I’m a daughter to a father who never showed emotional range. As a young girl, it was confusing to always see him with a permanent smile, like a mask of ever-present happiness that intuitively felt off putting. No one else in my life was like this; everyone around me, including myself, expressed fluctuating feelings both verbally and non-verbally. I became very skilled at reading the subtleties in people’s faces and body language.

Looking back now, I see that my dad suppressed all that he felt, and those suppressed emotions would erupt like a big explosion when certain triggers activated his inner child wounds. These outbursts sometimes caused him to black out, and he would even forget the intensity of the emotion and expression that had just overtaken him. Subconsciously, I began to model his behavior, trying to grow closer to him in the only way I knew how. When I became aware of this pattern in my early 20s, it catalyzed a deep healing journey of shadow work, emotional alchemy, and somatic healing.

As a schoolteacher, husband, and father, I can now see how he did the best he could to show up consistently, to be reliable, and to embody leadership. But his inability to express his emotions openly created distance in our relationship, in his marriage to my mom, and likely even limited the professional connections he made at work.

I haven’t always felt compassionate toward him. For many years, I was angry at him for not being the man I wanted him to be. Before I developed the mindset I have today, I wished he had more control over his emotions. Now, what I truly want for him is more peace in his mind and body. I want him to be transparent about what he experiences on the inside, so we can have a more intimate and heart-open relationship. I want him to feel safe enough to seek emotional support. And while these desires are specific to him, they are also what I hope for all humans to awaken to in this lifetime.

I feel deeply that my soul chose to incarnate as his daughter. In my view, our relationship—and all parent-child relationships—is karmic; meaning we preselected our family relationships before incarnating on Earth, with predetermined core challenges to work through in this lifetime. These challenges are divinely designed to help us refine and remember the wholeness of who we truly are at a Soul level. Spiritual seekers often resonate with the idea that our pain becomes our purpose, or that our karma—our greatest challenges—leads us to our dharma, our purposeful mission in this life, as understood in Indian spiritual tradition.

Now, I find myself in the professional role of leading men to reconnect to their emotions through a new approach. By using trance states, sensation, and attraction as tools, I help guide men into deeper feeling. I invite them to receive unconditional love and acceptance, sometimes for the first time in their lives. Since the spring of 2021, I have been guiding men through their deepest layers, helping them release the stifled tears they’ve been holding and melt into my compassionate heart. I feel I have truly landed in my purpose: to awaken humanity to the importance of our feeling bodies, including our sexual impulses, the full spectrum of our emotions, and the embodied experience of love.