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 lot of conflict, confusion, and pain into my life. So I became a rebel, a misfit - someone who never seemed to fully belong anywhere. My friends were punks, hippies, philosophers, psychonauts, entrepreneurs, artists, gardeners, mothers, grandmothers. I loved diversity. I loved navigating worlds and feeling alive in all of them, discovering the many different versions of myself that could coexist within one life.

 

My interests revolved around nature, music, art and crafts, parties, travel, sports, and human connection. I was living very much from the heart and going with the flow.

 

Surfing and climbing were two activities that made me feel deeply alive. I loved the adrenaline, the intensity, the depth of presence they connected me to. But there was nothing “spiritual” about it to me back then. It was simply life - raw, immediate, alive.

 

I had first encountered yoga when I was around 12 years old after reading about it in a local journal and asking my mother to take me to a class. I was the only child there, surrounded by people whose average age must have been around 65. I didn’t continue at the time, but somehow, something had already been planted.

 

Years later, while attending a surf camp in Morocco, I rediscovered yoga through the body - as a complement to the sports I loved. I began practicing the asanas more consistently, still relating to yoga mainly as a physical practice.

 

It wasn’t until I was 26, when I travelled to India for my first yoga teacher training, and twice more the same year, that something fundamentally shifted in me. 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 quite the same way again.

 

At the same time, I was also going through one of the deepest breakdowns of my life, which I share about in the "about" section. And 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 realized that some form of connection to the sacred had always been present in my life. Since childhood, I had spoken to “God” constantly - not as an idea, religion, or theory, but as a quiet presence that had always existed beside me. It had been as natural and unquestioned as breathing.

 

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

 

I found myself moving through ceremonies, altered states of awareness, moments of deep devotion, grief, beauty, surrender, and encounters that challenged the limits of what I believed reality to be. Some of these experiences were deeply beautiful and expansive. Others were overwhelming, destabilizing, 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 stay grounded and functional while relating to experiences that profoundly expanded or challenged how I perceived myself, life and reality.

 

At some point, even the spirituality I had started identifying with had to fall apart too. The concepts, identities, and intellectual understanding of it all no longer felt sufficient. I had to let go of many things I thought I knew about myself, about life, and about what spirituality was supposed to look like.

 

What followed was a much quieter and more grounded process: learning how to live with greater presence, honesty, discernment, and 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 actually brought me more space to breathe, to live, and to express myself more honestly.

 

Today, I feel less interested in spirituality as an identity 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.

 

And while I do believe there is something profoundly interconnected about our existence, I also accept that the full meaning of that may forever remain beyond the limits of our individual human understanding.