User:Gill Tree



An award winning entrepreneur, therapy business expert and author, Gill is the business feature writer for Massage World and Reflexions Magazines and regular presenter at National conferences and events. www.gilltree.com She is a woman with a purpose who believes that everyone has a unique talent and if they can find the right kind of help or opportunity to discover their own unique meaning of life, most of them could, like her, be living much more fulfilling lives. For Gill her turning point was in fact a crisis that became an opportunity to rewrite the story of her life. Having decided on a career in social work she followed the usual career path until 1989 when a journey to Kenya proved to be her wake-up call. After climbing Mount Kenya to almost 17,000 feet and disorientated by altitude sickness, she became lost for several days. Alone and frightened, Gill had to call upon all of her personal resources and on her beliefs. She discovered an inner strength that up until then has been untested. A strength that twenty years later she is still able to call upon, to take steps forward in living a true and authentic life where she is truly living her purpose. "It may sound clichéd, but once I returned home I really felt that I'd been brought back for a higher purpose”.

Gill was lost for 5 days; initially energised by the challenge, without food and walking and climbing twelve hours a day, she lost two stone and got more and more exhausted as time went on. "I could close my eyes and be asleep on my feet and I had to will myself to go on. It was close to Christmas and I made a decision I would not spend Christmas alone on that mountain. That gave me the determination to continue. In the end, I was found by two very kind Kenyan men on Christmas Eve".

On her return to London, after a period of recovery and adjusting, Gill decided to take a good look at herself, her work and her ambitions. Realising that her time as a social worker had fuelled a genuine desire to work with people, she thought carefully about her abilities, talked to a lot of people and sought professional advice. "I was instinctively drawn to train in Massage, but at that time purely as a hobby. As soon as I qualified, I started teaching introductory workshops at my local leisure centre, and invitations to teach kept coming my way. I call it following the whispers; something was pushing me in the direction of Massage teacher. It is interesting that many of my childhood games were around being a teacher."

Gill Tree teaching massage class Dedicated to promote the healing power of touch, Gill has pioneered the way forward for Massage and Aromatherapy as a profession in the UK since she established Essentials for Health in 1992. In 1996 she brought the International Association of Infant Massage to the UK. In 2000 she introduced the Swedish Massage in Schools programme to this country. With a book published in 2004 and the launch of Essentials E-learning Courses in 2009 Gill and Essentials for Health continue to lead the way for therapy training in the UK. Whilst leading and training her team at Essentials for Health she no longer teaches massage, but instead offers aspiring therapists the business training and support required to be truly successful.