After spending my very early years in India, my family and I emigrated to London, England just as I hit double figures. This is where I expected to live for the rest of my life, until a shocking and traumatic event in my late twenties pulled the proverbial rug out from under me. Life as I knew it ceased to make sense. For the years that followed, I slowly began to dismantle the structures of an existence I felt at my core as obsolete. During this period of alchemical calcination, I learned and qualified as an Usui Reiki Master teacher & practitioner, as well as being initiated into Shamanic wisdom traditions and practices. I also attended my first ten-day silent Vipassana retreat, after which I immersed myself in this method of Buddhist insight meditation, following in the lineage of the Myanamarese master, Sayagyi U Ba Khin. Eventually, I began to learn, practice + teach from the non-dual lineages of Advaita Vedanta, and from the Vedic body of knowledge, including becoming initiated into Vedic (Transcendental) meditation.

Gradually, layers Self-abandonment began to drop away, but the work had only just begun. The desert is where it would intensify: it summoned me and I answered. One autumn morning, my husband and I found ourselves standing in front of our new home in the rural wilds of the Mojave high desert, armed with nothing more than two suitcases of worldly belongings, an ocean away from all that we knew.

Almost immediately after landing in the desert over a decade ago, I fully immersed myself in the study + practice of inner alchemy and somatic-based healing, both solitary + with wise, powerful teachers, and of the rich mysteries of mythology, discovering their frequencies of resonance in Nature - within & without. As a child, I had been deeply interested in myth & story, given the cornucopia of meaning within the Indian cosmogony. I had a native intuition in an aliveness, an animism inherent in everything that myth pointed to, something that oppressive colonizer culture had fractured us from. In my early twenties, I had completed a Masters in European History & Literature, indulging my left-brained, intellectual side by exploring some of the rich, Indigenous European mythic traditions. But the myopic dryness of a purely academic approach didn’t fully satisfy. It wasn’t until the desert took me in that I began to listen, remember and weave rectifying, transformative meaning from myth, nature and the mystery traditions. My soul-body, until then a dried-up well, began to replenish her Self with deep, clear, sparkling water, nourished with the embodied knowing that I am something far more vast and mysterious than the wounds I had inherited.