MATT

I bring things into being that did not previously exist.

At 24 I founded Peoples Coffee — a Fair Trade Organic coffee company in a 20 square metre Newtown store, built by hand with zealous friends. Then Trade School Industries, training prisoners behind the wire and giving them work on the outside. Then Kapiti Biodiesel, a worker-owned cooperative. Each one scratched the same itch: making the world just a little better than I found it.

Then the businesses asked something of me that strategy, working harder, or performing more couldn't answer. I had to turn inward.

I spent years with the Christian mystics. In therapy. In somatic practice and open floor dance. In shamanic and tantric traditions. I trained as an integral coach through New Ventures West in San Francisco — one of the most rigorous coaching programmes in the world. I sold Peoples Coffee last year.

And I came here. To two acres in Ōhau, beneath the Tararua ranges. To raise my three children part-time on the land. To tend animals and grow food and listen to what wants to happen through me in this next season.

The land called me and I followed.

I am an integral coach. A somatic practitioner. A founder. A father. A permaculture steward — learning, slowly, what life is asking of me.

The thread running through all of it: I accompany people. I create conditions where what is true can finally be heard. I walk alongside people.

That is the heart of it.

Becoming Me is my audio musing space, or a podcast — reflections on this less ordinary path.

Service, the land, turning into my later years, being seen. You can listen here. → Becoming Me