After four years of university, I did what most Australians do. I went travelling.
I worked my way through the US, moved to London, and spent most of my twenties there doing the things you do in your twenties, working too hard, sleeping too little, and eating things that were slowly but steadily making me sicker.
It was in London that my food allergies really got going. Not the mild inconvenience kind. The kind where eating the wrong thing means you spend the next few days wishing you hadn't. I spent thousands on Harley Street clinics. Homeopaths. Naturopaths. Acupuncturists. Everything from eastern to western medicine. Some helped a little. One misdiagnosed me so thoroughly that I kept eating things that made me significantly worse for two more years before I worked that out.
Eventually, a GP on a quick trip to Australia identified the core of it: gluten, lactose, alliums, nightshades, grains including oats, rice, corn, beans, and soy, along with a cascade of autoimmune responses that explained a lot, and so began the next decade of managing. Not healing. Managing.
Fast forward to 2025. I took five months off to travel and take a time out from adulting. Italy was its own kind of challenge; try navigating Italian food culture with a gluten and dairy intolerance. Almond milk, by the way, is not a concept that has arrived in large parts of Europe. By the time I reached Central America, my body had decided it was pretty exhausted with random surprises in meals. Central American national dishes are built almost entirely from beans and rice.
By Canada I was tired. Not just travel-tired. The particular kind of tired that comes from twenty-five years of working around a problem that nobody could solve.
On a train through Alberta, my travel companion had been chatting to a couple and arranged lunch with them. She told me after the fact. I wasn't especially fussed; most of my meals on that train had been with octogenarians, so the bar was not what you'd call high.
We sat down. Did the usual introductions. The woman opposite turned out to be a former dietitian who'd spent years developing a healing modality of her own. She mentioned something called the Accelerated Release Technique. I nodded, said it sounded interesting, and got distracted by the possibility of having dessert. What? I was on holiday.
A day later, in the observation carriage, the one with the big curved windows that put the Rockies on full display, she suggested she show me what she did. She hadn't practised in a few days and was missing it. I said, sure, why not. What do I need to do?
Nothing, she said. Just give me a problem to heal.
My food allergies, I said.
So we sat in a crowded observation carriage rattling through the plains of Alberta into the eastern edges of the Rockies, and she got to work. Pendulum swinging. Tables being consulted. Questions being asked. At one point she appeared to be firmly but quietly scolding someone I couldn't see, her guides, I later understood, who had apparently offered some information she disagreed with.
From my end I watched the landscape change, plains giving way to valleys with rivers the colour of glaciers, mountains appearing on the horizon and then surrounding us. I answered a few questions. I accepted an apology from something I didn't fully understand. I explained what a cluster of words meant to me. It was, genuinely, the most low-effort healing I had ever been part of.
About an hour in, she put the pendulum down.
There, she said. I think you can start eating those things again. Start small.
The root cause, as it turned out, had nothing to do with food. It had to do with safety. As a child, I hadn't felt safe, and my body had been holding that stress for decades. As the load increased, it had started cutting out the things that were hardest to process, gluten first, then lactose, then soy, corn, onions, and so the list grew. My body wasn't broken. It was exhausted. And it had been trying, in the only way it knew, to make life a little easier.
I was sceptical. Reasonably so. Twenty-five years of evidence suggested this was not a problem that resolved itself over a conversation on a train through the Rockies.
That night I ordered a bread roll. Small one. Ate half of it with salted butter.
Nothing happened.
I've been eating whatever I want since. Bread, pasta, cheese, sushi, the lot. After thirty years of navigating menus like a particularly anxious detective, I'm still getting used to the fact that I can just order things without rearranging the menu.
The woman with the pendulum was Renu Arora, a healer, author, and the creator of the Accelerated Release Technique. Less than a month after we met on that train, I was in training to become a certified ART practitioner myself. I'm now the first in Australia.
I tell this story not because I think healing always works this dramatically, or this quickly, or in one session. It doesn't always. What I know is that what Renu found in that carriage was real, and what she released was real, and the result has been real every day since.
What I also know is that I spent twenty-five years looking for the right specialist, the right diagnosis, the right treatment and the answer turned out to be something none of them had thought to look for. Something the body had been holding, below the level of any blood test or consultation, waiting for someone to finally ask the right question.
That's what ART does. It asks the questions that other approaches don't know to ask. And it goes to the places they can't reach.
If something in that lands for you if you've been carrying something that the conventional approaches haven't been able to touch, I'd love to hear from you.
Renée de Villeneuve is a certified ART practitioner, the first in Australia, trained under Renu Arora, the creator of the Accelerated Release Technique. Sessions are online via Zoom. If you're ready to go somewhere different, start at wayfairer.net/work-with-me.