Meet Your Teacher

Hi, I’m Tessa!

I’m a Grief-Informed Leadership Coach, Psychotherapist & True-Self Expression Mentor.

I’ve worked for 17 years across psychology, social welfare and personal development fields, from working with some of the most vulnerable populations in our society, to high-performance coaches and millionaires.

I’ll tell you this: Grief escapes no one.

I have met Grief in the faces, and hearts, of every person I’ve worked with.

From the Rohingan family who risked everything, travelling by boat to arrive to Australia, leaving everything they knew behind in the hope of finding an ounce of safety and inclusion somewhere.

To the over-excited new life coach specialising in relationship communication - still carrying the pain of her little girl inside - not yet realising part of her wants to “fix” in others now the very thing she was powerless to fixing back then, to stop her parents fighting and eventually getting a divorce.

Long before I realised “grief work” was a thing, I had walked many people through their heartaches. I had supported hundreds of people to trust in themselves, and in others, and in life again. I had supported so many to resolve the weight of their past resentments, and open their hearts to love and awe again, after years of being closed off.

I had helped people find meaning in their lives after loss when no meaning seemed available.

Since I was a young girl, I’ve been walking alongside the unspoken, working with it for as long as I can remember.

Yet when it came to grief, I always felt something was missing.

A puzzle piece I didn’t know I needed to retrieve from within my own heart and body first... before I could truly help people as profoundly as I desired to.

I realise now, a part of me has been looking for it for a very long time.

The thing is, I know thinking about and talking about our experiences with grief can be vulnerable… and that’s really what I’m asking you to do when you say yes to Revolutionary Grief…

So I’m going to share with you here a little about my personal communion with Grief as a Sacred Teacher… to let you into my heart, and to reveal the very tender portal for which I discovered this missing piece of Revolutionary Grief.

Story-time (maybe grab a tea 🫖!)..

So, I was 9 turning 10 as I watched my mother die of cancer before my eyes. I didn’t understand what was happening or where someone goes when they die.

My life changed both suddenly and slowly—from traveling two and a half hours every weekend to visit her in hospital for months while she underwent treatment; to watching her change physical form into someone nearly unrecognisable once she came back home to live out her final few months.

My dad desperately tried to keep her alive. I would wake at 5am to the violent sound of the blender, as Dad juiced the vegetables and watercress he had grown in his garden, desperate not to fail her, desperate to protect her, desperate for her to live.

As I was making sense of it, my sisters—both a lot older than me—were living their own lives trying to make sense of it in their own ways also. One had just become a mother for the first time, while the other was in her final year of university.

No one in my family knew how to be with death. There were no role models. No conversations. No traditions.

It was awkward, and tense, and weird.

Profound sadness filled the air, without us ever naming it.

My “Internal-Grief Template” as I would come to know it, was shaped intensely by these early experiences.

Grief. The true lifeblood of the unspoken realms.

For us, there was no acknowledging the overwhelming emotional states.

No understanding the harrowing psychological and physiological impact when unacknowledged, unexpressed.

No ways to move with grief or let it move through us - only the slow suffocation of an invisible cloak, woven from misery, confusion and quiet terror.

The loss of someone is never just about that person. It’s about everything they represented to you—the fabric of life and reality they held together.

For me, that fabric disintegrated, and I felt like I had no place to stand anymore.

After mum passed, my family all changed in our desperate, feeble attempts to reconcile, to figure out what to do next.

We were booked in to see a social worker as a family. It didn’t go well.

That would be the first and last consultation I would experience until nearly ten years later, when I found myself in the midst of a painful friendship breakdown with my best friend. I felt somehow it was related to my mum dying.

I didn’t know how to deal with it, and I turned to drinking—maybe more than those around me. I got upset frequently. My friends and housemates would ask me, “Why aren’t you over your mum’s death yet? It was years ago.”

The psychologist told me I had a wall between ten-year-old Tessa and the rest of me. My world with my mum was alive, and the world after her was something else entirely. I was fascinated, and needed to know more.

In our second session, she seemed pleased that I looked “happier.” She knew I was studying psychology, so she told me to just apply what I was learning to myself, and I’d be fine.

I took this as a sign that my pain wasn’t worth supporting. That I needed to work it out myself. That I should be over it already.

Years later, I would go on a soulful, healing quest.

I would become the healer and role model I needed for myself.

Bit by bit, my family would become restored. But the event that would bring us closest together was when dad was diagnosed with cancer.

This time, I was not the little girl. This time, I was the 33 year old woman who had been initiated into the underworld.

This time, I had met death. (We had had a great conversation). I had explored the planes of consciousness we were existing in, as part of this reality we call life.

I had come to know many of the deep, Sacred Master Teachings of Grief, and helped many others navigate through the passageway of pain into power.

This time, I could stay open instead of shutting down.

I could move and dance and howl my way through this sacred passageway in ways no one had ever explicitly taught me.

I stewarded myself - and all the younger versions of me - through this experience, where I would this time watch my father weaken, alter form, and die before my eyes.

Without knowing it, during this time I was rewriting my Internal Grief Template of suppression. A template which had formed in my childhood, from the adults around me who didn’t role-model to me what to do with all my grief—who didn’t know themselves.

And yet, somewhere inside me, a seed—a knowing—had been growing this entire time. Just like an acorn grows knowing it will one day be the oak tree. There was a knowing that I could rewrite the ways of my past.

This came from the deepest place within me—an innate intelligence beyond conscious thought. A knowing that expression was not luxury; it was a necessity.

A knowing that led me through a thread of various healing initiations unbeknownst to me at the time.

From the years from writing poetry as a child to process my emotions, public speaking as a teenager sharing the story of my mum’s death, to creating an entire community movement in courageous story-telling so others too could benefit from the medicine of expressing the unacknowledged within us; the unspoken.

A knowing that guided me on my path, and ultimately brought me here.

But my final initiation - the final frontier - arrived only last year.

I was sitting at my favourite cafe, deeply triggered, feeling my whole body wanting to desperately close. I could feel the trauma-like response—my body wanting to shut down, collapse, freeze.

But I knew I couldn’t.

I knew I had to break this pattern.

I had been existing in this repeating loop, where 90–95% of my life felt amazing, aligned, moving in the direction I desired… and yet, something kept returning.

A feeling, a sense, a pattern I had tried so many times to get my hands on but couldn’t. It continued to manifest as self-protection, self-sabotage. It showed up in my home environment—manifesting struggle even when I had a roof over my head, even when I was effortlessly looked after.

And yet, my body continued to tell the story of not feeling safe, not feeling welcome, not feeling home.

There was still a part of me refusing to receive life.

Sitting in the cafe, I began doing gentle somatic movements to help cultivate safety in my body. I was adamant of changing the story in real time, opening my heart, expanding my chest instead of contracting.

I was praying, I was begging.

No, No, No. Please. Stay open. I am safe.

I began reminding myself, trauma needs to complete…

What needs completing here?

How can I support myself here?

If I trusted everything was working out exactly as it was meant to be… and trusted in my innate wisdom to guide me… how would I finally open here instead of shut down?

Something began niggling at me straight away.

I got my journal out, guided to write.

I asked myself *one* very specific question.

“If my body could speak right now, what would it want to tell me?"

I then scribbled down words

upon words

upon words

in my journal.

I had just unlocked something within me.

I had just experienced the biggest breakthrough of my life.

This was beyond a trauma concept… this was… something else entirely. My whole world view shifted in that moment.

It was then I heard the two words.

“I T’S   T I M E”

…

“It’s time to hold space for this.

For what has been your most tender wound.

For what everyone close to you goes to you for and knows you excel at.

Yet what you have hid from because it’s been too painful…

Until now.

You are ready.”

For the past 12 months, I have been unlocking the wisdom imparted to me on that day; the medicine of Revolutionary Grief.

It has been exactly what I needed to set myself free.

It has been exactly what I needed to unlock deeper levels of my own leadership, health, and non-circumstantial power.

And, I wish this for you too.

I have contemplated, I have trialled, I have integrated.

And, now I have stewarded the medicine of Revolutionary Grief into form;

for me, for you, for us.

No matter where you’re at in your grief journey, please know there is so much to look forward to.

We no longer need to sit in the heavy unspoken of grief not knowing what to do, or being afraid to let go, or being impacted in our present day reality unknowingly by suppressed grief from our past.

Revolutionary Grief doesn’t want us to be trapped; she wants us to be free.

I cannot wait to support you through the Evolutionary Pathway of Revolutionary Grief, and see the magic unfold for you too.

Tessa xx

PS. For those of you who don’t know me (yet) - I am someone who is deeply passionate about living open-heartedly, boldly, creatively, imperfectly.

I believe we should live life like we mean it, and dare to stand in our unique True-Self Expression and leadership in the way only we can.

None of this though is possible, without facing off with Grief, Death and Life itself.

Revolutionary Grief is here to support you to not just feel a bit better or lighter… but to help you embrace your wildest dreams, live your most courageous desires, and to come home to your most compassionate, loving, powerful self.