Something is Stirring

Something is stirring. And it will not be quiet.

You may not have a name for it yet. It arrives as restlessness — a growing inability to settle for the life that looked like enough a few years ago. As a confusion that no amount of information seems to resolve. As a feeling, persistent and increasingly insistent, that something beneath the surface of your life is calling you to account.

This is not anxiety. This is not burnout. This is not a phase.

It is a reckoning.

We are living in the most acute moment of narrative manipulation in human history. Consent is manufactured at scale. Information and disinformation have become indistinguishable. The stories of cultures, generations, religions — the very myths we have organised our lives and identities around — are being weaponised, accelerated and deliberately collapsed.

And somewhere beneath all of that noise, something in you is refusing to be managed.

That refusal is not a problem to be solved. It is the most important thing happening in you right now.

Is this you? 

I call the people who find their way here World-Builders.

Not because of their titles or achievements — but because of a sense of greater purpose they cannot unfeel. 

They are the leaders who sense that the systems they operate within are part of what is breaking. The creatives whose work is reaching for something they cannot yet name. The activists who have fought hard for external change and begun to suspect the real battlefield is interior. The parents who understand that what they carry, their children will carry.

World-Builders know that inner work is not a retreat from the world. It is the most direct intervention available.

If something in this page has landed in you — if you recognise the stirring, the refusal to be managed, the sense that something larger is asking something specific of you — you are probably not here by accident.

What I offer

I work with people across three interconnected forms:

Private Ceremony One-on-one plant medicine ceremony held in a carefully prepared container. For those ready to encounter themselves at depth — beyond the narrative, beneath the conditioning, at the level where real change becomes possible.

Wake Circle Ceremony Group ceremony for those who are new to this work, or who want to move through transformation in community. A powerful entry point into the practice of conscious unravelling.

Coaching Deep, ongoing one-on-one work for those navigating a significant transition — a dissolution, a calling, a creative reinvention. Rooted in Story Healing methodology, this is not performance coaching. It is the work of becoming the author of your own life.

“I travelled over 12,000 km and more than a day for a one-on-one session with Hymnj. Discovering his website, reading his writings, and listening to his music suggested I had found that person. I knew Hymnj was always there and that I was safe. We may have only spent a couple of hours together, but I doubt I will ever forget him and the gift he gave me.”

Ross Liston (New Zealand)

The Story-Healer 

What I have come to understand through decades of work — as activist, award-winning theatre-maker, coach and ceremony holder — is that human transformation is not shaped by circumstance alone, but by the stories through which we interpret our existence.

And those stories go deeper than the mind.

The stories we carry about our worth, our safety, our belonging, our capacity to heal — are not just psychological. They are biological. They live in our nervous systems, our immune response, the way our cells orient toward threat or toward love. The inherited scripts we mistake for truth are literally shaping our health, our illness, our vitality, our capacity to recover.

This is not metaphor. The body keeps the story.

Which means that story — wielded unconsciously, inherited without examination, or deliberately weaponised — is not just a cultural force. It is a biological one. It reaches into the most intimate corners of a human life and shapes what is possible there.

This is what I call Story Healing: the rigorous, embodied process of identifying the stories that are authoring you — the inherited scripts of your culture, your family, your trauma, your religion — and choosing, consciously and courageously, to become their author instead.

It works at three levels:

  • The narrative level — the beliefs and meanings we construct about our lives.
  • The somatic level — the stories held in the body that manifest as illness, tension, and chronic survival.
  • The mythological level — the deeper ancestral and cultural scripts, the generational contracts that move through us without our awareness or consent.

And it asks one fundamental question: who is writing your life?

But Story Healing is not only a process of examination and reauthoring. At its heart, it is a prepared encounter with something that cannot be manufactured.

I facilitate peak encounters with the sacred and the instinctive — awakening heightened states of consciousness, liberating the ecstatic and primal forces that live beneath our conditioning, and guiding people toward deeper presence, clarity and aliveness.

This is where methodology meets mystery. Where the rigorous work of story becomes the doorway to direct encounter — with God, with ancestors, with Spirit — whatever name you carry for the intelligence that lives beneath your conditioning and beyond your biography.

The process creates the container. What fills it is not mine to predict or control.

My Story 

I walk with the name Hymnj — Story Healer, medicine worker, and father, based in Cape Town, South Africa.

I grew up in apartheid South Africa — a young, angry political activist in the then-underground liberation movement. My answer to injustice was protest theatre: stories taken directly from oppressed communities, onto platforms of influence, into the conscience of anyone willing to sit and watch. Story was not my calling before my activism. It was my chosen weapon in service of it.

Over two and a half decades I built an acclaimed career as a theatre director and writer — productions about alcoholism, racism, and gender-based violence taken to world stages. I wrote and directed Just Men, a three-year project using men’s own stories to confront toxic masculinity from the inside.

The more I studied, workshopped and directed, the more I understood just how deep the power of story actually goes.

And the more I had to face what I actually knew.

Those same mechanisms — the suspense, the hook, the emotional ambush — are the precise instruments of manipulation. The advertising executive, the propagandist, the politician, the cult leader, and the theatre director work from the same toolkit. The intention may differ. The toolkit does not.

And I watched what happened when the struggle in South Africa had won. The structures changed. The players didn’t. The people who had fought hardest for freedom became architects of a new subjugation. The liberation story had been built entirely around an external enemy — powerful, true, necessary. But a story that only points outward never asks what is being carried within. The inner wounds, the survival scripts of trauma written into the body over generations, had never been touched. When the external battle was won, they rushed in to fill the vacuum.

No external story, however righteous, can transform the interior of the people who carry it.

That realisation changed everything.

“It’s in his integrity. A man who really walks his talk. Deeply centred. Enormously holding. Absolutely present. In his embrace my grief overflowed. Years of abuse, sorrow, all the deep wounds literally spiralled out of my body. With his guidance, dedication and steadfast support I healed.”

Simone Beckerling (Medicine Woman)

The Awakening 

 

 

 

The turning point came at a plant medicine gathering in the Spitzkoppe mountains of Namibia. What I experienced there defies neat description. A symbolic death of the self. A shattering of the prison I had been living in. An encounter with the sacred so direct and so vast that the life I had been living seemed, afterwards, like a room I could no longer fit inside.

What followed was not a soft transition. A marriage and its dissolution. A business partnership that ended painfully. The relinquishing of income, security, and the identity I had built around my success. There were months I lived in my garage, renting out my apartment to survive. It was a masterclass in surrender — and in discovering what remained when everything else was stripped away.

I have sat with and learned from many deeply experienced practitioners — elders, wisdom keepers, therapists, and ceremony holders across traditions. No single master has defined my path. What I bring is something different: the product of an unusual intersection. Twenty-five years of working at the deepest level of human narrative — in the theatre, in the coaching room, in the field — and more than a decade sitting in ceremony, holding space for people at the most intimate edges of their experience.

My preparation is not a certificate. It is the work itself. Hundreds of ceremonies held. The trust of those who have sat with me and returned. And a rigorous, ongoing commitment to my own shadow — because a guide who has not walked the road cannot, with integrity, stand at the door.

I do not claim enlightenment. I do not claim the title of shaman or guru. I am a man navigating the rough road of life, working my shadows and minding my triggers like everyone else. What I know with my entire being is that I am in the right place, doing exactly what I am meant to do.

What are you here to do? 

I am not here to help you feel better about the inherited world. I am not here to optimise your performance within a system that is already burning. I am the guide at the door — the threshold between the story that has authored you and the terrifying, necessary freedom of authoring yourself.

What is being asked of each of us right now is not just political, not just economic. It is the most intimate demand imaginable: to wake up inside your own life. To see the game clearly. To choose, consciously and courageously, what you carry forward — and what must be left behind.

The door is open. But you have to be willing to walk through it.

 

“I was called to plant medicine at a time when I thought nothing could break me. Hard-headed. Stubborn. Bite down. Push through. Break the wall. That was who I was. Until life showed me I was wrong… I experienced a full ego dissolve. A death of who I thought I was, and a birth of who I actually am. Plant medicine didn’t turn me into someone new. It turned me into the clearest, strongest version of myself.”

Kyle Evans (High Performance Coach)