So before we get into any of this, I'd love to hear a little bit more about you, who you are, and what actually brought you to this work of blending the new and the modern, the East and the West.

Thank you so much for the introduction, and I will start with I'm an Australian man, just turned 50, have been in this field of work now for roughly 10 years.

Previously to this, I was in construction.

I had a construction company and, and then I was also a carpenter and then a young surfer carpenter, so very much an Australian, you know, core Australian childhood and young adult and adult life up until that point.

So what led me to that transition from being this tradie, surfer tradie guy who had a pretty good life to throwing it all away and becoming this version of me today? Well, it all stems back basically to my childhood, and then I think a lot of people can relate to that sometimes when they start to look back through their years after a few years of things not going quite so well.

And for me, that looked like, my childhood looked like the son of, uh, a drug addicted or opioid addicted father who was using heroin at the time, and a mother who was soon to be opioid addicted not long after my birth.

So what had happened essentially was I was born into this very unstable environment.

Yeah

from the

get-go.

And most of my life was, you know, dispersed in and around different family members, friends.

you name it, you know, caregivers, yeah, just such, you know, a network of unsafe people for the most part.

So, you know, from a very young age, I learnt that through my own behaviours and my own sort of structure, I could manipulate people, basically, okay? So if to get my needs met, I could play a story or I could understand a system or a victim mentality or I could play a, you know, or I could leave a...

you know, a moment in time and use it as a form of manipulation, which is an interesting way we're going here at the moment, but that's okay.

I'll leave it here.

But once you hit that mark, when you... realize that that you needed to be the author of your own story you needed agency of the self and you needed to own your loci of control and nothing more and take responsibility to its fullest of what you could control while letting go of things outside your control because that's what you that's what i think you've just described in that moment or sorry in that journey did you start to feel more fulfilled, like deep into the bones, like into the soul, for want of a better word? And it made you feel more complete, you know, once you started to take that ownership?