Brian had been asking the same question since he was a child. Who am I? What is this life? What does it mean to be human?

I grew up in a small town in South Africa with a restlessness that nobody around me seemed to share. While other children played and slept peacefully, I lay awake at night tormented by questions that had no easy answers. What is this life? Who am I? Where does space end and what lies beyond that? The universe felt like an infinite mystery pressing down on a child who desperately wanted to make sense of it.
But nobody seemed to have proper answers. My parents were rather worried about me, my friends didn't share my curiosity, the big world religions seemed to offer more dogma than depth. And so, very early on, I decided to keep my burning questions quietly to myself. Flying beneath the radar, escaping into fantasy novels, feeding my imagination with worlds of mystery and magic. However, my deep questions never left.

When I went to university to become a vet, I had quietly hoped that fellow vets would have some answers for me about the meaning of life. After all, their main job was to heal and cure animals. Unfortunately, their answers were rather superficial as well. What I did discover in university, however, were hidden books in the great library that blew my world wide open. With stories from spiritual teachers around the world about altered states of being, Indigenous traditions, Yogis and Mystics who seemed to actually know something real about what it means to be human.

This lit a spark in me again and from then on, I spent every cent I owned on traveling to find the original places of these teachings. First, it took me and my partner at that time to Nepal, then to an Ashram in India, where I met my teacher and was introduced to Yogic practices. For the first time, I felt like coming home to myself.

Which is why I signed up immediately for a year-long course at the Ashram. Ultimately hoping to escape veterinary work and make a living as a yoga teacher. But what I found there was far more confronting and far more valuable.

One day, my partner, the person who had walked every step of the path beside me, who had been to the same Ashram and sat with the same teacher, decided she needed to find her own way. And ended the relationship.

The pain was unbearable. It almost broke me.

I tried to handle it with the practices I had been given. But they reminded me too much of the time we shared together at the Ashram. Everything was too deeply intertwined with what I had lost to be accessible. I tried traditional therapy but found myself going home just as depressed as when I had arrived. It led me into the deepest depression of my life, with no clear way through it.

With this new state of awareness, I went back to visit my teacher's Ashram in India. And one day, as the sun rose and a harmonium began to play, the final pieces were shown to me. I saw clearly what Awake Human Being could be: an integrated practice for people who want to use their life as a path to awakening. Not an escape from the world, but as embodiment. Deeper, more conscious, more alive.

From this, I created Dance Awake, as part of Awake Human Being. Then I returned to Cape Town and have been teaching Dance Awake classes at Claremont Hall ever since.