MEET ELLE

Elle is the founder of The Courageous Life, a Cape Town-based breathwork practice born out of her own experience of profound transition. After years of living an unconventional, well-travelled life, she moved back to Colorado to be with her mother through a terminal cancer diagnosis. In the fourteen months that followed, breathwork became the practice that helped her stay present with grief rather than move around it. And now it’s what she shares with others.

Elle’s approach is rooted in the Rebirthing Breathwork lineage developed by Leonard Orr in the 1970s, using conscious connected breathing, a circular, continuous breath pattern without pauses, to support nervous system regulation and emotional release. She holds this work as both ancient and contemporary, drawing on breathwork’s long history across yogic, Taoist, shamanic and Southern African traditions, including the ancestral wisdom of the San and Khoi peoples, while grounding sessions in a trauma-informed, client-paced approach.

Rather than aiming to “fix” or push clients past their limits, Elle’s sessions are designed to help people stay with what arises whether it’s grief, fear, uncertainty, long enough to move through it in their own time. She works with people navigating transitions of all kinds, whether that’s loss, career change, identity shifts or burnout.