About Me
The illness
I was thirteen. The doctors couldn't fix it. I spent more time in waiting rooms than at school. I was a nerdy kid; reading was the only thing that worked, so I read everything. At my grandmother's house I found a book on medicinal plants, and the last chapter was about self-hypnosis. I borrowed everything the library had, recorded my own hypnosis tapes on a cheap microphone, and played them to myself at night. The insomnia eased first. Hypnosis led me to meditation, and within months the symptoms that had filled those waiting rooms were gone. I've stopped trying to explain that. I haven't stopped looking since.
Outside the system
I never officially left school. I just stopped showing up to most of it. I would skip classes to watch seminars and read instead: Jung, every Joe Dispenza book in print, every Tony Robbins course I could afford. I worked on myself the way other kids worked on grades, every waking hour. At fifteen I already knew I was leaving, so I took night shifts at a post-office warehouse and spent three years saving up to make it real. I had this burning feeling that I was meant for something bigger than where I come from.
Streets of Europe
At eighteen I left for Barcelona with my warehouse savings and a plan to build a marketing company. I brought three of my closest friends onto the vision. None of us had ever run a business, and none of us spoke Spanish. We burned through everything within months. We moved to Budapest because it was the cheapest city in Europe, volunteered in a party hostel for a bed, and once put our last seven dollars on a poker table because winning was the only way we were going to eat. Then I hitchhiked through Italy to the South of France, where the money hit zero. Some nights a stranger's couch. Some nights the street. On one of the hardest nights, sleeping in the rain with nowhere to go, something in me asked the same question I'd found at thirteen: what if the only thing making this night unbearable is the story I am telling myself about it? It was a warm summer rain. It was actually beautiful. I have spent the ten years since learning what really happened in that moment.
The endless road
I kept moving. The next teacher, the next country, the next door that might open. I walked into dozens of bars a day in Edinburgh until someone finally hired me, worked three jobs in hospitality, and spent the biggest money of my life to that point on a cocktail course in London. A motorbike accident in Vietnam almost killed me. In Argentina, two truckers drove off the road into the desert with me in the cab. When one swung an iron pipe at me, ten years of martial arts caught it before I could think. Then I felt the machete at my back. They took everything and left me in the desert. Years later, walking a perfectly safe street in Vancouver, I caught myself checking over my shoulder, and understood that my body had never left that desert. I didn't have words for that yet. I just couldn't stop moving.
The source
I went to India. I sat in ashrams studying Advaita Vedanta, the yogic tradition, the philosophy, the meditation. While completing my 200 hours as a yoga teacher, I felt a calling to sit with plant medicine, so I left everything again and flew to the Amazon. I spent years there with the old lineages, in a world very few Westerners ever really enter. I learned to read what was moving in someone else's body before they could. It felt like I had the answer. I was wrong about that, but it would take a few more years to know.
Vortex
I came out of the jungle seeing the dark side of healing spaces: without real integration, they just produce more chasing. So I started building the bridge. I co-founded Vortex Retreats, helped build a community in Mexico, then a retreat center in Guatemala. I was still physically raising the dormitory while the first participants were arriving. Six in the morning until two the next, building it, running it, feeding forty people, holding a relationship that was not working. When the last group left, my body simply stopped, and I was in bed for weeks. From the outside, I had everything. I had built the thing I said I wanted, and it had taken the body I needed to enjoy it.
Seen
Somewhere in those years, a mentor watched me arrive at a gathering after traveling for 48 hours and asked me a question I have never put down: who flies for two full days just to feel like they belong? Later, when I showed him the parts of myself I was most ashamed of, he said: I see all of you, I see all of that, and I still love you. I didn't know it yet, but everything I now do for the people I work with started in that moment.
The body
By 2023 I had done nearly everything: hundreds of ceremonies, coaches, mentors, therapists, parts work, IFS, CBT. Then I met Judith Johnson, a pioneer of the somatic field with more than fifty years in it, and trained directly under her. I was face down on an 83-year-old woman's massage table, screaming, while she held my body and walked me back to the moments in childhood where the love was not there. What I found underneath was not a technique problem. Every course, every ceremony, every business I had built was one long attempt to earn something I had already been given. The deepest unraveling didn't happen in ceremony. It happened in complete sobriety.
Lineage
For three months in late 2024, I lived in Judith's house. We recorded her entire 1.5-year practitioner program, her life's work in transmittable form. By the end, I was co-facilitating her certification programs with her. Around the same time, I co-authored a book that hit #1 in fifteen categories across the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. A faith-based coaching program I had co-founded took off, and we served hundreds of people while working 80+ hour weeks. Through all of it, I was being mentored closely by some of the best leadership coaches in the US.
Home
These days I take a real day off and the work doesn't enter my body once. I have a small circle of people who see me clearly, call me forward, and are always there for me. I wake up lit up. And I am in full devotion to helping people live their lives instead of endlessly healing them.
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