The Story Behind Lawers Skai

From the Lowlands to the Scottish Highlands

Finding my connection with nature did not begin with the mountains. It began in the Lowlands of Scotland, in an old farm orchard, standing in front of an apple tree in bloom. In January 2017, I wrote about this moment in an essay titled Blossoming Hands, published in Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. It remains, for me, a genuine starting point — the first time I understood that a connection with nature was not something abstract, but something felt entirely through the body and senses. That apple tree was my first teacher, and my first real encounter with the pillar that would come to sit at the heart of everything I now offer: Nature.

In October 2019, I started my own walking tour guide business in the Scottish Highlands — returning to Killin, a small mountain village in the ancient landscape of Breadalbane, with a different quality of attention than I had ever brought before. I found a mountain landscape that had not abandoned me, even when I felt I had abandoned it. Living and working alongside mountains over 500 million years old gave me something I could not have found anywhere else — something I wrote about in Eternal Mountain: Essays from Afar: "With the mountains, I was able to experience for the first time in my life the weight and depth of my own soul; the deeper our connection with nature, the deeper our experience of life and therefore its richness and true meaning — our destiny." Between the rocks and water of Breadalbane, I found what I came to call sanctuaries — places of rest, inspiration, and rejuvenation — and it was here that the foundations of Lawers Skai were quietly laid.

Over the four years that followed, Eternal Mountain grew into something I could not have imagined at the outset. What began as guided walking tours became a genuine practice of sustainable geotourism — weaving local history, geology, and landscape together with a focus on physical and mental wellbeing. I taught courses in drawing, nature writing, and painting across the Highlands, and built a small community around fitness walking and creative practice — the earliest form of what would become the second pillar of Lawers Skai: Creativity. I designed a historical comic in partnership with VisitScotland and Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park, appeared in a French television documentary filmed at the Three Sisters in Glen Coe, and worked alongside national tour operators as a recognised heritage destination in Scotland.

Every part of it — the walking, the teaching, the writing, the partnerships — was, in hindsight, an apprenticeship. Eternal Mountain taught me not only how to guide people through a landscape, but how to help them navigate their own way through the challenges of life. Without knowing it at the time, I was already practising the third pillar too — Mindfulness — in the slow attention that walking, teaching, and creating all demanded of me.

Lawers Skai is therefore what I built once I understood the difference — an exemplification of my own journey of self-actualisation and transformation, lived through nature connection, creative expression, and mindfulness practice. A journey I continue every week: walking the rural landscape around Kippen and Stirling, drawing, painting, and practising yoga — and teaching adult art classes, bringing that same creative practice into the community.

All of this happened through years of showing up — to a landscape, a sketchbook, a room full of people learning something new. Looking back, I can see it clearly now: every part of that journey was quietly shaping me into the wellness coach I am today, and building, pillar by pillar, the very service I now offer — a way of creating a unique mind and a genuine quality of life, for myself first, and now, for you.

This is the story of what nature, creativity, and mindfulness gave me. But there's another part of this journey — one that explains why, this September, I will be studying the science of compassion itself.