CEO of the Quest for Life Foundation, Petrea King has many other feathers in her cap – she’s a well-known author, inspirational keynote speaker, teacher and facilitator, as well as a qualified naturopath, herbalist, clinical hypnotherapist, yoga and meditation teacher.
Awards-wise, she’s received the Advance Australia Award, Citizen of the Year and the Centenary Medal for her contribution to the community and has been consistently nominated for Australian of the Year since 2003 and was NSW finalist for Senior Australian of the Year in 2011.
For Petrea, wellbeing is our ability to embrace every moment regardless of its challenges, with a quiet mind and an open heart, free of judgement.
“We can become so distracted by the constancy and rapidity of change and the many mobile and online communications coming at us that we forget to nurture, nourish and replenish ourselves. We lose connection to our own inner sense of things and react moment by moment, just to survive,” she says.
Petrea says women have the unique capacity to tap into our inner intuitive silence and bring forth wisdom, humour, insight, creativity and compassion for ourselves, our loved ones and our communities.
The tools she teaches to other women to live their best life, and enjoy wellbeing, have been the keys to her own health and wellbeing, from an early age. Not long after her brother died by suicide, Petrea was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and was not expected to live.
“My children were four and seven years old. Working through this tough time, a large part of my emotional healing involved meditation and actively working through the feelings I’d suppressed since childhood and the limiting beliefs and anxieties I’d accumulated,” she says.
This is when she realised that crisis can become a catalyst for personal growth and understanding, and provides an incredible opportunity for healing and peace.
“I’m not suggesting that waking up and learning to live our life consciously is an easy thing to do. But we do know through neuroplasticity that the brain is constantly changing. Every day we create 700 brand new neurons from the hippocampus, ready to be used.
We can consciously choose to change our thoughts to those that move us forward to better health and happiness,” she says.
She was told that her remission from cancer was both unexpected and unlikely to last. With Marcus Blackmore’s encouragement, Petrea started her holistic approach to assisting other people with life-threatening illnesses.
This then evolved into her treating people who were struggling with some grief, abuse, loss or trauma in their lives and many people with depression, anxiety, other mental health issues, domestic violence, relationship breakdowns, post-trauma stress (PTSD) – most of which she’s experienced herself.
