In 2017 my partner's mother asked me a simple question: why do you dance?
I was a professional dancer. Years of training, money, sweat. And I had nothing. "Because I do" was the best I could manage, and it didn't survive contact with the question.
That same summer my knees gave out from pushing a body I'd been using as an instrument of ambition rather than living in. Both things landed at once: I didn't know why I was doing what I was doing, and I couldn't keep doing it.
What followed was less a plan than a fall. A Vipassana retreat. Travel. And in an Ayurvedic clinic in southern India, meeting Dr. Helen Mosimann-Kogan, who was living in a way I hadn't known was available — she knew why she thought what she thought. That was the whole of it. She was awake, and I was not.
I came to this work as a former professional avoider.
Nine years of training with Helen and The White Rabbit Reveals followed, in The Science of Acting and the holographic approach to transformation. The central idea is simple to state and takes a lifetime to work with: your external reality mirrors your internal state.
Then I did something that surprised everyone, including me. I went back to university in Flagstaff, Arizona, to study ecology — two years measuring how Utah juniper survives drought. I'd expected academia to pull me away from all of this. Instead it gave me the ground under it.
The juniper grows seventy-five feet down before it makes any real progress upward. Nothing visible happens for a long time. I recognised the shape of that immediately, and it's the honest description of what this work asks: a long unglamorous period below the surface, followed by growth that looks sudden to anyone who wasn't watching.
I've since taught this in mentoring rooms, in energy work, and — for the last two years — in English lessons, where it turns out to be startlingly useful. If you've never quite resonated with woo-woo spaces but you're still looking for something with depth in it, that's where I stand too.
