What has life asked you to carry so far

I was born in a kampong in Singapore, raised by a mother who worked before dawn and came home after dark so her children could eat. My father was largely absent. Into that space stepped my sister, eight years older, who cooked and scolded and made sure I got to school. I learned what care looks like from watching the two of them. I learned what absence costs from living inside it.

​

By twelve, I had drifted toward the early formation of what would become a gang. Secret oaths, older boys with tattoos, the feeling of belonging to something that asked for loyalty and offered protection in return. I learned discipline there, strangely enough. I learned that power without structure becomes chaos. I also learned that I did not want to spend my life looking over my shoulder.

​

​Kung Fu found me at nine. I trained every morning before school. What it taught me was not how to win. It taught me how to stand. How to breathe through pain. How to meet force without becoming it. My sifu was not just a teacher. He was the closest thing to a male guide I had in those years, part instructor, part father figure, part therapist, though none of us would have used that word then. Those lessons live inside the PATH Framework now, though most of my clients will never throw a punch.

​

I spent my twenties and thirties as a corporate road warrior across Asia. Sales, then management, then regional leadership. I could read a room, negotiate a deal, close a quarter. I understood how organizations move, where pressure accumulates, and what it costs people to perform at the level corporations demand. Underneath all of it ran a question no target could answer: why does achievement so rarely feel like enough. That question eventually became the heart of my work with corporate leaders and teams today.

​

I also went through two marriages in those years. The first ended because I was never home. The second ended because I was home but not present. I do not blame either woman. I was a man learning, too slowly, that achievement is not the same as connection.

​

​The hardest chapter came later. My son turned to crime. The kind that makes you sit in a courtroom and wonder where you failed. I sat in that courtroom. I sat in the silence after. And I made a decision: either I let this grief destroy me, or I let it become a vocation. I went back to school at forty. Psychology. Then clinical training. Then the doctorate. I was the oldest intern in every room I entered.

​

The Airbnb years were unexpected. Four years embedded in APAC Safety Operations, thinking about what happens when people are in acute crisis. I learned that psychological safety is not a workshop. It is a practice. It is the daily work of making it possible for people to say what they are actually experiencing without fear of consequence. That insight runs through everything I do now, in the clinic and in the boardroom.

​

PATH emerged from all of this. Not in a single moment of insight. Slowly, the way a path forms through grass. PATH stands for Psychology of Alignment Toward Harmony. Its core idea: suffering rarely comes from being broken. It comes from being misaligned, from living in ways that no longer fit who you actually are. The work of PATH Psychotherapy is not repair. It is return.

​

Most approaches borrow from Eastern wisdom. PATH is built from it. Confucian relational ethics, Daoist acceptance of change, Buddhist awareness of the present moment are not additions to this framework. They are its bones. This is not integration. It is a distinct clinical philosophy, and there is nothing else quite like it.

​

I am still walking that path. I write. I teach. I consult with organizations across APAC. I see clients, though fewer now than before. Mostly, I try to turn what I have lived through into something that is genuinely useful to others. That is all any of us can do, I think. Carry what life has asked us to carry, and then, if we are lucky, use it to light the way for someone else.

​

If something here resonates, I'd be glad to be in touch.