Or at least, that’s how it arrived. A riddle of direct experience that I’ve been curious about ever since.
I was deep in a liminal space, somewhere between dreamy meditation and a White Tantric bodywork activation, when an expansion hit my nervous system. I opened my eyes partway and found myself surrounded by the Sri Yantra. Not a picture of it. The thing itself, a geometry of interlacing triangles hovering about three feet above my body and reaching out in every direction. I wasn’t looking at it so much as sitting inside it.
I felt it lock in.
Then I heard words sounding through my whole being, not through my ears:
“I am Sundari.”
I’d like to tell you I responded with poise. I lay there. My body hummed. I didn’t move for a long time.
I didn’t know who or what she was…
But as I began researching, thigs started together. What I had been experiencing, developing and coming to know through lived experience began to make sense.
I had been teaching Kundalini yoga within the Raj lineage for a few years. I had just returned from Bali, where I had stayed with a lead facilitator of Kundalini bodywork.
We had become friends, and the lines between the personal and professional had blurred. Yet my reasons for being there for fasting, living and practising Kundalini embodiment alongside him gradually revealed themselves to me as a process of integrated remembrance.
Later, sitting with Marya penzola in a tea circle, she looked directly at me.
She told me that my energy was among the most powerful she had felt in the room for a long time, yet I said the least. Then she asked what had brought me to Bali.
When I explained that I wanted to learn Kundalini bodywork, she smiled.
Her response was, essentially: “Honey, you don’t need to learn it. You already have it.”
Today, I call my expression of that work somatic de-armouring.
What’s a blonde white woman got to do with India?
Is it too out the gate to say that I remember living there in another lifetime? That I experience myself today as a collection, in essence, of lifetimes that have gone before me?
That’s what I would say if I weren’t concerned about what anyone thought of me.
Oh, wait. I’m saying it.
I also feel that I carry memories and codes of ancient Arabia and China. These memories don’t arrive as stories of being someone exalted or high-ranking. Some are repetitive, enduring and gruelling. I remember physical labour. Building. Working with the body through long days of effort.
In this lifetime, I feel called to a different duty: to explore the full spectrum.
And for that, I arrived as a blonde girl born in New Zealand, with more bloodline stories than a family tree could hold.
Norwegian, Scottish, Welsh, English, Irish… believe me, the ancestry goes on.
What that has given me is an identity made of many threads. A living mosaic. A kaleidoscope of histories, influences and ways of knowing.
That is how I have experienced this life so far.
Society likes us to pick a lane. To make ourselves easy to explain.
Yet the thread running through my life is an ongoing study of reality: how we perceive it, how we participate in shaping it, and how we come to understand ourselves within it.
I study. I experience. I break things down. I integrate them and share what I learn.
The four pursuits—dharma, artha, kama and moksha—give me a framework for exploring purpose, prosperity, desire and liberation within a complete life.
I am living the process while sharing the process.
Direct experience becomes embodied knowledge. Then comes the work of finding language for it, crafting an understanding that I can offer to others.
There is a question I continue to sit with: what does it mean to serve and help keep a lineage alive when, from the outside, some might wonder what business I have teaching it?
My relationship with this wisdom asks me to keep studying, to honour its origins, and to take responsibility for what I share.
And still, it comes through me.
Looking back, I recognise the presence I felt as a child in the one I later came to know as Sundari. The name came later. The relationship had already begun.
I have been walking with her ever since.
Learning to listen. Learning couarge to be true
Aligned with the Divine Mother’s will.
