I often say that my life has unfolded in layers - some tender, some chaotic, some luminous, all of them woven together by a spiritual thread I didn’t know was there when I was young. Looking back across the inner landscapes I’ve travelled - Deaf identity, mental-health struggles, visionary experiences, shamanic initiation, yoga, Ayurveda, art - I see now that my creativity has always been less a hobby and more a lifeline. A way of making sense of the worlds I walk between. A way of speaking when spoken language felt too limited or too loud or entirely unreachable.
The Deaf World as My First Spiritual Territory
Before I ever learned the language of spirit guides, plant allies, or dream-visions, I learned the language of silence. Or, more accurately, the language that grows inside silence. Being part of the Deaf world shaped my sensitivity, not just toward communication, but toward energy itself. When sound is less dominant, you start to feel life differently: through vibration, through subtle shifts in atmosphere, through the way a person’s presence enters a room before their voice does.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but this kind of sensing is profoundly shamanic.
As a child, I often retreated into inner worlds - not because the outer world rejected me, but because I felt something ancient stirring behind everyday life. I could feel the emotional weather of a person before I understood their words. I could sense when a place was holding grief or when an animal was curious or when a tree felt “awake.” These weren’t fantastical ideas to me. They were simply reality.
What I didn’t yet understand was that this way of moving through the world would later become the foundation of my spiritual practice.
Mental Health as a Portal, Not a Poison
My journey through mental-health struggles cracked something open in me. I won’t romanticise it - there were days when the world felt like mist and I was losing my grasp on myself. But there were also moments of profound revelation, when the boundary between inner and outer reality thinned and I saw glimpses of something larger guiding me.
Years later, I would learn that many shamans, mystics, and spiritual practitioners describe similar thresholds - what some traditions call a “shamanic sickness” or “calling illness.” At the time, though, it simply felt like falling apart.
But falling apart was what allowed me to fall inward.
It was during this period that I began experiencing visions - other-reality scenes, encounters with presences that didn’t feel like hallucinations but like teachers. They came with instructions: “Listen deeper.” “Walk slowly.” “Follow the thread.” They didn’t heal me instantly, but they offered direction when I needed it.
It was these experiences, woven through the Deaf world’s silence and my own internal storms, that prepared me for what came next: my shamanic initiation.
The Night the Spirits Called My Name
My initiation did not come with drums or ceremonies or mentors. It came alone, at night, in the middle of a period of deep transformation. I experienced what felt like a spiritual rupture - a tearing of the veil between my human self and something vast, ancient, and unyielding.
I encountered what I can only describe as ancestral forces, and they were not gentle. They demanded honesty. They demanded surrender. They demanded that I stop hiding from my gifts.
I felt stripped, undone, emptied, and then rebuilt. Not into someone new, but into someone I had always been.
When it was over, the message was clear: You are a shamanic warrior.
A warrior not in the sense of violence or conquest, but in the sense of courage. Someone who confronts the shadow - my own and that of the world. Someone who walks between realities and returns with medicine. Someone who must learn to hold power responsibly, humbly, and in devotion to healing.
The Path of the Yogic Heart
In the aftermath of this initiation, I found myself drawn to yoga - not as Western fitness culture portrays it, but as a spiritual discipline. I became a devoted practitioner, studying the Yoga Sutras not just as philosophy but as a way of living.
The sutras became my compass. The yamas and niyamas offered grounding ethics. Meditation offered clarity. Asana offered a way of communing with my body after years of feeling fractured from it. Pranayama became a bridge between the worlds I navigated internally and the physical reality I walked through daily.
Yoga softened the fire of my shamanic warrior path without extinguishing it. It taught me compassion alongside courage, discernment alongside intensity, surrender alongside strength.
Ayurveda: Learning the Language of the Body and the Earth
My journey eventually guided me toward Ayurveda, where I am now deep in study. Ayurveda feels like an earthly companion to my shamanic and yogic practices - a system that understands the body as an ecosystem and the spirit as a subtle force shaped by daily living. It teaches that healing is not an event but a lifestyle, a relationship, a conversation with nature itself.
Through Ayurveda, I’ve begun to understand my body’s rhythms and misalignments. I’m learning to treat myself with gentleness, nourishment, and ritual rather than constant spiritual pressure. Ayurveda has become another layer of my creative and spiritual practice, influencing the way I move, breathe, and create art.
Art as Invocation: Poetry, Nude Landscapes, and Surreal Nature
Creativity has always been my bridge between worlds. My poetry emerges from the same place my visions do - those liminal spaces where emotion, spirit, and observation merge. I write to give shape to the ineffable, to translate what I experience with senses that don’t always fit neatly into spoken words.
Photography became another spiritual language for me. My creative edits - nudes woven into surreal landscapes, bodies merging with stones, skies, branches, and rivers - are attempts to express what it feels like to exist between realms.
The nude, for me, is not erotic but essential. It is vulnerability, truth, the soul without costume. When I place the nude body within nature or surreal elements, I’m telling the story of how spirit inhabits form, how energy flows through flesh, how the human and the earthly are not separate.
These images are my visual prayers.
Walking Forward: Aspirations on the Shamanic-Creative Path
My future aspirations are simple but not small. I want to continue weaving together the threads of shamanism, yoga, Ayurveda, and art into something that feels like service. I want to create work - poetry, photography, teachings - that honours the Deaf world, honours mental-health journeys, honours the unseen realms, honours the body and the earth.
I hope to one day guide others through their own spiritual awakenings, not as a guru, but as a companion. A fellow traveler. A bridge-walker.
Most of all, I hope to keep living with integrity - to embody the shamanic warrior with humility, to practice yoga with sincerity, to study Ayurveda with devotion, and to create art that reflects the fullness of my lived experience.
Because ultimately, my journey is not about transcending reality but embracing all of it - every realm, every shadow, every silence, every vision - and learning to walk with purpose, beauty, and truth.
