How Chris and Tristan met
Chris and Tristan met at a shamanic based healing event that taught participants the medicines and ceremonial practices used to overcome pain and suffering. The gathering was held in a botanical garden, among paths and planted beds that stayed open to the evening air, as people arrived still in their coats, tired from the day and ready for breathwork, ritual, and conversation that named grief without dressing it up.
When the session ended, people lingered, and Tristan and Chris found themselves talking a little apart from the group. The conversation turned personal quickly, because both had survived harm that still hurt, and both could see that there was a better way of leading the world through healing.
Chris was never given a fair start
Chris's youth left marks that followed him into adulthood. He was bullied, lived through severe abuse, and faced mental health issues that shaped the years after. He was never given a fair shot at attaining tertiary education, and the workplaces that pay enough for rent and food stayed closed to him. That was wrong then, and it is still wrong for the young Australians living versions of that life now, many of them with it worse than he did.
What stayed with him was not a neat lesson. It was the raw fact of how little chance he was given, and the knowledge that the same door is still shut for people younger than he is. He could not make peace with that and leave it alone.
He learnt how to help anyway
Even with that past on his back, Chris kept showing up for people in pain. No teacher was waiting for him, so he built the path himself until he could work at a practitioner level, teaching his nervous system and his craft through long stretches of solitary practice.
His mornings began in ice water, breath held and released through the Wim Hof Method while his body shook and the rest of his life remained unstable. His nights went into shamanic practice, yoga, and healing work that forced him to sit with pain instead of running from it. Between those hours, jobs came and went, and habits he is not proud of still pulled at him, yet he studied and practised until he could meet others at that depth with real skill.
Years later he has steady work and a craft people trust, and he arrived there not by a clean path, but by staying with the hard parts when disappearing would have been easier.
Why Tristan came into the work
Tristan had spent his days in technology, working with screens, systems, and code. Put him in a room with someone who is hurting and he feels useless, because he cannot sit with a person in ceremony the way Chris can. That gap kept him out of healing others for a long time, even while he cared about the same people Chris reaches.
Years later, after they had healed side by side as comrades through many different spiritual events, Chris asked him to bring the skills he does have so that what they build can reach further than one practitioner in one room. They have not named the finished form yet, and they are building it together either way for younger people who look like who they used to be and who deserve more hope than they were given.
We are writing what we needed then
What we can offer first is what we needed when we were younger, so we are putting that into blog posts and sharing them here. Read them, and when a post lands, put it on your Instagram, share it to Facebook, or send the link to a friend in a hard season.
People who need this will not find it unless someone passes it on. One honest share is the difference between staying stuck alone and knowing you are not the only one.