Life, Resilience, and the Beauty of Imperfection

In Conversation with Vanessa Morton...

It was a bright afternoon in the park in Warrington when I sat down with Vanessa. There’s something about her energy that feels both honest and untamed, as though she has learned to dance with life’s chaos rather than fight against it.

She began our conversation with a poem. “Beginning Today,” she called it. In it, there’s a line that lingers:

“How can we be perfect when we’re living in such an imperfect world?”

At 52, Vanessa tells me she refuses to be defined by age, industry, or expectation.

“I work in a very competitive industry, and you’re constantly compared with younger people. Around the time I was entering perimenopause, many of my friends were so down about it all. But I thought: that’s not going to be me. I’m not going to let this define me. That’s why I started swimming. That’s why I tried running,  I was terrible at it - but I tried."

"Now I look at the women in my groups: one is 65, another is 78. The eldest cycles from Aphrodite’s Rock to the top of Troodos(Cyrpus). (37 km) At 78 years old! And I think: Monica, I want to be like you. You give me hope.”

When I ask what she’d tell her younger self, she didn't hesitate.

“Oh God. To trust the process. Because it’s all been beautiful - messy, yes, but beautifully so. I wouldn’t change any of it. But I’ve spent too much time standing in my own way, always searching for more, instead of trusting that what I have is enough.”

She tells me of her best friend, who never made it to 50.

“Eight weeks after I saw her last, she was gone. A brain tumour. She had said to me, ‘I’m turning 50 this year, I want to look after myself.’ And then… she was gone.”
“It was devastating. But it was also a reminder, a painful, beautiful reminder that we have to live. We have to keep living.”

Perhaps this is why she throws herself into challenges that most would shy away from. For her 52nd birthday, she signed up for a swimming challenge to raise funding for Aspire (Spinal Cord Injury). She managed to raise £1,450 and swam 31.95 miles, which she had initially thought was 44 kilometres. “It turned out to be 44 miles,” she says, laughing at the absurdity. “But it became my meditation. The sea has become a form of meditation for me now.”

Her story is woven with reinvention. At 17, she left for Miami, hungry to redefine herself. At 27, she stepped onto a rooftop in Fort Lauderdale for her first yoga class, under a full moon.

“It was Ashtanga. I resisted at first, but I was hooked. For me, at that time, it was a challenge , and there was a lot of ego in it. I wanted to be at the front, to do the arm balances. But over time, the spirituality and the physical came together. That’s where it was born.”

Now she is an international yoga teacher and founder of Yoga Escapes with Vanessa  www.escapewithvanessa.com. Her work is about guiding women out of their comfort zones, creating experiences that feel like once-in-a-lifetime  and reminding them that midlife is not an ending, but a beginning.

“This is the most exciting time of our lives,” she tells me. “We should be celebrating. We’ve raised kids, we’ve given so much — now it’s our time to live fully.”

It was through this spirit of celebration that Vanessa and I first connected. She told me,

“When I met you, I loved everything about you. Your story , being stuck in Cyprus during lockdown, teaching yourself to surf  it inspired me. When I saw what you were creating with Sippi, I thought: my students need to see this. There’s nothing like it here." 

"What I love about Sippi is that it’s perfectly imperfect. The meaning behind the pieces, the story woven into each one, it’s different. And it resonated with me straight away.”

She told me about the very first piece she loved from our very first collection and then gifted by her students a bracelet she wore daily, and the necklace that still feels too precious to take off.

 

 "I got these two in Sri Lanka. It was gifted to me from the girls, and I wasn’t expecting it at all. I’ve done four retreats there now, and it was this last trip that I fell in love with Sri Lanka the most. What I love is the people - their culture, their resilience, and their joy. They’ve been through so much  natural disasters, terrorism — yet they are still smiling. They are humble, happy, and inspiring.”

When I asked from our new collection which piece she loves the most, she said:

“One piece in particular popped out to me and I thought: I’m having it. I deserve it. It was my gift to myself for working so hard. And when the package arrived , the ribbon, the handwritten note - I was in tears. Honestly, it took my breath away. Even more beautiful in person than in the picture.”

Her connection with Sippi isn’t just about the jewellery pices; it’s about what Sippi stands for the story, meaning, and empowerment.

Jewellery becomes a vessel. It carries memory. It reminds us of who we are, what we’ve survived, and what we’re still reaching for.

Vanessa’s life — raw, brave, imperfect, alive — is the embodiment of what I want Sippi to stand for. Strength in imperfection. Beauty in resilience. Jewellery not as decoration, but as connection.

At the end of our time, I asked Vanessa if there was anything else she wanted to say. She smiled and said...“I love you.”

And that, perhaps, is the essence of it all. Love for each other. Spreading that unconditional love.