about & contacts
Melanie Kalay is the founder of melamoves, a wellness platform that blends science-backed practice with embodied, rooted wisdom. Her approach is grounded in trauma-informed, research-led methods and shaped by decades of study with leading somatic and social embodiment teachers.
With a background in functional fitness, yoga , and nutrition, Melanie offers a sensitive, inclusive, and non-performative approach to transformation—one that honours nervous system rhythms and the lived experience of marginalised bodies.
Through melamoves, she supports people to return to rhythm, reclaim space, and rebuild trust in their own knowing. Her work bridges structure and softness, movement and rest, care and clarity.
Melanie holds numerous certifications, including a Diploma in Sports Therapy, Senior Yoga Teacher Status, Somatic Therapeutic Training, Menopause Health, and various qualifications in nutrition and bodywork.
My Core Embodied Values
-
Lead with lived wisdom, not performance.
-
Honour rhythm, care and personal sovereignty.
-
Create from an ongoing journey — not a perfected destination.
Melanie's journey
Movement has always been central to my life — though how I understand it has been shaped by experience.
I was an active, outdoorsy child and a competitive athlete until a serious elbow injury at 20 left me with lasting mobility loss. Recovery taught me about adaptation, acceptance, and patience — and quietly planted the seeds for my professional path.
My twenties and thirties were spent deepening my understanding of the physical body. I trained across a range of hands-on and movement-based disciplines, from personal training to sports massage therapy. When I later left the UK and began travelling, my perspective widened further. It was during this time that I first studied yoga, meditation, and mind–body practices, gradually shifting my work toward a more holistic and embodied approach.
In 2020, in response to lockdown, I began moving more of my work online. That shift came to an abrupt halt when I suddenly lost my father to COVID. At the same time, I was navigating the under-acknowledged experience of perimenopause. The combination of grief, PTSD, and hormonal change brought me into stillness — and in that stillness, I turned inward.
Somatic yoga, sound therapy, and connection to nature became my rituals of reconnection. They helped me come home to my body, process long-held and unexpressed emotion, and re-root myself.
When I later contracted COVID myself, I had to rebuild again. That journey reminded me of the importance of strength and resilience — and called on every skill I had developed as I worked to regain my health.
Today, my work is shaped by all of it: the pain, the healing, the remembering.
It is trauma-informed, intuitive, and built with care.
It centres people often overlooked in mainstream wellness — queer folks, people of colour, childless and childfree women, and anyone navigating grief, change, or marginalisation.
For me, wellness isn’t just about personal growth.
It’s about collective care.
And creating spaces where people feel seen and safe to return to themselves.
