It's strange to look back at my life and see the depth of suffering and the immense privilege.

Dad was already making $$$ by the time I was born. For me as a kid, there was no such thing as a "money problem". We just had enough. We could travel, buy pretty much whatever we wanted. Obviously not anything, we weren't that rich... but Dad had a Porsche, and we had a couple houses. Pretty sweet.

In the years that followed, I have certainly experienced money problems. A lot of financial stress. Very little external security. Part of my coming of age was the sharp realisation that it does not in fact grow on trees.

It's part of why I'm such a good coach/teacher.

I can be stable when things aren't.

I'm great to have around when people are dying or there's a crisis.

But being a rock is also not something I enjoy needing to be, so I don't work in that capacity. I've had to be that for so long. So these days, I create stability around me as best I can. And yet a part of me just can't shake the sense that much of the stability we're building is imagined, anyway. Not real. Sandcastles in the sky.

This is why I focus in the realms of the body, where there's less space for white little lies.

Healing it. Building it. Moving it. And letting that capacity seep into higher levels of love, leadership and creativity.

The other realisation about money was that many of the ways people make money fucking suck. Ethically, I mean. So, coupled with my hilariously annoying ability to be okay while making less, I am also very stubborn about what I will and will not do in order to make money.

Integrity comes before all else. A sword I bow before, and wield.

Without integrity (being whole and true) there can be no sovereignty. Through our resisted internal conflicts, we become slaves to those who know which buttons to press.

Anyway, I never got to see Dad build his wealth. Little young Jack was just there for the ride, and fortunately for me, this meant I got to see a lot of the world as a young boy. It expanded my perspective beyond the weird dogmatic pseudo-tribal bullshit that a lot of kids grow up with. I got to see people live in so many different ways. So many different customs, languages, all of that.

My belonging was a worldly belonging... and in fact, so worldly that I never seemed to fit in around kids who weren't "international". Got bullied really badly. Absolutely hated school - in fact, the best 2 years of my life were when I was pulled OUT of school - because pre-teen me was not in a good way.

I remember trying so hard to change my UK accent into an American accent, then a Kiwi accent, then an Aussie accent.

Just so I'd stand out less.

Later, I learnt that 2 year homeschooling period was only 6 months. Crazy. Felt like an entire life season of learning and growing. Being at peace. Left alone for the first fucking time since prep.

Able to actually do things rather than exist in constant distress around shitty kids who genuinely made a point of targeting me.

I was so gentle. Wouldn't hurt a fly. Didn't talk shit. Kept to myself. Worked hard.

Maybe that was the problem.

Eventually I tired of the verbal jousts and started implementing the "if you talk shit, I uppercut you" rule, and it worked and weirdly everyone was surprised???

I got to spend a lot of time with Dad before his death. He was older than most dads.

This was a privilege, and it was also suffering. Because I saw and was subject to his decline. He really struggled with his health and with not being the steady provider he once was. The GFC had obliterated a lot of our family investments and he wasn't well enough to generate income in other ways. He was stressed as fuck, and I was an only child so I copped the brunt of his struggles to manage his emotions, plus the heavy expectations of someone who knew what I was capable of and felt strongly about making sure I was more of a success than my other three half-brothers, who Dad felt he'd failed with in some ways.

A lot of pressure.

We moved house 11 times in 9 years through high-school.

Not a lot of stability beneath all that pressure to make it possible or reasonable for me to perform and still be okay internally.

But it was fine, because back then I didn't know what "internally" was.

Or if I did, I'd eat so much food and train so hard that I could totally forget about my sensitive inner world and all the inconvenient pain in there. It's actually crazy to realise that through most of my mid-late teens and early twenties, I essentially had an eating disorder. Easy to normalise under the banner of "athlete" or "ripped strength athlete" but no, it wasn't good.

Fasting was just a reason not to eat because preparing a decent meal looked like microwaving a sweet potato, covering it in melted butter and eating a steak with it.

Nothing inherently wrong with the food. The problem was not knowing what it felt like to care for myself. These were just the fastest, easiest ways to get calories. Smashing as much protein as humanly possible and eating big steaks just helped me to feel okay inside. Full. Loved. Steady. I'd go hard on sugar too. And other things. All to be able to rest (not really rest, just an absence of feeling).

When you look at my instagram and you see something that resonates, or you see the body I built, or the "following" I have...

Just know that for everything that glitters there has been equal desperation.

More than I care to talk about, because most people wouldn't know how to receive the actuality of my internal experience without freaking out and trying to fix it. I'm a good coach because I can teach, train and "therapise" (not a licensed therapist, just someone who's lived close enough to the edge of life that I know how to be real).

I've always placed my suffering and my dreaming into my physical practices. Movement. Training. Long meditative walks feeling how it all works. Physicality has been my canvas and my reference point to understand life.

To work with my body has been my... body of work.

There's so much more we could talk about, but it's like I have this inconveniently complex, deep wiring, and have experienced realisations at a young age that have kind of ripped the veil of "normality" away. Most people have a mid-life crisis. My early adulthood has felt like the crisis.

I talk to people who've started off in finance or sales or working a real job, who've then become disillusioned with that and decided to move into coaching... or online creation.

And I'm like "Fuuuuck. I was disillusioned before I was even a coach."

See, I saw the futility of so many of the things we do in life, and felt like the only thing that made sense was to help others who see it too, not to be consumed by it. And from there, to actually contribute to better ways of living - which can obviously only be done through embodiment, because theory is for schmucks and faith is nothing without work.

I speak to so many people who think they get it.

But they can't move well.

So I know they don't get it.

If you can't move well, you probably don't have the neurology - the internal felt sense - to actually dance with complex ideas with any degree of nuance or groundedness. We need the body to massage our reality. It's the science of living. If this sounds abstract or "soft" to you, you NEED to move more until it becomes smack-you-in-the-face-obvious what it is that I'm saying.

Move differently and everything changes.

I don't have a book or a podcast for you on this one. Your tactics are protecting you from what's real. Feel it.

Some days, I feel like I'm doing people a disservice by NOT just telling them to "embrace the emptiness of this life and be consumed by it until there is nothing left of you and then you realise you're still here, alive, and THAT's the real you."

But I haven't figured out how to sell that one...

Other days, I can see how the work I'm doing with clients is directly helping them transform stress, pain, tension, resistance, inner conflict into something absolutely beautiful and tremendous, not only for them, but for everyone they touch.

Both approaches are right. Who and when and why are the variables.

Obviously there are a some very important intermediary steps to teaching a human being how to alchemise their suffering and turn it into their strength. Really, it's God who does the heavy lifting. I just show up and trust that, and the coaching process unfolds. The art of physiological and psychological transformation. Some call it "healing". But honestly? Life leaves marks and we're always healing in some way, so might as well just call it living. The end goal is nowhere but here.

Spent 15 years and 20,000 hours working it out, and I'm a spring chicken who knows nothing.

This e-mail doesn't end with a key takeaway or a call to action.

Life ain't like that, brah.

Jack