I did not choose a spiritual path.

In fact, I was deeply conflicted with what I thought spirituality was.

Being born between two very different religious and cultural backgrounds, religion had brought a great deal of conflict, confusion, and pain into my life.

Very early on, I learned that in order to be safe, I had to bend myself.

To bend my truth.

I learned to adapt.

To fit.

Everywhere.

And for much of my life, that became my identity.

My superpower.

The chameleon.​

As a teenager and young adult, my friends were punks, hippies, philosophers, psychonauts, entrepreneurs, artists, gardeners, mothers, grandmothers.

I loved diversity.

I loved navigating worlds, cultures, and generations, discovering the many different ways of being human that could coexist within one life.

My interests revolved around nature, animals, music, art, crafts, parties, travel, sports, and human connection.

I lived very much from the heart, following whatever made me feel most alive.

Surfing and climbing were two of those things.

I loved the adrenaline, the intensity, and the depth of presence they demanded.

It was simply life.

Raw, immediate, alive.

Looking back, I can see how naturally I learned to integrate wherever I went.

And how many of the threads that shape my work today were already present back then.

Yet something deeper remained unresolved.

I was home everywhere.

Yet I hadn't found home within myself.

My inner world was inhabited by so many people, experiences, and possibilities that I only knew how to define myself through them.

I had learned how to navigate worlds.

But I had not yet learned how to inhabit my own.

Beneath all that curiosity lived a quieter longing.

A longing to belong.

Not to a group.

Not to an identity.

But to life itself.

Perhaps that was the beginning of a much deeper search.

Looking back, I can also see that my relationship with mystery began long before I ever called it spirituality.

Growing up in Egypt, there were moments when the veil between the visible and the invisible felt surprisingly thin.

I never questioned it.

It was simply part of the world I inhabited.

As a child, I spent six to eight hours a day in the water.

I played with my breath, gravity, the movement of my body, and the sounds carried beneath the surface.

Those hours cultivated a profound sense of presence and intimacy with life.

I was also deeply connected to animals, and it was not uncommon for injured or vulnerable creatures to find their way into my care.

None of this felt extraordinary to me.

It was simply how I experienced life.

I didn't have the language to explain it.

Nor did I feel the need to.

It quietly became part of the way I related to the world.

It wasn't until I was twenty-six, when I travelled to India for my first yoga teacher training - and twice more that same year - that something fundamentally shifted.

It felt as though an entirely new layer of awareness had opened.

My perception of life changed in ways I could not fully explain.

And I never saw the world in quite the same way again.

At the same time, I was also moving through one of the deepest breakdowns of my life.

Suddenly, the ways I had learned to navigate life no longer made sense.

My mind struggled deeply with what was unfolding because it challenged almost everything I thought I knew.

And yet, when I looked back honestly, I realised that some form of relationship with the sacred had always been present.

Since childhood, I had spoken to God.

Not as an idea.

Not as a religion.

Not as a theory.

But as a quiet presence that had always existed within me.

It had been as natural and unquestioned as breathing.

After returning from India, I moved through a series of experiences and awakenings that profoundly transformed my relationship with life, reality, and myself.

Ceremonies.

Altered states of awareness.

Moments of deep devotion.

Grief.

Beauty.

Surrender.

Encounters that challenged the limits of what I believed reality to be.

Some of these experiences were deeply beautiful and expansive.

Others were overwhelming, destabilising, and difficult to integrate.

At times, I felt completely ungrounded by it all.

It took me years to slowly anchor myself back into life after walking through experiences that had profoundly altered the way I perceived the world.

I had no real structure to hold or make sense of everything I had lived.

So a large part of my journey became not the pursuit of spirituality, but the integration of it.

Learning how to remain grounded while relating to experiences that profoundly expanded and challenged how I perceived myself, life, and reality.

Eventually, even my need to understand had to fall apart.

The concepts.

The identities.

The explanations.

None of them felt spacious enough.

I had to let go of many things I thought I knew about myself, about life, and about what spirituality was supposed to be.

What followed was a much quieter and more grounded process.

Learning how to live with greater presence.

Greater honesty.

Greater discernment.

And greater care for both spirit and humanity.

I still resist the word "spirituality" in many ways.

And yet, something undeniably alive moves through me when I write, sing, dance, pray, create, or meet life from a deeply present place.

There is something profoundly beautiful and mysterious in that experience, even when I cannot fully explain it.

And maybe that is part of the point.

I no longer feel the same need to intellectually grasp or define everything I experience.

Accepting that there are dimensions of life my mind cannot fully contain has given me more space to breathe.

More space to live.

More space to express myself honestly.

Today, I feel less interested in spirituality as a theory and more interested in learning how to live in relationship.

With life.

With others.

With the unknown.

And with the deeper intelligence moving through all things.

Perhaps some mysteries are not asking to be solved.

But to be lived.