On Coming Home to Yourself
Originally published on my Substack ‘ The Art of Sacred Space’
If I had to split my life into two lanes, I’d say it’s been primarily devoted to two things: getting to know myself deeply, and creating beauty - design, poetry, singing, music. Creative work was deeply a part of my life for a long time, until one day it wasn’t. My creative path has been anything but a straight line and more like the Paul Klee doodle below:
“A line is a dot that went for a walk.”
If my creative spark was that dot that went for a walk, mine got a passport and went on a really long world tour.
Back in 2006, I used to write poetry for absolutely no one - back when the internet and blogs still felt like private journals that happened to be online, and no one was developing their personalities into an Instagram content strategy. I was creating purely for the act of self-expression and release, in it’s simplest, most honest form.
I didn’t know it then, but I was embodying creativity in the most important authentic way I would for a long while. It was around then while in architecture school I also had a small musical act with a friend singing Armenian folk music for tiny crowds at university and cultural events. No big vision or plan, just creating and channeling art for the sake of art.
Then life happened as it tends to. I wrote less and less, I sang less and less until I just put all the creative work on the back-burner. What followed was almost two decades of a corporate career mastering things that were unfortunately, slowly hollowing me out.
Fancy titles at trendy tech startups. Making an “impact” through my work. Drinking the kool-aid, becoming one with the kool-aid. The ambition of climbing even higher and proving myself even more sucking up all the air in the room until, like a drought, I realized all the other things I loved and once watered began to wither away.
A resume that checked every box the world told me to check. My “real” job and real work of launching brands, making deals, being a serious professional woman with a serious professional title - took up all the room while the creative things - design, music, writing, self-expression - got filed under “maybe later.” One fed my ego and paid the bills. The other things fed my soul but somehow became less important.
What I eventually came to accept was that an accomplished and well-decorated life that feels good in some ways can still be hollow and unfulfilling in the ways that matter most. Even worse, it can be a form of deep avoidance. My career, while aspects of it were meaningful, became more and more an elegant distraction from much more confronting questions such as:
What am I truly meant to do with my life?
Why do I keep going deeper down this path of pursuing entirely un-creative work for a living?
Who am I without all this? Who am I when I stop performing this version of success that serves other people more than myself?
How do I get back to doing things that give me joy?
My ability to finally sit honestly with these questions came only as a result of the years of inner work I had been doing. It wasn’t that I was perfectly healed. It’s that I finally wanted the truth more than comfort. So my higher self spoke louder into my consciousness the many truths that became harder and harder to ignore.
‘You’re avoiding the inevitable’
‘You are letting fear programming hold you back’
‘You are qualified and ready for more even if you don’t feel ready’
‘You can’t minimize the consequences of being misaligned forever, it will catch up’
‘The cost of not changing is too great'‘
Just to name a few.
There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes not from working hard but from trying to force alignment in places you’ve outgrown. And eventually, you can’t outrun it. You need to do something, anything that means something to you about it, even if the action you take doesn’t make perfect sense in that moment.
In order to change, one must realize and feel the cost of inner misalignment - when the outer and inner worlds don’t quite gel. When the things that light you up aren’t what you spend the majority of your time doing, and when you have natural talents and gifts that are being underutilized. In these conditions it’s usually that something inside is being fundamentally avoided, minimized or neglected entirely.
As I grew into newer versions of myself, the career I’d carefully constructed felt more and more foreign to the person I was becoming. The things that served me once no longer did. The inner narrative, the rationalized trade-offs, the fear of outgrowing an identity without knowing concretely what came next - all of it humming in the background and impossible to ignore.
The reckoning, when it came, didn’t happen in a boardroom. It happened as a gradual but ultimately intentional journey of looking deeply inside and processing what I hadn’t yet confronted.
Many moments of frustration, honest conversations with mentors, plant medicine ceremonies, therapy that worked, therapy that sucked - the unglamorous work of sitting with questions I wasn’t sure I wanted honest answers to. The journey of learning how to face what I never realized I even needed to. The journey of accepting change and grieving old identities before I could release them, which is as uncomfortable as it sounds and as necessary as it gets.
The most liberating realization was when I deeply felt in my bones that nothing I did (or didn’t do) needed to make sense to anyone but me. Most people will intellectually agree with this, yet far fewer can embody that kind of freedom. Even fewer do the hard work of embodying this belief at an innate, subconscious level.
Yet that is what sets apart the people that stay stuck and the people that turn a corner and grow.
A turning point arrived one afternoon in New York, in a five hour long Sound Journey, and a hero dose of psilocybin. Thanks to an incredible Sound facilitator and a shruti box, it was the first time in years I’d let myself sing freely without thinking about how I sounded. Completely lost in the music, something cracked open. The insight that came through was that my voice wasn’t just art - it was medicine. It was healing. And I wasn’t performing. I was finally free to let sound just flow out of me, my body as an instrument and vessel for magic.
It was around then that I started integrating the insight that I was the only thing that ever got in my own way. And that we don’t need permission, qualifications or justifications to take our creative lives as seriously (or un-seriously) as we want.
In 2023 I completed Sound School training in the lineage developed by sound researcher Alexandre Tannous. I began offering my own sound journeys. Rooms full of people going inward into meditation, while I play instruments, get everyone vocalizing and vibrating, souls traveling somewhere no itinerary could find without ever leaving their mat or opening their eyes.
It’s the kind of work that resists a simple elevator pitch or explanation, and it was only the kind of work I could do after I became the kind of person that didn’t feel the need to have one. It didn’t have to make sense to me, or to anyone. But I understood it in my body, intuitively and felt so inspired by that understanding that it bridged the gap in a meaningful way.
The work of sound healing/journeys a.k.a “sound baths” is to me some of the most mystical but profound healing work that exists. To sit in stillness requires a deep trust and commitment to the process of simply letting go.
This comes alive in the yogic concept of ‘Anahata’ meaning the ‘unstruck sound.’ Anahata points to the idea that there is a frequency that exists beneath all material things including audible sounds. It’s what exists before anything is made or explained or performed for anyone. So in terms of Sound, it’s not the sound you hear but the sound you don’t, rather you feel it and connect to it. Like the creative pulse that was always there, quietly humming underneath all the surface noise that we are conditioned into making for the world, while ignoring what is real and true for us deep down inside.
In that way, re-discovering my creative spark that never left, that exists in eternity, beyond all things, is like discovering Anahata. What is always there and available to you. You just have to find your way back to it. And the truth is, finding yourself somewhere else, somewhere you don’t really want to be anymore or that doesn’t serve you isn’t a failure. It’s information. All of it is part of the journey and the information.
The home you live in, the relationships you stay in, the career you keep showing up to, the beliefs you carry without questioning - all of this is data and all of those things are mirrors pointing back to you, inviting you to see yourself truly, more deeply, more honestly. And if things don’t feel good, when things don’t serve your highest and best self, you should probably be thinking about moving on.
I’ve scaled companies, built teams, transformed homes, held hundreds of events and facilitated dozens of ceremonies. None of it compares to holding space for someone in a genuinely transformational moment of their life. For me, the common thread is always the same: creating the conditions that help you alchemize your journey, grow, step through to the next chapter and ultimately bring you back home to yourself.
Because there’s no place like home.
That’s what I’m building today. A community for people who are devoted to the inner journey of being more of who they authentically and deeply are. If that’s you - you already know it. Welcome home.
