shaped everything I now do: “hard” massage is often the opposite of what a nervous system locked in high alert actually needs.

A figure walking into dappled woodland light
going in

03 · The first wing

Energetic release

Along the way, a trigger-point therapist who became a friend introduced me to a Pranic healer. I sat in a chair with my eyes closed, sceptical and hopeful in equal measure. What happened next I still can’t fully explain: emotion moving from my solar plexus up into my throat, and a wave of anxiety I’d carried for years — years of performance anxiety as a musician — simply gone.

What he said stayed with me longer than the session: “there’s nothing you need to do.” It was the first time I experienced my body as an energy system as well as a structure. The first wing.

Hands held over a person in a healing session
Pranic healing

04 · Heart unlocks

Lomi Lomi

In October 2025 I trained in Lomi Lomi — slow, flowing Hawaiian bodywork — with Dan Joy’s Slow & Aware school. Something about the group, the practice, the pace of it, unlocked something in me that decades of structural work hadn’t touched.

I cried more in six days than I had in thirty years.

It reconnected me to who I was before I built up all the masks. And it completed the picture: trigger-point work had taught me precision — where tension lives and how to release it. Lomi taught me the other half — that a nervous system lets go when the whole person feels safe, held and unhurried.

The Lomi Lomi training group
Lomi Lomi · Slow & Aware

05 · Safety

Who is this for?

A book on consent — Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent — changed how I use touch. At its heart is one question: who is this for?

A gift given that is not wanted is not a gift at all.

It taught me the difference between doing something to someone and doing it for them; between touch that takes and touch that serves. In my sessions I want nothing from your experience — and I’m curious about everything in it. Trust allows safety, and safety allows relaxation — not just of the muscles, but of the nervous system. An alert nervous system won’t release and let go.

Betty Martin beside the Wheel of Consent diagram
Betty Martin · the Wheel of Consent

06 · Micro & macro

felt.

Twenty years brought two things together: releasing tension precisely, and calming the whole system. The micro and the macro. The same message delivered at every scale, to a single muscle fibre or to the whole person: it’s OK now. It’s safe for you to let go of this.

Because I learned massage therapy on myself first, when I work on someone else I feel the sensation at the same place in my own body. I have an imprinted memory of what each muscle gives. That’s the whole foundation of Felt — a therapist who has spent twenty years on both sides of the table, in the same body.

Hands resting on folded indigo cloth

07 · Full circle

I keep saying yes

When my body collapsed in my twenties, it took my first dream with it — I’d wanted to be a musician since I was five. What I couldn’t have known was that the music would come back on its own, effortless and communal: jamming with a yoga community in East London, playing bass for two hundred people improvising together in Victoria Park.

I became clear on what I wanted — deep connection with people I resonate with, work that is honest to what I’ve lived, and to keep playing. Everything in this practice comes from that. I just had to say yes.

Playing music for community yoga in Victoria Park
Community Yoga · Victoria Park

My sessions are a chance for your entire system to become more spacious.

My sessions are a chance to let go of whatever you have been holding on to.

My sessions are a chance to listen — with thanks and appreciation for everything your body has done for you.