My Story

My Story

CHRYSTAL DAWN JAMESON
Founder of PlayBrave Collective

I grew up in the lava fields of Kaʻū, Hawaiʻi. Wild terrain, off-grid, raised by a single mother who taught me to find my own way. I was homeschooled through my early years and went on to attend West Hawaii Explorations Academy, one of the first project based learning schools in Hawaii, where I worked on solar cars and hydroponics at a natural energy lab.

I learned early that you figure things out by doing them. By getting in and participating. By staying curious and staying in the game.

Play wasn't something I was taught. It was just how I lived.

That carried through into competitive soccer and travelling teams, into surfing that took me around the world, into photography, filmmaking and writing that found audiences internationally, into renovating a vintage caravan and hitting the road with my son, into every wild, uncertain, fully lived chapter of this life.

I've also known heartbreak. A ten year marriage that ended when our son was born. Starting over as a solo mother in a country far from home. The kind of seasons where everything you thought you knew about yourself gets quietly dismantled.

And it was in those seasons that I discovered something I hadn't expected.

Play brought me back. Every time I got back in the game, surfed, moved, created, connected, tried something new, I was handing myself evidence. Evidence that I was still capable. Still able to feel joy. Still able to trust myself with something new.

That's the heart of PlayBrave. Play creates evidence. And evidence builds the confidence to meet whatever comes next. Staying in the game is how we keep gathering it.

After decades of study across NLP, woman centred coaching, yoga in Mysore, breathwork, plant based nutrition, permaculture and human potential with teachers including Dr Clare Zammit and Tony Robbins, I kept arriving at the same doorway.

We cultivate the capacity for transformation through movement, creativity and play. We rehearse the feeling we're after until it becomes evidence we can trust.

My life has always been a series of experiments. The PlayBrave Show and Her Brave Story Podcast and One Brave Question are experiments. Learning to skate ramps at forty seven is an experiment. The book is an experiment. Parenting is a freaking experiment. All of it is. And every single one of them is evidence that I'm still in the game.

I'm also an environmentalist, an activist and a humanitarian. A whole food plant based cook who feeds her community with as much love as she can. I care deeply about people, animals and this planet. About the kind of world we're leaving behind.

All of that is woven into PlayBrave Collective. Into the way I coach, create, gather and show up.

Because life isn't just about feeling better. It's about living fully. Contributing meaningfully. Loving well. And proving, one brave experiment at a time, that it is never too late to come home to yourself.

Nobody else can play your life for you, brave soul.

Chrystal Dawn Jameson xx