Prue Jeffries Biography

Prue Jeffries is a somatic educator, practitioner, movement teacher, former professional surfer, and founder of the NAIO™ Holistic Awareness Process. She is a Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy teacher, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist (BCST), Master Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist (MSME/T), Continuum Guide, massage therapist, and NAIO™ practitioner and educator.

For many years, Prue has worked as part of teaching teams and faculty for Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy trainings and related certification programs. She has also led complete multi-year craniosacral practitioner training programs herself. Her teaching in Craniosacral Biodynamics is grounded in decades of practice, study, clinical experience, perceptual development, and embodied inquiry.

She now leads NAIO™ Practitioner Training programs, mentoring, intensives, retreats, and occasional classes and workshops in somatic practice, movement, embodied awareness, Craniosacral Biodynamics, and craniosacral-informed approaches.

A pioneer and visionary in women’s surfing, Prue spent two decades travelling the world on the Association of Surfing Professionals World Championship Tour, now known as the World Surf League. She is also a published writer, editorial consultant, founder of a women’s clothing company, brand ambassador, event producer, and filmmaker.

Her lifelong relationship with water includes surfing, ocean swimming, canoe paddling, and other forms of embodied water-based practice across oceans, rivers, lakes, coastlines, and diverse natural environments. While this background is unusual within the somatic field, it is central to Prue’s work. Her life in water has been, and continues to be, an apprenticeship with nature as primary pedagogy — learning through waves, weather, currents, tides, risk, play, timing, breath, centredness, poise, focus, responsiveness, and attunement to living, unpredictable environments.

This was not simply a sporting background, but a sustained embodied education. For many years, Prue spent long hours each day immersed in dynamic water environments, moving between personal practice and team-based paddling, between individual responsiveness and collective rhythm. Her learning was also shaped by experiential approaches to coaching and education, encouraging direct perception, self-inquiry, regulation, adaptability, and the capacity to respond to subtle changes in flow, force, rhythm, relationship, and environment.

Combined with the demands of elite athletic performance and many years of moving through different places and cultures, this formed a deeply embodied foundation for her work in somatic practice, ecological relationship, and the living intelligence of the body.

Prue’s work gradually evolved from surf performance coaching into adaptive, therapeutic, and somatic approaches to water-based practice. From early in her own surfing life, she approached training holistically — attending not only to technique and performance, but to breath, perception, rhythm, recovery, focus, emotional state, intuition, relationship with water, and the wider conditions of place, weather, and environment.

From the early 2000s, she began supporting children with disabilities and injuries to experience surfing and water activity as sources of joy, confidence, movement, and embodied participation. This was not a departure from her life in water, but a deepening of it. As her own work developed, Prue became increasingly interested in how water, movement, play, relationship, animals, nature, and embodied attention can support regulation, confidence, access, healing, and participation in life.

This inquiry continues in her development of water-immersed somatic practices, where the qualities of buoyancy, support, movement, rhythm, contact, and environment become part of the therapeutic, somatic, and ecological field.

Before entering formal somatic lineages, Prue was already developing her own inquiry in light touch, meditation, water-based awareness, fluid movement, photography, film, and creative expression. Her later study of Craniosacral Biodynamics, Continuum, somatic movement education, and related body-centred practices arose because these fields resonated with questions already alive in her own experience, while also offering refinement, language, practice, and community.

Her craniosacral work has been shaped by the work of Franklyn Sills and by her training with Mary Louise Muller and Christopher Muller, internationally respected teachers of Craniosacral Biodynamics who also became colleagues and friends. Her movement and somatic inquiry have also been influenced by Continuum and the work of Emilie Conrad.

From this wider trajectory, Prue’s work has continued to evolve into a distinctive somatic ecological approach — one that brings together touch, movement, perception, water, nature, creativity, therapeutic presence, and the living intelligence of the body.

Prue has led multi-day retreats and bespoke small-group experiences that bring together somatic practice, health, movement, surfing, paddling, nature immersion, and wildlife encounters. These experiences are often organised in collaboration with experienced local providers, guides, and small businesses, creating carefully held opportunities to explore embodiment, ecology, place, and relationship with the living world.

Art and creativity have also been central to Prue’s life and work. Through writing, film, image-making, design, movement, and creative practice, she continues to explore ways of articulating the affective, embodied, and ecological dimensions of experience — how the body feels, senses, imagines, remembers, relates, and participates in the natural world.

Being with the ocean, nature, and the creative flow of life deeply informs Prue’s work. Her experience as an elite athlete, her training in somatic and body-centred approaches, her contemplative practice, and her decades of clinical, teaching, and retreat experience all contribute to the way she supports people in developing embodied awareness, regulation, wholeness, well-being, and connection.

Current Work & Interests

Prue’s current work explores the relationship between embodied awareness, somatic ecology, water, movement, touch, perception, health, and the living world. She is especially interested in how body-based practice can support regulation, vitality, ecological relationship, and a renewed sense of participation in life.

Through Body of Wonder, her teaching, mentoring, retreats, and writing continue to develop around the body as a living, intelligent process — shaped through nature, relationship, movement, and wonder.

Through this work, Prue invites a deeper relationship with the body as a living expression of nature — not separate from the world, but part of the larger field of life in which we sense, move, heal, relate, and become.

For a fuller account of Prue’s surfing career, please see her Full Surf Career Biography.

For a more detailed overview of Prue’s training, teaching, professional experience, and creative work, please see her Full Résumé / CV.