Sonia's Story
Lawyer. Explorer. Keynote Speaker. Nervous System Expert. Cultural Heritage Reclaimer.
Sonia Houria is a French-Tunisian nervous system and emotional intelligence coach, keynote speaker, breathwork facilitator, Survival Apnea Ambassador, and founder of Women Make Waves. She is the creator of The Houria Method.
A former international commercial lawyer, she spent years working as a solicitor and legal counsel across multiple countries. When she moved to Australia, she couldn't practise without restarting her studies from scratch. She took it as a sign. The law she had been practising felt meaningless and she was meant for something else.
What she was meant to do had been there all along. As a child, she would heal every injured animal she found. She spent hours watching documentaries and reading books about ancient cultures and origin stories. She loved teaching. Raised between three worlds, she learned early that everyone has different ways of seeing things and communicating.
Then a surfing accident crushed her vertebrae and forced her into stillness. It was the second biggest turning point of her life.
She could no longer use sports and adventure as a distraction. For the first time, she had to sit with everything she had bottled up: a childhood marked by emotional instability, an unsafe home, physical violence, neglect, racism, the ruptures of separation and abandonment, and learning to silence herself under dictatorship. And underneath all of that, the grief of losing her mother, the person she was closest to in the world.
That stillness broke her open. It also saved her life.
Now she mixes her true interests, ancient cultures, adventure, and healing, with her trained analytical mind and ability to teach.
Throughout her travels and encounters with indigenous and ancient cultures around the world, she kept recognising something familiar. Every tradition she met reminded her of Tunisia, of the way of life her own family carried without realising its connection with the First Nations of Tunisia. It drew her to look deeper into the Amazigh, the people she came from.
After doing the deep work of accepting her whole identity and reclaiming it, she understood that the same principles that kept her Amazigh ancestors, the Indigenous People of Tunisia, thriving for millennia are common to ancient cultures everywhere, and they apply to the modern individual and organisation. She focuses on returning to the one that is hers: the tradition of her Tunisian ancestors. She now weaves those principles together with modern science in The Houria Method.
What she also learnt by reclaiming her identity is that Tunisia had erased its own roots for survival, just as she had. She saw that in many places around the world, indigenous ways are either erased or slowly disappearing because of the spread of a western monoculture. She believes that by creating a movement of people using The Houria Method for their personal development and growth, they will reconnect with and champion their roots, including westerners. This leads to deep-rooted solutions that take into account the health and wellbeing of people and the planet at a large scale, transforming the way countries shape their identity, heal themselves systemically, and start thriving in a sustainable, supportive rather than extractive way.
Founder of Women Make Waves
A movement, methodology, and community helping hundreds of women and men build emotional resilience through breathwork, coaching, retreats, and inner work since 2020.
Co-creator of IAMPOWER Summit
The Illawarra's largest women's mental health and wellbeing summit, delivering tools, strategies, and community support.
Author: Safety is the Strategy
Currently writing The Human Blueprint for Resilience, Belonging & Real Performance. A book distilling the ideas that have changed hundreds of lives.
From humble beginnings
Raised between France, Tunisia and Algeria by her mother while her father worked overseas, and then completely after her parents divorced. While being torn between her two identities and siding with the French for self-preservation in the face of racism, she also acquired the strength, independence and ingenuity Tunisian women hold, rooted in their Amazigh matriarchal heritage.
Her mother was diagnosed with cancer. When she passed away, Sonia became her brothers' legal guardian, long before she was ready for that weight. She learned to carry everything alone at all cost.
No network. No plan. Just a knowing that the life she'd been pushed into wasn't healthy for her. She started from scratch, led by survival instinct.
She continued rock climbing and got seriously into surfing. Born by the ocean, she returned to it. The first real encounter with her body as something to draw joy from, rather than pain. But still, she continued the pattern of pushing at all cost and sought thrill in adrenaline-fuelling activities.
A surfing accident that changed everything. When you can't move, you have to listen. She could no longer use her body as a machine to push through, and suddenly had to contend with what she had been avoiding all her life.
The inherited patterns. The survival strategies. The disconnection from identity, culture, lineage. This is where The Houria Method was born. Named after her grandmother, because Houria means Free Woman and that is exactly what the method did for Sonia and later for her clients. She used the richness of the women in her family as the blueprint for everything: adaptability, entrepreneurship, openness, inclusion, grit, performance, and so much more.
What healed her, she made available to others. Breathwork. Coaching. Retreats. Surf confidence. Community.
Co-created what became the largest women's mental health and wellbeing summit in the Illawarra region to date. From individual healing to community infrastructure.
Developed the Symbiosis keynote: nervous system intelligence for organisations. The method that healed individuals, adapted for teams, leadership, workplace culture.
the Strategy
The Human Blueprint for Resilience, Belonging & Real Performance. The ideas that changed hundreds of lives, distilled for the world.
A solo expedition retracing Amazigh ancestral nomadic paths. Exploration as reclamation. Deeply personal. The explorer, in motion.
How might The Houria Method be transposed at a larger scale to support communities and potentially national policies? Sonia is actively exploring this question as she noticed commonality between her story and the story of Tunisia itself, then other countries'.
It takes only 3.5% of a population in peaceful, committed action to shift an entire system. This is a strategy, not a metaphor. Sonia believes that by healing themselves, individuals open the possibility of creating long lasting positive change in their teams, organisations, community, and wider. That is what Women Make Waves and everything Sonia does is about. The ripple effect.
"We've all been fed the narrative that there's nothing we can do, that it's too late, that we don't have the power. I don't buy it. It takes only 3.5%."