About Craig 

Between Two Worlds

If you had asked me when I was younger what I thought I would be doing at sixty-four, I can promise you I wouldn't have given you anything remotely resembling the life I have now.

I certainly wouldn't have said psychic, healer, trance channel, Babalawo, hypnotherapist, coach, creator of talismans and ceremonial tools, or Modern Day Medicine Man for the Soul.

Actually, for a good part of my life I probably would have thought some of those things sounded a bit weird.

Which, considering where I ended up, still makes me laugh.

But perhaps I should start at the beginning.

I was born with what I can only describe as a gift.

Conventionally, perhaps people wouldn't call it a gift from God. I am not a member of any one religion, although I do believe in God, just perhaps in my own way.

To me, this gift has always felt as though it came from somewhere greater than myself.

That doesn't mean I always wanted it.

Quite the opposite.

There were plenty of times, particularly when I was young, when I wished someone would take the bloody thing back.

I had absolutely no idea what to do with it. Nor did I speak to anyone about it.

I was the third of five children.

Actually, six.

Jamie was one of more than 180 foster children who passed through our family home. He touched our hearts differently and became our brother, Mum and Dad's son, and every bit as much family as any of us. He turned fifty this year.

Even getting me into the world had apparently been something of a challenge. Mum had suffered many miscarriages before I was born, and family stories tell of her spending much of her pregnancy doing everything she could to keep me here.

Then illness nearly took me out of it again in my first few years.

Yet here I am.

Asthma became a constant part of my childhood. There were hospitals, home ventilators and the limitations you begin placing upon yourself when you grow up believing your breathing can suddenly turn against you.

Interestingly, I was a better-than-average swimmer.

Years later, breath would become one of the great threads running through my life.

But there was something else happening when I was very young.

I saw things.

I felt things.

And sometimes I simply knew things.

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The Wolf   

Some of my earliest memories go back to around three or four years old.

There was a wolf standing at my bedroom door.

I don't mean I had an imaginary wolf.

I saw him.

To me he was as real as Mum or Dad or any of my brothers and sisters.

Most children who are frightened of something in their room want the light left on.

I wanted it turned off.

If it was dark, I couldn't see him.

For years I slept with the covers pulled over my head. Even when I couldn't see something, I could often feel that there was something else in the room.

Mum still remembers me talking about the wolf.

The strange thing was that he was never threatening. He didn't attack me or bare his teeth. He simply stood there, watching and, as I would understand much later, guarding.

Of course, none of that was particularly useful to a three-year-old.

Guardian or not, I just wanted the bloody wolf to leave me alone.

And he was persistent.

He was always there.

Feeling What Wasn't Mine

In many ways, though, the wolf wasn't the hardest part.

People were.

Or more accurately, what I felt from people.

For as long as I can remember I have felt the energy around others. Happiness, sadness, fear, anger, joy, grief, excitement, confusion — sometimes emotions I didn't even have words for.

As a child, I didn't understand that what I was feeling wasn't necessarily mine.

I simply felt it.

People have told me all my life that I give the best hugs.

For years I thought that was a strange thing for people to keep saying.

Now I understand it differently.

They were feeling something too.

I believe everybody has the capacity to feel energy to some degree. Some simply feel it more strongly than others.

Mine happens to be strong.

That doesn't make me better than anybody else.

If anything, I have learnt that it makes me accountable for what I do with it.

But I knew none of that then.

I was bullied as a child because I was different and, for a period in my teens, I became the bully myself.

I'm not proud of that.

But this is my story, not the cleaned-up version of it.

I also had an enormous temper.

Before I learnt how to control it, I would punch a hessian sandbag until my knuckles bled. My Nan would put salve on my hands and somehow knew how to settle me.

People probably thought I was trying to prove how tough I was.

I wasn't.

I was angry.

Really angry.

Around twenty-one, after an incident I wasn't proud of, I decided that part of me could no longer be allowed to run my life.

Martial arts helped enormously. It gave me discipline, focus and an understanding of the language of violence.

I wasn't a violent man.

I was an angry man learning not to be controlled by anger.

There is a difference.

By fifteen or sixteen I had also had enough of the seeing, feeling and knowing.

And, of course, that persistent wolf.

So I said stop.

And the physical appearances stopped.

I no longer saw him standing at my door.

But somehow I always knew he hadn't really gone.

I had simply closed the door on that part of my life.

Or at least I thought I had.

The Ordinary World

Then ordinary life took over.

I left school earlier than I probably should have and went to work with Dad as a glass blower. My older brother and sister worked alongside us and I remember that as a genuinely good period of my life.

Then I decided I wanted more.

More money. More success. I wanted Dad to make more money too.

So I worked.

At one stage I had three jobs.

I had been taught how to work hard.

What I hadn't been taught was how to work smart.

For most of my adult life I owned and operated businesses — gift and print shops, cafés, fish and chip shops and other ventures.

I cared about my staff, the integrity of what we were selling and looking after customers properly. Staff often stayed with me for years.

Later in life I became involved in a much larger business within the corporate environment.

That gave me another education entirely.

I saw business at the top — senior management, decision makers and people carrying enormous responsibility.

And I saw that someone can look fantastically successful from the outside while privately their health, relationships or entire life are slowly falling apart.

That experience stayed with me.

It is part of the reason I can sit with business owners and senior executives today and understand what is going on beneath the suit, the title or the balance sheet.

And this is why my professional coaching is so successful.

I haven't simply read about that world.

I've lived in it.

Some of my decisions worked very well.

Some didn't.

And a few were spectacularly bad.

​The Little Voice I Didn't Listen To

The really big mistakes of my life have something rather annoying in common.

Before I made them, something inside me usually said:

Don't do it.

And naturally, I did it anyway.

Chaos generally followed.

Eventually even I had to notice the pattern.

Sometimes I understand that guidance as spirit. Sometimes our unconscious mind knows things before our conscious mind has worked them out.

Both make sense to me.

Again, I seem to live between those worlds.

But there is another kind of knowing that I don't rationalise that way.

Things would come to me that I could not have learnt, remembered or reasonably worked out. I would simply know.

I could stand somewhere and know something had once happened there when there was no physical evidence of it.

I once told a property owner that a shed had stood in a particular place and that his grandfather had made horseshoes there, despite there being nothing visible to suggest a building had ever existed.

I have met strangers and known that something significant happened at a particular time in their life without knowing anything of their history.

Sometimes I simply know when someone is genuine and when they aren't.

I'm not a body-language expert.

I just know.

Over time I learnt not to pretend otherwise simply because another explanation might make somebody else more comfortable.

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Ceremony, Commitment & Celebration

My ceremonial work has also taken me into some of life’s happiest thresholds. I have created and conducted weddings, commitment ceremonies and renewals of vows, from traditional handfastings and pagan ceremonies to contemporary celebrations designed entirely around the couple. I work with them to create their vows and ceremony, and often take on the role of Master of Ceremonies as well. I love the freedom of helping two people mark an important moment in a way that actually feels like them.

Learning to Breathe

Asthma followed me well into adulthood.

Then, roughly thirty-six years ago, I was lying in a hospital bed after another attack.

It was quiet.

Just me and the room.

And a message came:

Breathe this way.

With it came instructions.

Breathwork wasn't something I knew about.

But I listened.

I practised the breathing I had been shown consistently, and over the following months my breathing became stronger and the serious attacks that had repeatedly put me in hospital stopped.

I still have asthma.

I am not telling you this because I discovered some cure for asthma.

I didn't.

I'm telling you because this is what happened to me.

Was it spirit? God? Something else?

I don't need to manufacture an answer.

I know what happened.

And it taught me something I have learnt more than once:

When that deeper message comes, listen.

Years later, breath would become a formal practice and one of the ways I work with others.

My Wolf Had a Name

Around thirty-two, part of my life fell apart.

I felt lost, disillusioned and, quite frankly, depressed.

I left Australia and backpacked for several months searching for answers, meaning and perhaps God.

When I returned home, I found myself repeatedly walking past one of those weird shops.

You know the ones.

Crystals. Tarot cards. Books on esoteric subjects.

I probably muttered weird people under my breath more than once.

Yet something kept pulling me towards the place.

Eventually I gave in.

Inside, I found myself at a counter with a book about gods or mythology.

I opened it.

And there he was.

My wolf.

“That's my wolf,” I said out loud.

The bloke behind the counter replied, “No mate. That's Anubis. He's a jackal.”

“No,” I said.

“That's my wolf.”

That moment changed something in me.

The figure I had seen since I was three or four finally had a name.

Anubis.

Years later I discovered something about that exchange that still makes me smile.

The old description of the Egyptian animal simply as a jackal turned out to be rather more complicated. The animal historically called the Egyptian jackal is now associated with Canis lupaster, the African golden wolf or Egyptian wolf, and even the precise canid represented by Anubis is not as straightforward as I had been told that day.

Does that prove what I saw as a child was literally a wolf?

No.

I don't need it to.

Perhaps the three-year-old me wasn't particularly interested in taxonomy.

To me, he had always been my wolf.

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And on that same visit I bought my first crystal.

Lapis Lazuli.

I knew nothing about it.

I simply liked the way it felt.

Only later did I discover its extraordinary history and its prominence in ancient Egypt.

Again, coincidence?

Maybe.

Life has given me enough of those moments that these days I tend to smile rather than argue about them.

That one piece of lapis began a love affair with crystals that has lasted decades.

Ivana and I now have around 1.5 tonnes of crystals, much of it carefully selected for quality, and I have designed jewellery for around twelve years.

And I want to be clear about something.

Crystals do not heal or protect people. I believe they assist and enhance the energies around people.

There is a difference.

Learning Not to Carry Everybody Else

When that spiritual door reopened, my sensitivity came back with a vengeance.

I would walk down the street and feel person after person — happiness, sadness, anger, fear, grief, sexual energy, joy, confusion.

It became physically and mentally exhausting.

At one point I knew very clearly that these energies were destroying me.

Then I was shown something through what I understand as my guides, ancestors and spirits:

This energy is not yours. It is theirs. It is not for you to receive, but to recognise and learn from.

That changed everything.

I began learning energetic boundaries and discernment.

What is mine?

What isn't?

What am I meant to recognise without carrying?

Eventually someone else's sadness no longer made me sad. Their fear didn't become my fear.

It became information.

A knowing.

And strangely enough, the very thing that had made ordinary life so difficult became incredibly useful in ordinary life.

You learn a great deal in a business meeting when you can sense that what somebody is saying and what they are actually feeling are two completely different things.

What had once overwhelmed me became one of the foundations of my life and work.

And it taught me something else:

Responsibility.

I NEVER simply walk up to somebody and tell them what I feel or see.

I believe unsolicited readings are wrong.

If somebody hasn't asked, it is not my right to interfere with their life simply because I perceive something.

Having an ability does not give me authority over another human being.

It gives me responsibility for how I use it.

We should lead the way, not tell it.

Learning Without Becoming Somebody Else

Eventually I found my way into spiritual development classes through a local publication called Spiritual Links.

I went along with a fair amount of cynicism.

Thank goodness I did.

The people there were grounded, knowledgeable and real.

They were amused that this complete Muggle, with virtually no spiritual training, could apparently see, feel and know the things I did.

My ego loved that for a while.

I thought I was special.

Fortunately, these people were grounded enough to help me through that and help me stay grounded myself.

I learnt quickly.

But I have had few teachers.

That is not arrogance.

I respect good teachers enormously.

Much of my spiritual life simply did not unfold through formal teaching.

Things came.

I knew.

I experienced.

And I learnt.

It also became obvious that I was never going to become somebody's idea of a New Age person.

I didn't want to dress differently every day or speak as though I had floated above ordinary humanity.

I hadn't.

I still haven't.

Walk past me in the street and I probably look like any other bloke.

That's fine with me.

I don't need to look spiritual.

I'd rather live with good character and integrity.

Dad once told me:

“What other people think of you is none of your business.”

For me, that means that if I am living with integrity and good character, that has to be enough.

I don't do excuses very well.

When I make a mistake, I try to own it.

When something goes well, I'm happy to acknowledge that too.

To me, spirituality without integrity is simply performance.

Magic

About twenty years ago my friend Phil was turning forty.

I had no idea what to give him.

Then one morning I woke with an answer:

A staff.

I walked through the bush near home looking for the right branch.

Not that one.

Not that one either.

Eventually one drew me towards it.

That was Phil's.

It took months to create, and as I worked I found myself doing ceremonies under different cycles of the moon — for protection, for life and for those who would gather around it.

This was new to me.

I simply knew what needed to be done.

Phil loved it.

That led to other staffs, talking sticks, altar pieces and eventually talismans and amulets.

At first I hand carved everything and even made my own glue in the ancient way.

Then I discovered something profound.

Modern glue works considerably better.

So does a Dremel.

What fascinated me was how people responded to the pieces.

Someone might be visually attracted to one, then touch another and suddenly say:

No. This is mine.

There was — and still is — magic in my work.

Sometimes I create a piece knowing it belongs to someone without knowing who that person is.

Then, eventually, its keeper arrives.

Today people around the world know me for my ceremonial tools and talismans.

That makes me proud.

Very proud.

Some people who know me call me a Wizard.

I suppose in many ways I am.

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Another Door Opens

On Thursday, 27 June 2019, Ivana convinced me to attend a trance-channeling demonstration at an estate in England.

I almost didn't go.

I was sceptical.

Very sceptical.

I sat in the front row looking for the gimmick.

Instead, I experienced something that once again changed my understanding of myself.

During healing work, I was asked to support a woman who had become unsteady. As I held her arm, people in the room, including Ivana, described my hands and arms as appearing almost transparent orange, as though glowing.

Near the end, the channel indicated that I also needed healing.

At the time I was in considerable pain from a deformity in my spine.

The trance channeler put his hands on my shoulders.

My body became light.

I felt connected to everything.

Supported.

And for that period, there was no pain.

None.

There were tears in my eyes.

Relief can be profoundly emotional.

Then I was told — or simply knew — that I was meant to share this energy.

What followed sounds like something from a film, but it is what I experienced.

Energy seemed to move from my hands through the room towards different people.

Several came to thank me afterwards.

It changed something in me.

And in true Craig style, I then did almost nothing about it.

I was still sceptical.

Even of myself.

Eventually, through another unusual sequence of events, I was guided towards trance channeling.

Through that work, pieces of my life began joining together.

I came to understand Anubis as the protector and guide who had been present from the beginning.

Other energies and personalities, including Eyean and Myliard, became part of that work and of my understanding of the magic within the ceremonial pieces I had already been creating for years.

When I trance channel, I am not sitting somewhere inside listening.

For me, a door closes.

I don't see what happens.

I don't hear it.

And because I remained sceptical even of myself, for more than a year I deliberately refused to watch recordings of my own channelings. I didn't want one session entering my conscious memory and influencing another.

If this was going to happen, I wanted to know I wasn't feeding it myself.

Not Everything I See Is Beautiful

There is another side of my work I have kept very quiet.

I have experienced energies and entities that I understand as malevolent, and I have worked with what I understand spiritually as possession.

But I believe actual possession is far less common than many people think.

Often what appears external may instead be an extremely powerful unconscious pattern — fear, trauma, old experiences looping until they seem to control someone's life.

That doesn't make the suffering less real.

It means discernment matters.

My sight also extends to land and buildings, and over many years I have become experienced in energetic space clearing.

Sometimes what I encounter feels difficult or malevolent.

At other times it is something quite different — perhaps ancestors of the land who feel ignored or displaced and require acknowledgement rather than confrontation.

I have quietly cleared hundreds of spaces over the years, including some significant buildings and sporting complexes in Sydney.

I won't name them.

I was asked not to.

I gave my word.

Confidentiality is non-negotiable for me.

If somebody comes to me, their story stays with me.

That matters more than being able to put an impressive name on a website.

Ivana

And then there is Ivana.

My love.

My life.

She came into my world more than twelve years ago.

At first we were friends.

We lived in different states, so instead of meeting regularly, we talked.

And talked.

About life, relationships, our experiences, what we believed and where we thought we were going.

Somewhere along the way, we just clicked.

Friendship became something much deeper, and eventually we became partners in life.

Ivana is singularly the wisest woman I have ever met.

Her work with women is extraordinary, and I have watched her change lives in her own way.

We have similar paths, but we are not the same.

Neither of us needs the other to become us.

Yet when we work together in ceremony or retreats, there is something remarkable about it.

We become One in that space.

There is a magnificent bond of trust between us.

More than once she has suggested something and I've thought, Really?

Then ignored her.

Then spirit has basically repeated the same message.

Apparently I occasionally require a second opinion.

Together we have learnt to ignite our own passionate lives.

And together, in our different ways, we help others begin to do the same.

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Formalising What I Already Knew

Around fourteen years ago I began deliberately studying breathwork.

Breath had already changed my life.

In 2019 I travelled to Bali to study SOMA Breath with Niraj Naik and became an instructor.

Then in 2020, as a birthday gift from Ivana, I attended a retreat with Johannes Egberts of Breathless.

Their teaching gave structure and language to something that had already been deeply important to me for years.

Breathwork and cold immersion remain part of my life today.

My spiritual path developed in a similar way.

I grew up attending both Church of England and Catholic churches and, in truth, had good experiences with both.

But organised religion eventually felt too rigid for me.

I continued to believe in God, simply in my own way, and felt a deep connection with the land, Spirit and the elements — Earth, Air, Water and Fire.

Later Ivana gave me a Lifepath reading through the Yoruba tradition of Ifa.

Philip Neimark performed that reading.

We became firm friends.

Philip guided my curiosity without ever pushing me.

Over time I became a Babalawo, an Ifa priest.

Ifa is now one of the backbones of my life.

Personally, I experience it less as a religion and more as a way of living — character, destiny, wisdom, responsibility and relationship with life.

Another Bridge — ICHMind

For decades most of my spiritual development came through lived experience and few teachers.

But eventually I recognised a gap.

There were people I could help who would simply never come to see that psychic bloke, the healer or someone who seemed a little too much like a shaman.

It didn't fit their world view.

Ivana suggested hypnotherapy.

My response was something like:

“HAHAHAHAHA. Really?”

So naturally I ignored her.

Then that familiar inner voice arrived.

Do it.

This time I listened.

We found The Mind Academy, run by Alistair Horscroft.

On the first day he started saying things about spiritual people that perhaps should have offended me.

The thing is he was right about quite a few of them.

I liked him.

Sarcasm and all.

Ivana and I both studied there, effectively going through the course three times because there was so much to absorb.

I also took my coaching much further.

Hundreds and hundreds of hours of study and practice later, ICHMind — Integrated Clinical Hypnotherapy was born.

And another bridge appeared.

Today much of my work involves business owners, executives and people carrying significant responsibility.

But my job isn't to make another person believe what I believe.

My job is to understand the person sitting in front of me, their world view, and work within a framework that makes sense to them.

Sometimes that means clinical hypnotherapy.

Sometimes NLP or professional coaching.

Sometimes breathwork.

Sometimes intuitive or spiritual work.

Sometimes simply an honest conversation that nobody else has been willing to have.

The clinical work didn't replace the spiritual work.

It joined it.

That is why Between Two Worlds isn't marketing language for me.

It is the story of my life.

A Modern Day Medicine Man for the Soul

I didn't give myself that name.

Malvadee McIver, a host on Psychic TV Australia, called me “A Modern Day Medicine Man for the Soul.”

The name stayed because somehow it brought together the many parts of my life that I had once thought were separate.

I have been a glass blower and businessman, worked within small businesses and the corporate world, practised martial arts and even dabbled in politics.

I was also the child who saw the wolf, the teenager who told the spiritual world to leave him alone and the sceptic who walked past a crystal shop muttering about weird people before finally recognising Anubis.

Over time I became a psychic and healer, learnt to trance channel, became a Babalawo and created ceremonial tools and talismans.

Later I added clinical hypnotherapy, NLP and professional coaching.

None of those things cancels out the others.

Neither do my mistakes.

I've made some very good decisions.

I've made some bloody awful ones.

I've been angry, arrogant, frightened, successful, lost, sceptical and occasionally amazed.

I've doubted spirit.

I've doubted myself.

I have had few teachers, yet I have never stopped learning.

And at sixty-four, I have less interest than ever in pretending to be something perfect.

I don't think perfection teaches very much.

Experience does.

Mistakes do.

Wisdom does, if you're prepared to turn what happened into something useful.

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At Sixty-Four

Perhaps one of the strangest things for me now is that I am becoming more willing to let people see the whole of who I am.

I have never been particularly good at promoting myself.

Clients have complained about it.

Friends have complained about it.

I'm still not sure whether I've been lazy about promotion, reticent or simply happier doing the work than telling everyone about it.

Probably all three.

But I've also realised something.

If I stay hidden, people who might genuinely benefit from what I've learnt may never know I am here.

So at sixty-four, I'm showing myself a little more.

And surprisingly, it feels good.

I've lived enough life to know I don't have all the answers.

I hope I never become arrogant enough to believe I do.

But I've also lived enough to know I have accumulated some wisdom worth sharing.

I've worked with people from all walks of life.

Some are deeply spiritual.

Some are senior executives who would never describe themselves that way.

Some are carrying trauma, unconscious patterns, fear, business pressure, relationships, loss or simply the feeling that something in their life is no longer working.

I don't require them to believe what I believe.

That would defeat the point.

I want to understand their world view, understand the person in front of me, and find the most appropriate way to help them move forward.

Transformation Should Lead Somewhere

After all these years, I have become increasingly clear about what I want my work to achieve.

I believe deeply in transformation.

But I no longer believe transformation alone is enough.

It should lead somewhere.

For me, that place is resolution.

I don't want people dependent upon me.

I don't want somebody endlessly needing another reading, another healing, another session, another teacher or another strategy simply so they can continue coping with the same unresolved pain.

Sometimes we need to cope.

Of course we do.

Coping gets us through difficult periods.

But I don't believe it should become a permanent way of life.

Coping is survival. Resolving is truly living.

I want people to learn from what happened without being condemned to keep living it.

To recognise patterns and change them.

To understand themselves more deeply.

To use the past as wisdom rather than a prison.

To transform where transformation is needed and, wherever possible, move towards resolution.

Perhaps that is what my own life has been teaching me all along.

After a lifetime of walking between these worlds, I no longer need one part of myself to disprove another.

I don't need the spiritual Craig to invalidate the businessman.

I don't need the hypnotherapist to explain away the psychic.

I don't need the Medicine Man to pretend he has never been angry, frightened, arrogant or spectacularly wrong.

They are all me.

And perhaps at sixty-four that is one of the greatest freedoms I have found.

I can simply stand where I stand.

Between Two Worlds.

With good character, integrity and curiosity.

With wisdom earned from living.

And still with a great deal left to learn.

I wish you resolve.

Without Fear, Change Your Life.
Without Fear, Heal Your Life.

And may you also Ignite Your Own Passionate Life.

Craig