Sovereign

How I became my own guru, and how you can too.

The Blueprint

When I was eight years old, I knew things about the future that seemed fantastical when I looked back on those "knowings" as a teenager. They were not so much thoughts of "how I wanted to live my life" as they were a blueprint of a world not yet in existence – for example, communities where everyone was sexually free, where divine union between people was considered normal, healthy and good.

I started meditating when I was 22, and at the end of every sit I would solemnly renew a vow without understanding what I was even vowing: that whatever it was I was here for, I would know when the time came, and I would do it. I did not know the route, nor the cost, but I knew the destination was filled with overwhelming beauty. Because of this, I could never fully embed myself in anything along the way. I knew when I got married that I would not stay, even though I would have loved to experience the depth of love with another over a whole lifetime together. I knew also, sadly, when my daughter was born that I would leave one day. I prayed it would not be too early for her to understand; she was 16 when it happened. I followed my truth because I had no other option. That is the particular plight of someone who knows what they are for and cannot pretend otherwise - to follow spirit is a choiceless choice.

A Life That Looked Complete

Before I "awoke," my life was truly good. I was blessed with a wonderful husband, a delightful daughter, our own home, a thriving business doing what I loved and was surrounded by community. Everything on the checklist ticked just so. Yet over time, a creeping rot set in and I felt like I was dying.

Not dramatically or inside a crisis. Just a slow, steady sense of depletion, like a phone that never quite charges to full anymore. Shakti was quiet, lurking in the shadowy, unvisited rooms of my psyche, patient and absolutely certain she would eventually be let out because it was pre-ordained.

I was very comfortable in my masculine "Shiva" side in those years - directed, driven, effective and capable. Everything was always "my way," because that was logically the best way, of course. My thinking was black and white, and everything was simple. I think I was fun to be around, people liked me, but my inner dialogue was ferocious. I was hard on everyone, and hardest on myself. A perfectionist who would not settle, always achieving, always externally motivated, never quite still - even though I was a strong Vipassana meditator, go figure…

What I did not understand then was that everything I was judgmental of, I was most terrified of becoming. The dreamy people. The ones who followed signs and talked about energy and lived outside the conventional map - hippies. I found them embarrassing, flakey. I laughed at them, quietly, from inside my very organised, very productive, slowly suffocating life.

I would not have said so then, but I was doing everything in my power not to be who I knew I was.

The Quest Begins

Eventually the pressure became too great to ignore. I told my husband I needed to fold my business and travel. So we packed up and all three of us went overseas for a year.

What I did not tell him, or perhaps even fully tell myself, was that I was looking for something - a space in which something else could happen. I could feel it the way you feel a change in weather before the sky shows it.

When we split up during the travels, as we sometimes did to pursue our interests, the most extraordinary things began to happen to me. A chance meeting in the Netherlands led me to a young meditation teacher. Months earlier, in another meditation, I had felt I was on the verge of being shown the very "meaning of life" when the teacher abruptly stopped the session: "Get up. Shake your arms, shake your legs. Now is not the time." I reluctantly did as I was told, feeling I had come to the very edge of an awakening experience and was robbed of it. But in that room in the Netherlands, the experience returned - and this time nothing stopped it. It was a great reminder that when something is meant for you, there is no need to push for it. It will come in its own time regardless.

Wide Awake

What followed was six months of being in the most extraordinary state - every cell of my body was throbbing with light and energy, spiraling in pure joy. I had to be constantly mindful to stay grounded enough to function while traversing multiple dimensions. My meditation practice became the most important thing in my life, not for spiritual merit, but for basic survival. Without it, I would have ended up in a psychiatric ward, because the energy was so enticingly strong. You cannot hide that kind of frequency - it moves through a room before you do.

This is what Eastern traditions call "ananda" - pure bliss, profoundly ecstatic and almost excruciating at the same time. I had spent decades building a strong container of masculine self-discipline without knowing that was what I was doing, and it turned out to be exactly what I needed to hold that level of life-force energy. If you experience a strong influx of life-force with no structure to contain it, it is like trying to hold the ocean in a paper cup. I believe psychiatric wards are smattered with people having similar awakening experiences without the foundation to hold that incredible energy.

During those six months, I ended my marriage with a heart full of love. I moved into the caravan on our property and told my husband that if someone came along that I could work on my intimacy issues with, I would take the opportunity, but I was not looking for anything.

Three months later, a couch surfer arrived at our door. The moment he stepped onto our veranda I saw our entire history together - lifetimes of it. I was forty-four, he was twenty-two, and I was horrified at myself. But I just needed to be near him, I was compelled to merge with his perfectly aligned energy.

The Body Breaks Open

What I thought might last three weeks ended up lasting three years. That relationship was its own initiation: beautiful, confronting, and far from simple. It was the most profound relationship of my life, and my complete unravelling. We had many adventures, most of which involved going to beautiful places and making love for hours in ways that rearranged the cosmos. We traveled by horse and cart for 5 months, which sounds romantic but also proved to be exactly the conditions under which my body finally broke. I thought I was having a heart attack, turns out it was "only" an overactive thyroid - graves' disease.

I understand now that the vibration of the awakening moving through my body for months had unearthed an illness a lifetime in the making. I had been silenced as a child, in ways both explicit and ambient. The thyroid governs voice, self-expression, the capacity to say what is true. How poetic that it was the part of my body that became the loudest.

A specialist told me I would be on medication for the rest of my life, or I would die. I replied that we are all going to die, so I'd prefer to do it on my terms, and walked out without the prescription. The path of western medicine is to stop the symptoms so you can continue doing what you always did, but that's how I became ill in the first place. I found a naturopath, stabilised my heart rhythm, and chose instead to heal by changing my life - not a choice I recommend for the faint-hearted.

What followed were three years of healing that did not look like healing from the outside. Thyroid fluctuation, awakening and early menopause share an identical set of symptoms, so it was triple the intensity. Eventually it became too much for my young lover, and I was forced to leave him and walk my own path.

I found myself living in a squatted community in a forest in the Netherlands - low cost of living, kindred spirits, deep rest. I did not have to work, and I gave myself full permission to be deeply sad and feel it all. It was exactly what I needed.

Becoming My Own Guru

This is where the reprogramming happened. Not through any course or teacher or structured practice, but through learning to live in the present, listen to what my body needed, and never deviating from that. I used every single thing that arrived in my reality, positive or negative, as information about where the next layer needed to be released. I stopped trying to manifest anything - what was coming to me on its own was so much more precise than anything I could have conjured. I just kept removing layers, sitting with old wounds and watching myself be reprogramed - transmuting shit into gold.

The world is full of "clever" people, knowledge is everywhere; wisdom, on the other hand, comes from lived experience mixed with some ineffable quality intrinsic to each individual. No one else is living inside your body, feeling the specific quality of your aliveness - or your deadness. No one knows the precise contour of what you are here to become, mastering that understanding is the foundation of wisdom. That doesn't mean you don't need help, but each person must walk their own path. "Don't walk in the footsteps of the masters, search for what they were searching for" was written on my wall through this time as a reminder - to be liberated, you must become your own guru.

At certain moments during those years, I received what I can only call complete downloads. In an instant, I would understand a whole aspects of what I needed to do - the full architecture of the work I do now came that way - the reasons why, the people it was for, the structure of the sessions, all of it at once. I did not plan to work with men, or to do tantra or erotic massage. The path was laid out in front of me and I followed it, not because I fully understood where it led, but because my body said yes, and I learned to trust that above all else.

Spirit told me to change my name, although I fought it for six months, eventually I surrendered. Spirit gave me a tattoo also - complete, whole - and told me to put it on my forehead: the yantra for enlightenment through unconditional love. It faces outward into every room I enter; I see it reflected in the mirror, where it reminds me of who I am and what I am here for. People feel it before they can explain why, it functions as a portal.

Every initiation in this life has followed the same pattern: resistance, exploration, understanding, surrender - and then the recognition, on the other side, that I could not have become who I needed to be without it.

I am not who I was. This is not a metaphor. The woman who ran that successful business, who was hard on everyone and hardest on herself, who was driven and black and white - she is gone. Not abandoned, just completed. She built something strong enough to hold what came next, and then she was no longer needed in that form - like a caterpillar that transforms into a butterfly. I lost people I held dear because we no longer resonated in compatible frequencies. They loved who I was. But I love who I am now more.

And I am so wonderful and precious and funny. I say that not from ego, but from the simple, settled recognition of someone who stopped fighting themselves. The judgment I carried for most of my life was always aimed, with perfect precision, at exactly who I was becoming. The things you judge most harshly are the things you are most terrified of owning about yourself. And the things you are most terrified of being are usually the things you most need to become.

I am not telling this story so you will be impressed by it. I am telling it because I think it may be your story too, in some specific shape that belongs to you and no one else.

Most people are living the version of their life that was handed to them - through the programming of their family, culture, wounds, or their fear of standing out. Many never learn that underneath all of that, there is an original blueprint for who they are, a knowing that arrived in this life with each of us.

The path back to that blueprint requires courage - the kind that means being willing to lose the life you built to find the one you were meant for. I think this is the loneliest and most liberating thing a human being can do.

No one can walk the path for you, and you cannot walk it for anyone else. I walked mine through the fire that was designed perfectly for me and came out the other side in possession of something of great value that I now offer to others - not as their saviour, but as someone who has been through enough fires to hold space steadily while they find their own way through.

What This Means for You

This foundational wisdom of sovereignty is especially important with the men I work with. My deepest commitment is to give power back - not to accumulate it, or to become someone they depend on, but to return their essence to themselves. The masculine needs to be powerful in this world, initiated into both masculine and feminine energies inside his own psyche - able to wield power not over anyone else, but in his own life, body and direction. A man who has found that cannot be manipulated, made victim, or be pulled from his path by anyone or anything, and he has no need to do so to others.

That is what sovereignty means - not invulnerable, or superior - just fully, clearly, unmistakably yourself. Governing your life the way you came here to live it.

When I finish a session, I hold my beloved client's head in my hands, I kiss their forehead with deep reverence, watering the seed of courage in their heart for them to live from their truth, then I place my hands to my forehead and give gratitude. I am overwhelmed with gratitude, every time. For the work, for the people who trust me to hold them, and for the extraordinary privilege of being exactly where I am supposed to be.

My eight-year-old self knew all of it - she just had to wait for the rest of me to catch up. And here we are. Sovereign.

An Invitation

There are many alive at this moment who came here to create a new world, not to perpetuate the old system. You know who you are.

The way the system changes is by one heart at a time - each soul going inward, doing the real work, stripping back the programming until you find what was always underneath it. Paring back the layers until you are so solidly yourself that there is no crack for corruption to enter, no hook for manipulation to catch on, no version of yourself available for sale.

That is sovereign power. And it is available to all those willing to go through the fire to find it.

If you feel that call and it is no longer something you can ignore, I am at your service. Not as a guru - I am just a way-shower holding a light that makes the way easier for those who choose to walk. And I am here to tell you: the path is more incredible and more beautiful than your current self can even imagine. There are whole worlds of bliss waiting for you to take each next step.