From Paediatric Nursing to Nature: Bridging Family Health, Sleep & Nervous System Wellbeing
Meet Julie Cleasby, Registered Paediatric Nurse, Registered Health Visitor, educator and trainer, Clinical and Paediatric Hypnotherapist, mindfulness practitioner, Certified Forest Bathing Practitioner, founder of To Baby and Beyond and Rested Roots, and a professional who participated in the International Parenting & Health Institute’s Integrative Adult Sleep Coach Certification Program.
Based in West Sussex, United Kingdom, Julie has spent more than 26 years supporting women, babies, children and families across both public healthcare and private practice.
But Julie’s professional story is especially interesting because it has never remained confined to one discipline.
Her career has moved through:
Paediatric nursing.
Health visiting.
Child development.
Parent education.
Infant massage and movement.
Sleep support.
Hypnotherapy.
Mindfulness.
Emotional wellbeing.
And, most recently, nature-based nervous-system support.
At first glance, these might appear to be separate fields.
Look more closely, however, and there is a remarkably consistent thread:
Helping people feel safer, calmer, more supported, and better able to rest.
More Than 26 Years in Child & Family Health
Julie’s professional foundation is healthcare.
She is a Registered Paediatric Nurse specializing in child health and development and a Registered Health Visitor. Her career has included extensive work with women and families during the antenatal and postnatal periods, as well as expertise in infant and child development.
Her LinkedIn history includes work connected with the Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital and Worthing Hospital, while Julie describes having held roles including nurse specialist for looked-after children and community paediatric team manager.
This clinical background gave Julie a strong understanding of babies and children.
But eventually, she wanted something different.
She wanted the time and flexibility to support families in ways that reflected the areas she cared most deeply about.
And that decision led to the creation of To Baby and Beyond.
Creating To Baby and Beyond
Julie founded To Baby and Beyond after leaving her NHS roles and moving into independent family support and education.
She began teaching baby massage, baby yoga and baby first aid, providing sleep support to families, and developing her work as a hypnotherapist, EFT practitioner and life coach.
What began with groups of parents in a small Brighton studio grew substantially.
Today, To Baby and Beyond is an accredited professional training provider offering education in areas including infant massage, baby yoga, toddler yoga, baby reflexology, tummy time, mindfulness, first aid and family wellbeing. Its courses are delivered both within the UK and internationally.
The organization reports having trained 4,000+ instructors globally.
That represents an important evolution in Julie’s career.
She moved from supporting families herself to educating professionals who would go on to support families of their own.
From Practitioner to Educator & Trainer
Teaching has become a substantial part of Julie’s professional identity.
Through To Baby and Beyond, she has developed and delivered training in both public and private sectors and created professional programs intended to translate developmental science into practical family support.
The current training model emphasizes evidence-informed practice, child development, bonding, positive touch and family wellbeing.
Julie’s professional reach therefore extends far beyond the families she has personally supported.
Every practitioner she trains has the potential to carry that education into another community.
A Multidisciplinary Approach to Wellbeing
Julie’s professional education eventually expanded well beyond paediatric nursing.
Today, her qualifications and areas of practice include:
Clinical Hypnotherapy
Paediatric Hypnotherapy
EFT — Emotional Freedom Techniques
NLP
Life Coaching
HypnoBirthing
Mindfulness
Forest Bathing
alongside her nursing, health-visiting, family education and training background.
These disciplines introduced Julie to another side of wellbeing:
Not simply what happens physically within the body, but how stress, emotional regulation, relaxation, mindset and environment can influence how people feel and function.
That broader perspective also intersects naturally with sleep.
Expanding Her Education Into Adult Sleep
As part of her continuing professional development, Julie participated in the International Parenting & Health Institute’s Integrative Adult Sleep Coach Certification Program.
For someone whose work already encompassed family health, relaxation, hypnotherapy, emotional wellbeing and sleep support, exploring adult sleep through a more integrative lens was a natural extension of her professional interests.
And Julie’s career illustrates something particularly important about sleep:
Sleep does not exist separately from the rest of life.
Stress can matter.
Environment can matter.
Daily rhythms can matter.
Emotional wellbeing can matter.
Physical health can matter.
The ability to transition from activation toward rest can matter.
Julie’s multidisciplinary professional background allows her to approach wellbeing from several of those perspectives.
Because Julie participated in the program but did not complete certification, we recognize her IPHI education here as part of her broader professional development rather than identifying her as an IPHI-certified Integrative Adult Sleep Coach.
From Babies to Adults and From Clinical Care to the Woods
Julie’s newest professional chapter may initially seem quite different from her earlier work.
It actually brings many of those threads together.
Julie founded Rested Roots, which provides forest bathing and woodland wellbeing experiences in West Sussex.
Forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku, is a slow, guided form of nature immersion.
As Julie explains through Rested Roots, it is not a hike and it is not a workout.
Participants slow down, pause, engage their senses and spend intentional time experiencing the woodland environment.
The philosophy is almost the opposite of modern overstimulation:
No rush.
No performance.
No constant digital input.
Instead, Rested Roots creates opportunities to slow down and reconnect with one’s surroundings.
When Rest Became Personal
There is also a personal story behind this latest chapter.
Julie is a mother of twins, business owner and professional who spent years managing a very full life. She describes reaching a point where she realized that although everything may have looked fine externally, she wasn’t truly resting.
Nature became one of the places where she could slow down.
She describes the woods as somewhere she could breathe again and reconnect with a steadier pace.
That experience ultimately contributed to the creation of Rested Roots.
There is something particularly fitting about that evolution.
A professional who has spent decades caring for other people eventually began asking a different question:
What does it mean to genuinely rest?
Nature, Mindfulness & Nervous-System Support
Rested Roots now brings together several areas of Julie’s professional background.
She identifies herself there as a:
Registered Nurse
Certified Forest Bathing Practitioner
Mindfulness Practitioner
Trainer
and describes incorporating hypnotherapy-informed relaxation and nervous-system support alongside EFT-inspired emotional grounding and self-compassion practices.
Her sessions are intended for people experiencing stress, burnout, or simply a desire to reconnect with nature and slow the pace of everyday life.
Importantly, this work doesn’t erase Julie’s earlier professional identity.
It expands it.
The nurse is still there.
The educator is still there.
The hypnotherapist is still there.
The mindfulness practitioner is still there.
And the professional who has spent years exploring sleep, rest and family wellbeing is still there.
The setting has simply expanded from hospitals, homes, classrooms and consultation spaces into the natural environment.
Supporting the Nervous System Across the Lifespan
When we look at Julie’s career as a whole, another pattern emerges.
Much of her work has involved helping people move from overwhelm toward greater regulation and confidence.
With babies, that might involve positive touch, movement or parent-child connection.
With parents, it might involve education and reassurance.
With hypnotherapy clients, it may involve relaxation or emotional patterns.
With people experiencing stress or burnout, it may involve mindfulness and nature immersion.
And in sleep education, it means understanding that rest involves far more than simply telling someone to go to bed earlier.
Different populations.
Different tools.
But a remarkably consistent professional curiosity around rest, regulation, connection and wellbeing.
A Mother of Twins Supporting Other Families
Julie’s work with babies and families also has a deeply personal component.
She is the mother of twins and has described understanding firsthand the importance of positive touch and bonding.
That experience informed her family work and even led to specialized professional education around supporting twins through infant massage.
It’s another example of something visible throughout Julie’s career:
Personal experience often becomes professional curiosity.
Professional curiosity becomes education.
And education becomes something she teaches to others.
Professional Profile
Julie Cleasby
Registered Paediatric Nurse | Registered Health Visitor | Educator & Trainer
Location: West Sussex, United Kingdom
Founder: To Baby and Beyond
Founder: Rested Roots
Professional Background
Registered Paediatric Nurse
Registered Health Visitor
Child Health & Development Professional
Early Years First Aider
Professional Trainer & Course Developer
Julie has more than 26 years of professional experience supporting women, babies, children and families.
Additional Professional Training
Clinical Hypnotherapist
Paediatric Hypnotherapist
EFT Practitioner
NLP Practitioner
Life Coach
HypnoBirthing Educator
Mindfulness Practitioner
Certified Forest Bathing Practitioner
IPHI Education
Participated in the Integrative Adult Sleep Coach Certification Program
International Parenting & Health Institute
Professional Focus
Child & Family Health
Infant & Child Development
Adult Sleep & Rest
Nervous-System Wellbeing
Mindfulness & Relaxation
Hypnotherapy
Forest Bathing
Positive Touch & Bonding
Parent & Professional Education
Stress & Burnout Support
An Inspiration in Lifelong Professional Evolution
Julie Cleasby’s career is a wonderful example of what professional evolution can look like.
She began in paediatric nursing.
She became a health visitor.
She supported women and families through pregnancy, postpartum life and early childhood.
She moved into independent family education.
She built To Baby and Beyond.
She became a hypnotherapist and expanded into emotional and mind-body wellbeing.
She explored integrative adult sleep through IPHI.
She trained thousands of professionals.
And now, through Rested Roots, she is bringing together nursing, mindfulness, relaxation and nature-based wellbeing.
Yet perhaps the most interesting thing about Julie’s career is not how many different qualifications she has accumulated.
It is how consistently they return to a similar question:
What helps human beings feel supported enough to slow down, connect and restore?
From a baby receiving nurturing touch to a parent learning how to support their family, an adult struggling to rest, or someone standing quietly beneath the trees in West Sussex, Julie’s work has continued exploring that question from different perspectives.
💙 Julie, we are delighted to recognize your professional journey and your participation in IPHI’s Integrative Adult Sleep Coach Certification Program as part of this Professional Spotlight.
Your continued evolution from paediatric healthcare to family education, sleep, mind-body practices and nature-based wellbeing demonstrates the possibilities of lifelong learning and multidisciplinary practice.
