In light of new beginnings for Aries season and the Persian New Year (I have %7 Persian blood apparently), I am going to create today from and for all that came before. This is the best way to honor something new without being delulu–to honor the past. When we move from water to fire we get volcanic Earth. Something I am for sure an expert in.
I grew up breathing in the weight of unspoken things, addiction, abuse, love, lies, learning—before I even had the language for it—that truth, when silenced, festers. Fear a foul ghost.
That true words locked away in a drawer can carry more force than false words spoken aloud. I learned that pain, when left unnamed, can consume a person from the inside out. I witnessed it in my mother’s longing, in my father’s addiction, in the letters that never found their way to the hands that needed to hold them.
And so, of course, I became obsessed with raw truth.
Because I know what it feels like to read something and feel it crack me open. I know the power of words that have been held back for too long, the electricity they carry when finally released. I understand, in the marrow of my being, that the difference between a life lived freely and a life suffocated by silence often comes down to whether or not we dare to speak.
This is why I help others put their raw truth on the page, into the song, into spiritual practice. Because I know what it means to have something insid that is too big to hold alone. I know that truth doesn’t just live in the mind—it lives in the body, in the breath, in the shaking hands that dare to write the thing that was never meant to be spoken. I know that art is not just expression; it is liberation.
When I guide someone to put their truth into words, into song and ritual, I’m doing more than teaching craft. I’m leading them into that sacred, terrifying space where truth meets body, where breath meets sound, where the unspoken finally takes form. I’m guiding them to the place where the silences stop taking shape—where they dissolve, unravel, and make way for something wilder, freer, truer than they ever imagined possible.
Because I have lived in the silence. And I will not allow others to be swallowed by it.
This is not just my passion. This is a calling. There is no confusion on how much do I charge, or what to create. This is my life blood, my pulse, everything I do needs to happen regardless.
Join us to tap into your soul love in a online retreat called Your Soul Speaks March 27th 9a PST-12:30 for energetically healing meditation and shamanic memory based writing - come listen to all that sustains and lives beyond death that you are and feel the tension melt.
This story doesn’t just live in my memory—it lives in me. It shaped the way I move through the world, the way I listen, the way I feel words before they ever touch the page.
Yet, beneath the surface, other silences begin to take shape.
When we lack access to the profound power and love residing within the body—not merely in its physical health or ideal state, but as an eternal essence, a knowing borne from direct experience—we become far more susceptible to control. To acquiesce to the status quo, to refrain from questioning the narratives of separation perpetuated by shameful figures, and to accept the idealization of beauty devoid of the pulse of passion. We have been conditioned to perceive anxiety as a problem with us ,when it is actually a cosmic calling for creative change.
Yet, beneath the surface, other silences begin to take shape.
I often articulate my thoughts as if they were indisputable truths, believing them with every fervent, desperate fiber of my being. Yet, the truth is that the moment I fully embody this belief—when it presses into my bones, when it hums beneath my skin—it is fleeting. And then it’s gone. Dissolved into the air like breath on a cold morning. In that space, I must begin again, if I am to meet the great mystery as she moves through us, shifting, unfolding, dissolving, re-forming. She is the benevolent wind and the rain, the rhythm of something ancient that lingers long after we have vanished.
Throughout my childhood, I existed in a world of my own making, weaving stories that others could step into, linger within, or pass by unnoticed. I now recognize that I still do. At the age of nine, I stumbled upon letters my mother had written to my father—letters heavy with her discontent, her terror that if she left, he would kill her. He had told her so. Again and again. A slow, quiet violence stretched across time.
In an ironic twist, she chose to volunteer at a domestic abuse center, offering the very support she never received. A form of salvation she could not claim for herself. The letters, written in her slanted, cryptic handwriting—so like my own—were difficult to decipher. But even before I fully understood their weight, I was entranced. Whenever I could slip into her room undetected, I would pull open the heavy drawer of my great-grandmother’s dresser—the one Barb had inherited—and steal glances, feeling the illicit thrill bloom in my chest. The scent of aged paper mixed with faint traces of her perfume, with something else, something raw. It felt sacred, unspoken. My fingers trembled as I unfolded the pages, my eyes devouring each word, my breath slowing, as if afraid to disturb the ghosts lingering there.
As I read, I felt myself split—part of me grounded in the moment, part of me hovering just above, watching. The words became incantations, whispering of loss, of entrapment, of the unbearable weight of staying. My child-mind could not yet wrap itself around the full horror of it, but I knew, in some deep and unnameable way, that I was touching something forbidden. Something that had shaped me long before I could understand it.
Yet, beneath the surface, other silences begin to take shape.
By that stage, I had already begun crafting my own stories—mostly graphic novels starring my dog, Snowy, and Fluffy, embarking on fantastical journeys to the moon or engaging in impossible feats like playing basketball. But these letters—my mother’s letters—held a different kind of power. They weren’t stories; they were something raw, something forbidden. They held a charge, an electricity that made my pulse quicken. The mere thought of them drew me back, again and again, with a hunger I could not explain. It was not joy. Not exactly. It was the thrill of trespassing into the unspeakable, of touching the sharp edge of truth and feeling it cut.
I would wait until the house was silent, until I was certain no one would see me. Then, carefully, I would slip into her room, my bare feet pressing into the cool wood floor, my breath shallow with anticipation. The dresser stood like an altar—ancient, heavy, bearing the weight of more than just objects. My fingers, small and trembling, would curl around the drawer handle, easing it open inch by inch. The scent of old paper, of perfume lingering in fabric, of something unnameable and ghostly, filled my nostrils. And there they were: folded sheets, edges softened by time, ink smudged from the pressure of her hand.
As I read, I felt untethered, as if I were floating just above myself, hovering between the words and my own breath. My mother’s fears bled into my mind, seeping in like ink through fragile pages. If she left, he would kill her. He had told her so. And yet she stayed. My child-mind couldn’t hold the full weight of those words, but they clung to me nonetheless, curling around my ribs, pressing into my chest like a secret too large to keep.
Still, I returned, again and again, drawn to them as if they were a spell—one I didn’t understand but couldn’t resist.
Yet, beneath the surface, other silences began to take shape.
Some letters were addressed to my grandmother, whose own mother had left fractures in her. My grandmother, a wild-eyed hippie in the late ‘60s, lost herself in acid trips and the arms of mafia men who subsidized their rent. My mother’s letters to her were filled with pleas and confessions—a housewife grasping for a life beyond the walls closing in around her.
There were letters to Barb’s sister, my cherished Auntie Diane, a hospice nurse with a gentleness my mother clung to like a lifeline. Barb and Diane loved one another with a purity that shimmered between them, love expressed through words, through embraces, through the space they made for one another in a world that had denied them safety. Ten years her senior, Diane had mothered my mother in ways my grandmother could not, while my grandfather—a predator, an alcoholic, a specter of harm—remained distant, yet ever-present.
Diane’s letters were the only ones to receive a response. The ones addressed to my father, to my grandmother, remained trapped within that heavy old dresser, silent witnesses to a pain left unanswered. I do not know if they ever reached the hands for which they were meant. But I know that when Barb finally left, my father’s fear of loss became real—not a fear of losing her, but of losing himself. Without her, he unraveled. Addiction swallowed him whole. And in the wake of her absence, he let go completely into death.
This kind of heartbreak can hold a person hostage. It is not the breaking open we mystics learn to endure, the expansion and contraction of the heart that teaches us how to live inside grief without being consumed by it. No—his was the kind of heartbreak with no tools, no ties to anything real in the unseen–his undomesticated healing Souther Italian ancestry replaced by the promise of money and success. The American Dream robs the soul. My father died inside the heartbreak that seals a person inside themselves, that festers, that devours. That destroys you inside of silence.
Yet, even here, beneath the surface, other silences begin to take shape.
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