Unveiling My Why
My Journey to Becoming
The long road back to the woman who was there all along.
The Turning Point
I was fifteen years old when I tried to end my life.
I had reached a place where I felt I did not belong, where my own worth had become difficult to feel, and where I could not imagine a way through what I was carrying. My mother and grandmother came home hours earlier than expected and found me in time.
Their unexpected return saved my life.
When I woke up in a hospital in France, I did not suddenly understand my purpose. I did not know that one day I would teach yoga, guide Yoga Nidra, become a coach, or build a body of work around helping women return to themselves.
I only knew that I was still here.
And somewhere beneath everything, there was a quiet feeling that being here meant something. That there was a reason I had survived, even if I could not yet name it.
That question — Why am I still here? — stayed with me for years. In many ways, it became the beginning of my journey.
15 years old — Corsica, France
The Value of Being Enough
Growing up in France, I often heard that I could “do better.”
It is the kind of phrase adults can say with good intentions. Try harder. Do more. Reach higher. But repeated often enough, it can begin to sound like something else: what you are doing is not enough. And, if you are not careful, that can slowly become: maybe I am not enough.
The strange thing is that some part of me always knew otherwise.
I knew there was something in me that did not need to be earned. A value that existed before achievement, usefulness, approval, or being the person everyone could count on.
And yet, knowing something deep inside and living from that knowing are not the same thing.
I became very good at reading the room. At sensing what people needed. At adapting. At being capable. At doing what needed to be done.
I also became very good at hiding.
I learned how to be present without drawing too much attention to myself. How to watch from the edges. How to notice the shift in someone’s face, the change in their energy, the thing they were not saying. I could read a room while making myself almost invisible inside it.
At the time, I did not understand what I was learning. I only knew that paying attention helped me navigate the world around me.
Those qualities served me. But they also taught me how easy it is to begin measuring your place by what you can provide. How easily being useful can become a way of belonging. How quietly we can begin disappearing while still showing up for everyone around us.
It has taken me years to understand that our worth is not a reward for being useful.
We do not have to prove we deserve space.
We already belong in our own lives.
Kindergarten school picture — Aubervilliers, France
Intuition Was Always There
Intuition was not something I discovered later in life. It was already in the room when I was a child.
My mother and grandmother were quiet mystics in their own ways. My grandmother had premonitory dreams. I remember my mother reading cards when I was young. None of it was discussed very openly. Perhaps there was doubt around it. Perhaps fear of judgment. Perhaps it was simply understood without needing to be explained.
But I noticed.
I noticed what was said and what was not said. I felt things before I had language for them. I learned to listen beneath words.
And perhaps some of that was intuition.
Perhaps some of it came from years of watching carefully.
I suspect it was both.
For a long time, I did not understand that this sensitivity was part of how I moved through the world. Eventually, I stopped treating it as something strange or something I needed to justify. I began to trust it.
Looking back, I can see that I did not need to become intuitive.
I needed to remember that I already was.
Less than 1 year old with Maman & Mémé — Saint-Denis, France
Discovering My True Calling
My life began to come into clearer focus when I became a certified yoga teacher.
Yoga gave me language for things I had sensed for years: the relationship between the body and the mind, the wisdom held beneath our thoughts, the way breath and stillness can bring us back to ourselves.
And then there was Yoga Nidra.
Over time, I came to understand that rest was not simply rest. When the body softens and the nervous system no longer has to hold everything so tightly, we can sometimes hear what has been underneath the noise all along.
Coaching grew naturally from there, but in truth, the impulse to guide people had been present long before I had a name for it.
Even when I worked as a travel agent, people talked to me. They always have — even when I was a child.
They would begin with one thing, and somehow we would end up somewhere deeper. I listened. I noticed. I asked questions. I helped them see what they already knew but could not quite reach on their own.
The certifications did not create that part of me.
They gave structure, skill, ethics, and language to something that had been there for a very long time.
2018 — Photographed by Nousha Salimi for Laughing Lotus Yoga Center, NYC
Why I Do This Work
For years, I thought my purpose was simply to help people feel better, find clarity, or move toward the life they wanted.
I still care deeply about all of those things. But today I understand the work differently.
I know what it is to lose contact with yourself while continuing to function. To be capable on the outside and uncertain on the inside. To sense what everyone else needs before asking what you need. To keep going while some quieter part of you is whispering, There has to be more than this.
My work is not about turning a woman into a better, shinier, more impressive version of herself.
It is about helping her stop disappearing from her own life.
It is helping her create enough inner quiet to hear herself again. To reclaim what she has pushed aside. To question the rules she inherited. To trust her desires without immediately explaining them away. To let herself be seen. And, eventually, to live from what she knows is true.
If I had understood some of this when I was younger, perhaps the road back to myself would not have taken quite so long.
I cannot change that road.
But I can use what it taught me to walk beside another woman as she finds her own way back.
Joshua Tree, CA. 2026
How Everything Came Together
For a long time, the different parts of my work felt separate: yoga teacher, Yoga Nidra guide, intuitive, coach.
Today, I see that they were never separate.
Yoga taught me to listen to the body. Yoga Nidra taught me the power of deep rest and the space between conscious effort and deeper knowing. Coaching taught me how to help someone name what is true and then live it.
Intuition taught me to pay attention to what is present before it becomes obvious.
Together, they became the way I work.
I often begin with regulation because clarity is difficult to access when we are bracing, spinning, or overriding ourselves. From there, we can begin to reclaim the parts of ourselves we left behind, redefine the beliefs and roles that no longer fit, reveal what is true, and rise into a life that actually includes us.
Not in a straight line. Life is rarely that tidy.
We return. We circle back. We meet another layer. We listen again.
The work is a spiral, not a staircase.
2 years old — Saint-Denis, France. I had no idea how many roads would eventually lead me here.
Learning to Receive
For years, money was complicated for me.
I was raised with messages that made it feel almost suspect, and for a long time I struggled with charging for work that came naturally to me. If helping people mattered so much to me, should I really be paid well for it?
Today, I see money very differently.
Money is energy. It comes and it goes. It is part of the exchange we need to live in the world we live in. How much money you have does not determine your value. Your worth was never tied to a number in a bank account.
But you are worthy of receiving.
You are worthy of being compensated for your time, your experience, your work, and what you bring into the world.
And receiving has probably been one of my greatest lessons.
I did not realize how often I was hiding behind my offerings — giving, helping, serving — while quietly avoiding the other half of the exchange.
Receiving.
Receiving money. Receiving support. Receiving recognition. Receiving the acknowledgment that what I offer has value.
I even had to learn how to receive a simple thank you.
For years, if someone thanked me, my instinct was often to give it right back: “No, thank you.” Or to brush it aside with, “Oh, it was nothing.”
I did not realize I was deflecting the very thing someone was trying to give me.
Receiving taught me to pause.
To let the appreciation land.
To simply say, “You’re welcome.”
It sounds like such a small thing. But for someone who had become so accustomed to giving, even allowing gratitude to come toward me without immediately pushing it away became part of the practice.
I had become very comfortable giving.
Receiving asked something different of me.
It asked me to stay visible.
To allow someone to say, “Yes, this matters to me. Yes, what you offer has value. Yes, I want to invest in receiving it.”
And perhaps that has been another part of my becoming: learning that I can give generously without disappearing inside the giving.
I can serve and receive.
Both can be true.
Because I Know What It Feels Like
I know the shape of hiding.
And I know what years of hiding taught me.
When you spend enough time watching from the shadows, you begin to notice things other people miss.
I notice the woman who is smiling while something behind her eyes tells another story.
I hear the “I’m fine” that does not feel fine.
I notice when someone is making herself smaller, holding something back, disappearing into the room, or carrying something she has not yet found the words to name.
Sometimes she does not have to tell me she is hiding.
I can see her.
Not because I can read minds.
Because I know that hiding place.
I lived there.
What began, in part, as a way of navigating my own world became one of the deepest gifts I now bring to my work: the ability to see beyond the role someone is playing and notice the person underneath it.
I also know what it feels like to have a desire and immediately talk yourself out of it. To know you are capable and still question whether you have the right to take up space. To sense a truth in your body while your mind builds a case against it.
I know what it is to see clearly for everyone else and still struggle to trust what you see for yourself.
That does not mean I have lived every story my clients bring to me. I have not.
But I recognize the pattern of leaving yourself out of your own life.
And I recognize the moment something begins to change.
It is often quiet at first.
A no that finally feels honest.
A desire you stop dismissing.
A boundary you keep.
A truth you say out loud.
A moment when you realize you no longer want to earn your place through usefulness.
Those moments may look small from the outside.
They are not small.
They are the return.
Sometimes being seen is where the return begins.
New York City — photographed by Klodiana Alia.
What I Know Now
At fifteen, I woke up in a hospital wondering why I was still here.
I spent many years looking for the answer as though purpose were something hidden somewhere ahead of me, waiting to be found.
What I know now is that my life has not been a straight path toward becoming someone else.
It has been a long road back to the woman who was there all along.
The intuitive girl. The woman who knew she was enough before she learned to doubt it. The person who could listen beneath words. The woman with desires of her own. The guide. The teacher. The one who could be soft and powerful, caring and boundaried, deeply present for others without disappearing from herself.
And there is another part of this becoming that I am still living.
I do not want to hide anymore.
For years, standing at the edges helped me feel safe. It also taught me how to see.
But I no longer believe I have to remain invisible in order to use that gift.
I want to be seen.
Not simply for the sake of being seen, but because I know there is work I am here to do. There are women I know I can help. And I cannot fully offer what I am here to give while keeping myself in the shadows.
Perhaps this is part of my becoming too.
Learning that I can use what I learned in the shadows without continuing to live there.
I do not believe becoming ends. We keep meeting more of ourselves as life changes us. We forget. We remember. We outgrow an old shape. We return again.
But I no longer think I am becoming because something is missing.
I am becoming because more of who I already am is ready to be lived.
Joshua Tree National Park with my son, Shawn — July 2026.
My “Why”
6 years old — Benicarló, Spain
If I were to sum up my “why” in a single sentence, it would be this:
I help women stop disappearing from their own lives and return to the woman who has been there all along — so they can trust what they know, honor what they want, and live as themselves.
Because I believe she is already there.
Not waiting to be fixed. Not waiting to become more worthy. Not waiting for permission.
Sometimes she simply needs enough safety, enough space, and the right support to hear herself again.
To be seen.
To remember what she knows.
And eventually, to let herself be seen too.
That is the work I am here to do.
