I didn't come looking for enlightenment.

I came because something in me hurt —

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and I couldn’t find a way out of it. And so I found myself (over the last 30 years), in many environments where people seemed to be looking for enlightenment - which, for me was a term I didn’t really get. What I wanted was something embarrassingly simple by contrast: I just wanted to feel better.

I grew up in the Midlands in the UK, in a Muslim Pakistani family that didn’t leave much room for self-expression. In a lineage where violence was considered a normal way to raise children. I was lonely in ways that went very deep, and very quiet. And inside all of that, despite all of that or maybe because of it, something in me kept finding doorways to a freer life.

So when I first started ‘seeking’, I wasn’t looking for the big E. I just wanted to feel better. At a level that went all the way down. To stop feeling so trapped inside myself so protective, so watchful, and so alone often even in company.

One of the first teachers significant to me was Amma, the Indian ‘hugging guru’. Her way was to radiate the divine mother as a field for all who came to her to bathe in and of course she gave hugs for hours and even for days at a time!

Love. Simplicity. Power. Transcendence.

I simply sat in that wordless field and drank it in.

But my ability to truly receive that visceral transmission was limited. I benefitted and yet I was hungry for something that met me more precisely where I was. I definitely needed more handholds to be able to experience the bliss of Divine Oneness that Amma was offering.

In my work today I call this ability to receive the ‘love letter box’. It’s the shape through which we receive, and through which we simultaneously filter out what our system doesn’t recognise as love or contact. This shape isn’t about your ideals, your aspirations, or your beliefs about love and partnership. It’s crafted from actual lived experience. And there’s usually a dissonance between what you think love is, and what your ‘love letter box’ actually lets through.

This window of receptivity exists at a deeper structural level of being. Our foundational experiences of love and connection remain alive in us and they hold firm the boundaries of this ‘love letter box’ — until we meet what brings us softening, opening, healing.

The softening of the shape of my ‘love letter box’ began in my early 30s. I was in a new relationship, in the first flushes of being in-love, open to Life in so many fresh ways that I pretty much blindly skipped into a path of couples Tantra. And so I met another key teacher: Ma Ananda Sarita, who radiated wisdom, love, vitality and humour across a spectrum that blew my mind. In one moment she’d be offering a discourse on the subtle nuances of a meditation practice; in the next, on the intricacies, clashes and ecstatic possibilities of sexual life - and teaching specific ways of attaining this.

Eight or so years into that path, a path that was clearly about relationship, I met a new teacher whose work showed me that, I hadn’t even begun to truly learn about relating. He was from the US, Brooklyn to be precise and was about to teach a four year training in a unique healing modality in Holland. My ego put up futile resistance. My heart’s decision was totally clear and unwavering. Dragging my feet initially, I followed my heart and entered the body of work of Jason Shulman: a Zen lineage holder, Kabbalah master, and above all a teacher of nonduality who emphasised the need to embrace the egoic-separative self with kindness.

Before this, I hadn’t encountered a path that didn’t ask me to transcend myself but to include myself.

Not to fix.

Not bypass.

But to actually relate to myself more clearly and dearly.

This focus on relating as the root of healing, beginning with myself, opened my receptivity and softened my ‘love-letter box’ on multiple levels of being. And of course the word Kabbalah itself means ‘to receive.’ Now, 18 years later, I live, teach and devote myself to this work. The harvest of this devotion is the ongoing expansion of my receptivity and the enrichment of relationships spanning across my personal life and my work. Along this path I also began to get an inkling of what people were reaching for when they aimed towards enlightenment. I just have a different name for it. I call it - the largest relationship.

This perspective started to form during the four-year Nondual Healing training. A path that held my hand, right where I was: in the middle of a busy life as a Rudolf Steiner class teacher, then at weekends a budding Tantra teacher and hidden from most people, a woman desperate to have a child, navigating a heartbreakingly painful infertility journey with my then husband. So many faces/facets jostling for space.

The one place any and all of them found a home was in this nondual healing work. And here, over time, I discovered that these terms, awakening, enlightenment, and healing, were all actually teachings about relationship. Not relationship in the usual sense between people, but a dimensional shift into the warp and weft of relating, going into the granular territory of how we relate to everything: to thoughts, feelings, conclusions about our past, our sensations, our body itself, life themes -like grief, illness, love, sex, money, power, culture. This path opened up a universe of exploring these atomic bonds of relating.

These days how I see enlightenment and understand healing is that both are descriptions of relationship.

Most of our everyday experience is from within a consciousness constellated around the experience of being a separate individual. We live in the tension of the urge to fully being the individual we are and navigating the powerful need for true connection. Enlightenment paths seem to promise the ultimate relationship — union with everything, with God, Life, the Universe, Oneness, Wholeness, of course we want this. But so often the small individual self gets lost or overlooked in that vastness - or even taught that it’s unimportant and illusory. I always had issues with this perspective. What I found in Jason’s teachings was a path where the separative consciousness most of us experience daily life through is not transcended or discarded, but included — included with profound, precision engineered kindness into the larger relationships we are inherently embedded within.

At last I could breathe.

My knowing (fuelled by intuition and varied peak experiences) that life is one field a singular wholeness and my desire to inhabit this dimension of interconnectedness, to live this, finally had a home and I had the freedom to fully embrace the small, imperfect, still-unfolding being I was and still am all at the same time.

Stay with me.

I’ll be sharing writing that weaves sweat and tears experience with philosophy, with phenomenological existential themes that touch our tender hearts and illuminate our lives. I’ll write about the world of inner transformation and healing. About parenting too, because Yes! I did finally become a mother, later in life, post-menopause even. My two daughters arrived through the extraordinary grace of adoption. I’ll write about Tantra and the body and what deep sex and intimacy actually requires. From my almost twenty years of working with people in a healing practice, I’ll bring what I’ve learned and am still learning about what human beings are actually carrying inside them and what they need. About how the everyday moments of a life open us to understand teachings all the wisdom paths have pointed to for eons.

And underneath all of it, there is a question, which I’ll keep returning to and exploring with you: What does it look like to slowly, imperfectly, sometimes painfully, become more capable of love. Not the idea of it. The actual thing.

Come say hello.