When a person is seeking to endeavour into their own deep inner work, the kind of work that steers their life through growth and change to a new paradigm of healing and health, they will require the kind of support that will ease the terrain to be traversed.
Every individual is completely capable of walking these lands on their own, but the beauty of our existence is that we just do not have to do it alone.
And it is these very experiences that make incredible bonds between people and their lived experience. Either because of the similarities to our own journey or the tales of resilience and strength that imbue us with a sense of hope and vision.
The ground crew a person builds is a beautiful necessity and whilst it can consist of loved ones and strong, unshakable humans, it can be resourceful to have someone who has an understanding of the strength and courage needed for the odyssey, as well as the recuperation and integration process that follows any incredible pilgrimage.
Many of you may have had some sort of therapy before. You may also know that not every therapist is completely suited your specific needs.
When I am working through episodes of healing I seek someone that has walked through their own fire, someone with battle scars and pressed flowers picked from the side of the path on some treacherous mountain peak somewhere, a person who has been their own hero or heroine, who have had sidekicks of their own whom they love deeply, someone who has been to the darkness, slayed the demons and survived to tell the tale.
That kind of a person knows exactly what I am about to go through, even if the story comes from an entirely different book.
Who and what you take with you, is important.
I would not want someone who has learned from the sidelines, who read a book and passed the exams and has never put to practice the things that they have learned for themselves.
Who have not had the very lived experience that shapes the person that they are and challenged authority and the powers that be.
I don’t want to see the piece of paper that dons your wall, I want to see your scars and know how you healed them.
How those memories mark the character that you have grown to be and that you are still walking, still learning, not so damaged that you can no longer keep going.
I want to learn from the elders who have done it, lived it, felt it to the core of their Soul!
I want to be held by the person who learned compassion because they had to give it to themselves when all the lights went out.
So here I am, about to tell you a little bit about the expedition of my own life.
Not out of some egotistical faerie tale to woo the audience, but because my own scars are exactly why I am who I am, and why I do what I do.
Always the Healer.
I distinctly remember realising that I had always been a healer.
(And let’s not get bogged down in semantics: for clarity, a healer to me, is someone who has been healing themselves of the affliction of being a human. Of living in a world that contains sharp, loud and scary things that one must outlive and shine through. A person who is their own beacon of light by which they follow through the dark nights and who can raise the sun when it’s all said and done.)
When I was 3 I used to speak to spirits.
When I was 5 I remember a vision that was given to me of a vast black ocean, me: a large shipping vessel, much like the coal ships we see out in the harbour.
Floating in a dark sea, other boats would come and dump their waste on my decks. I would receive it without question, the garbage piling higher and higher until the hull would begin to sink below the water tension.
In real life, this would lead to me having a complete meltdown.
Deck would be cleared and the boats would come again to cleanse themselves of their own effluence.
I was travelling around in The Mobile Shiatsu Clinic in some remote places and everywhere I went, people found me. The kind of people that, yes had aches and pains, but the kind of pains that were markers of deep hurts still alive and kicking, the kind of things they were waiting for someone to truly hear, see and help them to put them down.
I remember witnessing relief, physical, emotional and spiritual.
I remember feeling so out of my depth, but over and over again, the universe put us together to hold each other and every time, joy was found.
I remember, remembering: This is who I am.
Not in the circus, not as a sound editor or as a cat trainer and the millions of other things I’ve gotten up to in my short life.
I remember realising that even in all these different lives, I was still a healer, listening and holding everywhere I went.
The Foundations
I grew up in ever changing landscapes.
Born in a Bangkok hospital whilst my father worked in Burma, knocking down forests to build infrastructure.
My mother pregnant with a 2 year old in tow was not permitted into the country.
A little Filipino woman left to fend for her family with broken English in a strange Asian country.
She was ‘Indai’, aka second daughter of seven others.
A daughter of a strong woman and an alcoholic, gambling sergeant of a father who refused to clothe and feed them despite his military income.
The kind of poverty that is completely abstract.
My mother did what a lot of women in those situation do, learn English and find a foreign man and marry him in the hope of better horizons.
Not every story has happy endings.
My father washed ashore with the diaspora of Italians fleeing persecution after the Second World War. Dago’s they were called.
Australia, a harsh, dry and angry territory where the shores of home and persecution might have been easier than the childhood he was about to migrate through.
Not long after arrival his Mother was to die and he was left as the oldest male of 5 kids and a father, who despised him.
At the age of 5 he was taught how to mix concrete and put to work. Half of Melbourne can thank him for his education and the foundations of most of the city.
He grew up protective, angry and unloved which grew into coping mechanisms of alcoholism and gambling.
You can see the threads about to be tied together.
My childhood was an ever-changing landscape that constantly shifted depending on my fathers work, or how much the neighbours had figured out, or heard.
My older brother inherited his fathers rage and confusion, his survival instincts and lack of grounding. He did have his mothers’ Love.
I inherited my mothers’ escapism and ability to carry on, the wildness of my father and I had my mother and brothers resentment at my existence.
Dad travelled for work a lot, periods of reprieve where we could take a breath and be free and equally where I felt abandoned and betrayed by the entire group of people whom were known as family.
My mother and my brother were bonded.
I stood closest to the constantly falling tree, my intermittent and terrifying father.
It’s safer if you can see where the tree is falling.
But to me, all of them were dangerous, some hits are harder to take than others, despite the muscle behind them.
My mother would say that I have always been fiercely independent, it wasn’t a learned trait.
The sharpness of my intuition forged in the fires that was my Dad.
The healer in me came with my Soul and it was after my father died and I lost myself completely that I realised that somewhere in cosmic history we had made a pact and in this life I was to spend all my energy holding him together, healing him, as his daughter.
It was at this point that I felt like a complete failure and I hit rock bottom at a dizzying height in my career.
Run Away From The Circus
I learned that freedom was to get as far away from my family as possible. Physically and energetically.
I taught myself how to meditate and connect to crystals whilst simultaneously learning how to hack the family unit to ensure my freedom
If Dad was angry and decided not to talk to me and my mother clearly had no control or authority over me, I just lived as I pleased.
Far too inexperienced, I allowed myself out.
Gosh I got myself into a lot of trouble, good and bad. Fun and not.
I learned to leave the house as much as I could leave my body.
I was charismatic and cute with absolutely no common sense, a rebellious gait, despise of authority and unlimited amounts of curiosity and untamed energy.
I eventually grew into a serious risk taker, my chemical system geared up and stabilised by adrenaline and cortisol.
Always looking for the next hit… Always curating the next hit, the next boundary to smash.
Never wanting to actually be in my body, which felt like such a trap for my soul.
If I was to live in this physical world, then I would push it to it’s limits.
I was frustrated by my physical form, that I had to be imprisoned in it to live. I can still feel the scar at the top of my head the first time I released myself from my body.
At 19 I tried to traverse from my birth land, Thailand, to Nepal.
I went alone to India, experienced a strange and unhinged world, got shingles and intense food poisoning in Nepal before hiking from Katmandu to Gokyo, almost happily drowned white water kayaking the Seti River, had to endure all sorts of sexual misconduct by every single hotel owner, taxi and tuk tuk driver over all of Asia.
I didn’t understand stress. I just knew I felt alive.
In quiet moments I would naturally practice opening my chakras before I even knew what they were. I would leave my body and float out of my accomodation to see the world at night. I could get lost in the labyrinth of a snowflake melting on the window of the bus as it came down the mountains.
At 20 I came home after my Dad left my Mother.
Significant yes. Resentful. YES.
I could do nothing but try to escape.
By this time I had gone from being a cat trainer on Babe 2 to a Sound assistant, on Babe 2.
I would work films and on television shows and then in between continue earning by doing temp work and catering.
I slept 3 hours a day and spent the rest surfing, riding my motorbike at breakneck speeds and seeking the good type of trouble anywhere I would go.
I ended up in Canada, met a dude, went to Mexico, returned home, got married.
Somewhere in all of that I went to NZ to see if I could get a job on Lord of the Rings, I did! Which led to working on Pirates of the Caribbean.
Came home, was forced into sound editing, got divorced, lost my dog, saw Cirque Du Soleil and then found Flying Trapeze.
A year later I was in Sweden, having left everything behind, working in a Horse show-slash-circus as a flying trapeze artist.
7 years later I landed in Macau working for Cirque Du Soleil.
If there was one thing I was good at, it was joviality, intermingled with a severe ability to focus and the tenacity of a pit bull with a locked jaw, never willing to let go until I had juiced every single experience possible, laughing and shining every time the lights went on like a diamonte glued to an old costume, from a distance no one could see the wear.
I worked on some big shows, both in sound and in the circus.
I never aimed anywhere. I just went.
I was that ‘Yes’ guy. Always ready for the next adventure. I never used my head, only my unbeknownst addiction to make decisions.
I was affable and fun and people loved to be around me. Particularly the worst kinds of people.
And yeah, I let a lot of them in too.
The stage of my life looked amazing, fun and inspiring, but the back stage was a tangled mess of chaos, guilt, shame and abuse.
And like any good performer, I smiled and laughed and kept my mouth shut.
I didn’t fool everyone.
But even the most caring of people couldn’t save the sinking ship I was.
And the ship did almost sink.
The Catalyst Dies
I managed to leap frog from one shiny but sketchy story to another.
The place where this chapter started was the ring created by Cirque Du Soleil.
I got hand picked whilst I was trying to enjoy a precarious job performing and teaching trapeze at a water park in Israel.
And as I was want to do, I ran.
I would run from one precarious situation to another, hoping for something I had no knowledge of, wondering if I would find something I couldn’t speak in words.
Hope.
What a serious delusion I was in.
In this one, my father falls fatally sick.
The very large troupe I am working with turns on me as their ‘mother’ figure when I no longer can hold them as all the cracks I’ve been hiding (particularly from myself) start to show through the gloss and my smile starts to dim.
As my dad’s lights start to fade, I replace him with a partner who is as damaged and confused as he is.
And after he leaves his body, I return to meet him in another.
The show gets closed down.
And I finally decide to quit.
These circus years were years of pain.
I had years of abuse to my body with torn shoulders, bad falls and strains all numbed by pain killers and starvation.
The quality of my body like a mirror for the quality of the company I kept.
So much drama.
Internally and externally.
Between car crashes, fights and falls were injuries, mental breakdowns, manipulation and grief hidden behind the door of the caravan, curtain or glittery makeup.
I learned that I am made for difficult situations.
Forever that deep pillar holding steady when the world is being demolished by its very own hands.
I couldn’t hide it from myself anymore.
When he died, I lost all of me.
And all of this, was just like all of that. The childhood of smoke and mirrors, front stage and back stage.
Dark and light.
And then, whatever karma we were bound by was completely erased.
It was not like that beautiful moment in a trick at the peak of height where gravity does not exist. A tiny fragment of time less than a tick of the second hand that feels like an eternity of bliss.
Here was the bottom, that hard cold surface no watches, well below the net.
It’s harder when you hit it at speed and I knew this feeling physically.
Now I knew it on all the other levels too.
No job. No Father. No support. No compass. No feeling.
Here I felt the depth of all the abuse and breathed it in deep through my current relationship, he whose character was so much like that of my Dad’s.
Full of some sort of love and affection, unable to fully relinquish it and remorseful and hurtful when vulnerability showed its true face.
A tug of war that scarred no matter which it was pulled.
I returned to Australia and did what I knew so well to do.
Start again.
But this time was different.
It is here I realised that I was the common denominator in my story.
That if anything was going to change, it had to be me.
And so I did.
Like that pit bull with lock jaw focus, I took one step after another.
I found people who could hold my story. Who could see through the broken mirror I was trying to smash apart but simultaneously hold up out of some learned reflex I couldn’t resist.
These people were less found and more stumbled upon.
The universe is always providing.
I began slowly retiring from performing, started teaching and placed my deep desire to save my father into safe places that weren’t waiting for me when I arrived home from work.
I taught youth at risk, I was built for it.
I saw them, I understood them even if they thought they could eat this tiny creature alive whence they first laid eyes on me.
I knew them. And as soon as we would lock eyes, they knew it too.
I got my rigging license and started teaching less.
My aim was to become an acupuncturist, a practice that had saved my life over and over again since I was young.
I didn’t have the stamina for that lengthy amount of time, then Shiatsu showed its face and a new era began.
There’s nothing like learning something that heals whilst letting it heal you through the hands of other novices and trying to remember data through wet, blood shot eyes and snotty noses.
But man, it is one way to learn.
To let it imprint you through your skin, to your core and back through you life.
To allow the intention of gentleness, softness and kindness touch you for the first time.
To learn and come to know things that you have no concept of.
That’s a trip!
And it’s a beautiful one.
Every Hero’s Story
So many of you worry for me before you leave.
“I hope you haven’t taken any of my negativity on!”
“How do you cleanse after you work day? It must be a lot.”
And yes, I have rituals, and I mostly I am fine. And even when I am not, I know, now, how to clean the decks of the ship with grace and love.
I can handle the depths and the darkness, because, I always have.
For I am that diamonte in the dark.
My smile is real. It hides nothing.
I have always had that.
You will never hear me say that I regret my childhood.
I have always said, since I was a child, that I am proud of who I am because of what I saw, felt, witnessed and experienced.
I am proud to my Spirit, my Soul and my Heart.
That’s not to say that I wished it wasn’t another way for my mother, my father and my brother, and all the people in my linage, that bought them to the acts that they lived.
I pray for the day that there is no poverty, inequality or greed.
I am working towards a day where violence is no more.
I am the embodiment of forgiveness and how to hold a light in the dark. And I know that everyone can embody this too and pass it on.
And this is why I am on that futon with you.
Doing what I do, whether it’s for an injury, better digestion, pain, stuck emotions, spiritual disconnection or deep, harsh trauma.
I am there, ship steady in the choppy waters, lights on, pitbull focus and a Heart so big it will never falter.
I took the scenic route so that I can be here now with all these rich and silly experiences that have shown me what it means to be human, to be in the body. How to be present, resilient, loving and kind.
I may not have walked the same story, or terrain on your journey, but I have had a lot of experience and if you shall have me, I would be so honoured to hold your story and be with you as you take each step towards somewhere you may not even have words for.
So let’s get that bag packed an look to the next horizon together.
The Solstice Space 