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I was born under a communist regime, where freedom of speech barely existed and the only products you could reliably find on the shelves were potatoes and vinegar.

 

I grew up on a council estate, in a 54 square-metre flat carved into smaller spaces with cardboard walls. Nursery taught me to fight for food. Primary school taught me almost nothing. So I taught myself.

 

I learned to read at six and started tearing through my grandfather’s library. By sixteen I was deep in psychology, especially Jung, then philosophy, spirituality, and ethnology. I was looking for something larger than the grey, narrow world around me. I have always been drawn to intensity, depth, and expansion. I love life, even when it is difficult, cruel, or absurd.

 

The moment I got my passport, I left. I moved to London, the city I had dreamed about for years. London took me in and from the first day I knew I was home. I arrived with very little money and lived in derelict buildings, sometimes eating from supermarket skips. I met people from everywhere. I cycled across the city, started a band, toured Europe, and lived inside worlds that rarely touch each other. Artists, bankers, professors, CEOs, gamblers, DJs, courtesans, anarchists, conservatives, eccentrics, conformists. I learned to speak across class, temperament, background, and belief.

 

I have lived through extremes. Poverty, excess, freedom, loss, devotion, boredom, danger, beauty. I have lost people I loved. I have lost whole versions of myself. I have lived in luxury and felt empty there. I have lived in squat communities and learned how little a person really needs. I have seen how quickly identity can harden into a cage, and how hard it is for most people to admit they are trapped inside one.

 

I travelled for years, not to collect places, but to test myself against life. In Varanasi, at the cremation ghats, I felt the full closeness of death and the strange force of being alive. In silent meditation retreats, I sat long enough to watch the noise in my own mind lose its authority. I received teachings from people who had earned the right to speak. I read Dawkins as seriously as I read mystics, because I do not trust any mind that only feeds itself one kind of truth. I care about balance because without it, people get possessed by their own ideas and sometimes even turn themselves into ideologies.

 

I have worked as a boat master on a diving boat over the Andaman Sea. I have spoken with hundreds of people from every kind of life and watched what fear does to them, what grief does to them, what freedom does to them. For most of my life, I could not swim. Deep water was my greatest fear. Now I dive below the surface willingly, sometimes with nothing but my own body. I turned fear into joy. It taught me that what terrifies us most can become a source of strength, vitality, and peace.

 

That is one of the foundations of how I work.

 

I believe people are unfinished. I believe identity is far less fixed than most people think. I believe we are not nouns. We are verbs. We are in motion all the time, whether we admit it or not. My life has taken me through pressure, contradiction, reinvention, and contact with very different kinds of people. That shaped the way I see. It taught me to listen beneath performance, to spot self deception quickly, and to recognise the moment when a person is ready to stop repeating themselves.

 

I do this because I believe in human beings and  I know how much can change when someone stops clinging to an old story and starts meeting life directly.