A window into my journey…
I didn’t decide to hop on the Spiritual Path. It found me or should I say It struck me.
I’ve always believed in miracles and in all the things that one cannot explain. As a child, I was fascinated by Jesus’s ability to walk on water or multiply breads and at the same time, I couldn’t stand going to church: it was penitence. Thankfully, at 13, my father told me I could be relieved from that chore. So I did.
But it didn’t start there. It started with the biggest tragedy of my life when my young sister committed suicide. I was 25. Her death opened a door –or an access– to the Invisible World. What I knew to be true disintegrated in front of my very eyes: all that was left was the ashes of a life that didn’t matter anymore, but a new light shone on something bigger, wider than my own existence. She wasn’t gone, she had taken on another form: she became my teacher. The roles were inverted.
And then, there was Valentine Penrose (1898-1978) who sneaked in my life during my theater studies at the Conservatoire in 2001 with a poem called The Monja (The Nun). However, it’s only in 2012 that she became the biggest influencer of my life when I was in the heart of my research on her work and life. At the time, lost in some archives in Scotland, I found myself fascinated by her passion for the Vedic Teachings and by her experiences in India studying with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in Pondicherry. Her words awakened something deep in me: there was no way back. My own journey with yoga and meditation started right there. My research forced me to find data and explanations for her words, so I read some classics often talked about in Yoga –The Upanishads, The Bhagavad Gita– to eventually discover the Buddhist Philosophy withThe Dhammapada and the teachings from Thich Nhat Hanh, the late Zen Master.
After graduating with my PhD in 2014, I traveled to India for over 5 months and followed one of her journeys from 1938. I visited and stayed at the same Ashrams, deepened my practice of meditation and yoga, and fell deeply in Love with chanting mantras (Kirtan).
A few years later, while teaching in Higher Education, I became a yoga teacher and a Mindfulness Meditation teacher. I offered a 3-credit course on Midnfulness for a couple of years at the College I was teaching at. I also taught the Mindfulness Principles in a Sangha (Spiritual Group) to groups varying from 10 to 50 participants, as well as in a meditation studio and privately.
The journey keeps unfolding with Life twisting the path over and over again. Yet, I would not want it to be any different.