My Journey

The teachings of the Buddha resonate strongly with me. The practice of Vipassana (learning to observe sensations and not react) has been my greatest teacher in mastering the great assignment of this life: freeing myself from my reactivity. My relationship with reactivity has taught me just how sensitive I am. Sensitive or not though, we all have the choice as to how we respond and react to what we feel.

I came into this life with a very strong reactivity program, leading me to have stronger reactions than most. Perhaps you relate to growing up in a society that did not teach you how to feel and process your emotions. When feelings are too big and you are told to stop being so sensitive, don't feel like that etc, it is understandable that you may find yourself confused as to how you truly feel. When our society shames many of the more challenging emotions, it is easy for the subconscious to inform you that you don't feel particular ways that you indeed do feel. Many of us have inbuilt drives to want to please those around us. When people add their opinions and ideas about how we should feel, life can become very confusing to a little one feeling so many intense things. An easy out from the confusing intense feelings, is to go into the head, to disassociate.

I was around 27 when I started to realise that I was disconnected from feeling. It didn't mean I had stopped feeling. It meant there had been a severing between being able to understand what I felt and why. With all the experience I now have, I would pose the hypothesis that most people with strong reactivity are disconnected from identifying what they feel and why. For me, I needed to withdraw from the world of opinions and distractions to come back home to myself. Learning to be with the big feelings that used to lead to shouting or crying was not an easy task. The feelings we refuse to feel fully do not disappear just because we decide we don't want to feel that way. They get stored in the body, waiting until they are safe to be felt. This is why some of the least reactive people feel so tightly wound. Because they are doing everything to suppress instead of express and not be with the truth of how they feel. For me, once I opened that box of suppressed emotions there was no putting the lid back on. I felt like I was going backwards in the years of growth, because my reactivity seemed to peak an all time high! Now I understand that is actually the signs of reaching real spiritual growth. As we move towards our personal enlightenment, one would think life gets easier. My experience was the opposite. It became harder. I could no longer pretend I was ok with things I was not ok with. I could no longer be around the behaviours that I tolerated to keep the peace. The further I went down my path, the more I knew that this was why I was here. To liberate my own soul from the suffering cycle. To understand how I feel and why, without needing to explode in outward reactivity. It also became clearer to me that the path of yoga that I began teaching over a decade ago, was not simply teaching a practice on the mat for strength and flexibility. I came to understand that the reason I felt like some kind of imposter when I started teaching at 24 was not because of how well I knew the poses or not. It was because I needed to go on the journey to truly understand the meaning of yoga. To come into wholeness with myself and then teach from the place where I could hold another in their own suffering and pain, without needing to be the one to fix it or change it.

We each have a unique mission and it is up to us to find it. If you don't already have a grasp on what yours may be, the simplest way to understand your individual purpose is to start withdrawing from the noise of the world. You can do it as intensely as I did or you can do it subtley. Either way there is one commitment life asks of you... To grow in your own self awareness. What you discover about the truth of how you feel and what you really think may scare you, good! It means you are really getting to the heart of it. It scared me immensely to consider putting myself out there in the ways I am now. Usually our purpose asks a lot of us. Mine has asked a lot of me. For many years I tried to ignore the urge, focusing on my individual souls liberation, content with my inner exploration. In my case, taking more time for me, lead me to the place where I came full circle. I indeed needed time in solitude to come to my own realisations and be able to support others from this deeply embodied place. I am here to support you to do the same.