Whatever brings you in, we start underneath it.

I had a significant lower back injury playing rugby league at 18. By 20 I’d found my way to Pilates, and it got me moving again. I didn’t realise it then, but that injury was already shaping the long road that led to Ikigai Shift. Like a lot of people, I learned what a body needs by living with a problem in my own.

I’d been working in fitness for a while, and I kept seeing the same thing. Some people changed and some didn’t, even when we did exactly the same thing with them. That never sat right with me.

Working at the Australian Institute of Sport and in elite sport helped. I saw things in athletes you’d never see in everyday people, and things in everyday people that weren’t being applied in high performance. Moving between those worlds taught me to look for what sits underneath.

About ten years ago we were watching a man walk on our treadmill. He’d had a stroke. He could walk, but you could see the restrictions in how his arms and legs worked together. We could see where hands-on treatment might free things up, where training could build strength, and where his brain needed to relearn the pattern.

The next client was a man with low back pain. No stroke, no neurological history. He walked almost exactly the same way.

That made us ask a different question. With neurological conditions, we usually look at movement after the event. What if some of those patterns were already there, and the stroke just brought them into the conversation? When we started looking for it in our assessments, we kept finding it. It changed how we look at everyone who walks through the door.

My background is hands-on: soft tissue therapy and myotherapy, with training through the Canberra Institute of Technology and the Barral Institute, and a big influence from the fascia work of Dr Robert Schleip.

Working with people living with complex trauma and PTSD showed me how much sensory, hands-on work can influence, especially around the neck. In our clinic we saw it shift things like brain fog, dizziness, balance and how well people tolerated noise and other input.

With that same group, we’ve been working on an idea. Under enough stress, some people stay present and thinking, but start to lose input from their own bodies. Many ask for firm, heavy hands-on treatment, almost as if they’re trying to reconnect body and brain. [Working name: functional dissociation. Public wording to confirm]

What we’ve found in practice is that when we combine vision, inner ear and body awareness training, people start to get that connection back. Once body and brain are working together again, treatment and training don’t have to work as hard. That’s now a goal behind every hands-on session and every exercise program we run.

None of the tools are new. It’s physiotherapy, myotherapy and exercise. What’s different is how we apply them once you understand what’s happening underneath.

A big part of understanding what’s happening underneath came from Dr Yun-Tao Ma. He trained in traditional Chinese medicine in China, then moved to the United States and became a neuroscientist. [Confirm bio wording] He set out to explain acupuncture through the nervous system: what actually happens in the nerves, muscles and brain when you treat the body. His work on biomedical acupuncture changed how I look at every person I treat.

Two ideas from his work have stayed with me. The first is that every nervous system has its own level of sensitivity, and stress turns it up. The same knock, the same workload or the same treatment can land very differently in two people. The second is that when you help settle that stress response, everything else has a better chance of working: muscles switch on when they should, movement patterns can change, and the body doesn’t have to guard as much.

So before we decide what someone needs, we try to understand how their nervous system is responding. Is it a muscle or joint that has adapted? Are muscles not switching on when they should? Or is a stress response shaping the way they move? Usually it’s a mix. The answer shapes our hands-on work, and it comes with you into your training.

Stress is part of so many of the things people come to us with, from pain and headaches to dizziness, poor sleep and fatigue. It’s also a quiet thread running through the healthspan and longevity medicine everyone is talking about. Learning to notice it in yourself, and to settle it, is part of the work.

I first wanted to call the business The Shift. But that put all the change on us. Years ago, before the books came out, I came across the word ikigai and went looking for someone who could tell me what it really meant. That’s how I found Junko Azukawa, a Japanese-born calligrapher living in Australia. To Junko, iki means life and gai means value. A life value shift.

I explained what I was after using my wood fire. Open both vents and it burns bright and fast, and the wood is gone. Close one vent, then the other, and you get a slow, steady burn that lasts all night. A lot of people are burning hot and fast. I want to help them find that slow, efficient burn that lasts.

From those conversations, Junko created our character, drawn from one of its original written forms from around 3,500 years ago.

I’m not a physio and I’m not an exercise physiologist. I’ve built a team with the qualifications I don’t have. What I bring is the lens that connects it all.