Overview
A Day on Food, Pain and the Body You Live In
Saturday 10 October 2026 · Kamala Karoo Sanctuary, Barrydale
You don't need to be fixed. You need to be met.
The Day
This is a day for women who are tired of fighting their own bodies, whether that fight shows up around food, or around pain that never quite leaves.
Two women who know this ground personally are opening it up for honest conversation. Not a seminar. Not a sales pitch. A day built around real talk, small group time, and the kind of space that's hard to find anywhere else: twenty women, two guides, one full day, in the quiet of the Karoo.
What Your Day Looks Like
The day opens gently, with tea and a proper chance to arrive before anything begins. Simone speaks first, on living well with chronic pain.
Gerda follows, on conquering overeating and food trauma.
A short break brings everyone back together before Gerda and Simone lead more conversations and activities, exploring food and pain.
From there, we break for lunch and the day moves into a period of exploration and integration, giving what's surfaced through the morning room to settle in the body, before a closing activity and a closing circle bring the day to a quiet end.
The Details
Date: Saturday 10 October 2026
Time: 9:00 to 15:00
Venue: Kamala Karoo Sanctuary, Barrydale
Investment: R750 per person, all inclusive (talks, activities, tea, and lunch)
Seats: Limited to 20, intentionally small
If this feels like it's for you, we'd love to have you there.
Meet Your Hosts
SIMONE STEYN
PainEase Coaching
Simone is a certified mind-body health and wellbeing coach, a pain reprocessing and Emotion Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET) practitioner, a neurodiverse affirmed mental health counsellor, a health researcher, and is always engaged in ongoing learning.
Her work integrates Pain Neuroscience Education (PNE), Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), EAET, mindfulness, and nervous-system-informed healing practices.
Her diverse training across various modalities, coupled with her personal journey, has given her deep insights into working with individuals who are living with daily physical and emotional pain and other chronic symptoms.
She is passionate about creating safe, compassionate spaces, in individual and group settings, where people can move out of fear, calm the nervous system and step into healing—without blame, pressure, or pathologising.
GERDA BRUWER
The Wisdom Table
Gerda Bruwer studied nutrition, eating psychology, and just about every weight loss strategy out there. None of it managed to stabilise her weight or remove the overeating for good. Despite all her knowledge, in times of discomfort, old coping mechanisms like binges and overeating crept back, with weight gain of 10 to 30kg.
An early sugar addiction left her prediabetic and insulin resistant. Whenever the weight piled on, the wellness regimes got more stringent: whole food groups excluded, longer fasts, extreme resets, years of psychology, analysing her food issues to the point where it became tedious and unproductive.
Despite the shame and disappointment of constant failures, there is one thing she never did: give up. And she knew what she wanted: total freedom.
In the end, she had to go beyond everything she'd studied to what she knows today. It isn't about fixing your psychology, or striving for perfection through more rules or restriction. Weight is simply a side effect of eating more than your body needs. She had to develop lasting, sustainable solutions to conquer overeating for good.