AUTHENTIC FLOW

After years immersed in what I’d call a steady, more contained āsana practice, I began to feel a restlessness inside. A quiet, persistent yearning for something I couldn’t quite name. I had cultivated presence, yes. I had built spaciousness and subtle awareness. But underneath, something more primal stirred.

I found myself drawn, craving, even, a different current. One that didn’t ask me to be calm, but demanded I be honest.

One that was more open, spontaneous, chaotic, and more confrontational.

One that didn’t only soothe me, but strip me.

This practice didn’t just move me, it broke me open.

It shook me out of the stories I and the world had curated, the ones that had begun to calcify around my identity.

It asked:

Who are you beneath the perfecting and doing?

Who are you beneath the spiritual gloss?

Who are you in the dark, with the door locked, when no one is watching?

This was shadow work, in motion.

Not intellectual. Not conceptual.

Somatic. Felt. Raw. In the tissues. In the bones. In the breath that catches in the throat when the old trauma rises.

It surfaced what I had pushed down.

The grief I never fully grieved.

The anger I learned to mask with smiles.

The fears I had spiritualized away.

This work didn’t ask me to transcend my shadow, it invited me to dance with it.

It made me feel so intensely alive, I didn’t know whether to weep or scream or laugh.

It brought me to my knees, over and over again.

It made me want to walk away…run, even.

But somehow, I stayed.

And each time I stayed, another layer softened.

Another truth revealed itself.

Another door cracked open.

thus practice doesn’t promise comfort, it promises wholeness.

Through this new arising through my self-practice, I found more peace and more a distinct taste of liberation than I had reached through years of yoga and dance.

It wasn’t based on rules but guidelines

it wasn’t always clean.

It wasn’t always graceful.

But it was real.

I didn’t transcend. I descended… into the root, the pulse, the trembling ground of my own being.

And I brought all of me with me. The sacred and the messy. The seen and the hidden.

The light, yes, but also the beautifully fertile dark.

This is where Authentic Flow was born 2009.

From the collision of everything I had ever practiced and everything I had once been afraid to feel.