The journey of Returning home and to wholeness

On 18, October 2022, a day before I was meant to travel to India with my children—a long-awaited trip home—we had to cancel everything. I met with a traumatic accident that led to brain surgery. We never got on that flight. The heartbreak was immediate, but the healing journey that followed was something I could never have predicted.

But this story doesn’t begin in 2022. It began years earlier, in 2018, a year that broke me open. Within a span of months, I lost both of my parents and experienced the end of my marriage. The grief was immense, but what shocked me even more was how invisible that grief became in the culture I lived in. “How alone i was with my problems”

Since i have been living in Germany i have faced and recognised ways in which migrants don’t feel welcome or belong. While i did my part of integrating, learning the language and fitting in i soon realised there needs to be more room to understand racism and build bridges over obstacles of ignorance. I started creating spaces to address this with care and courage.

But in 2018 I learned that the society around me is not one that is grief-sensitive. It does not know how to hold loss, or how to support anyone leave alone, migrant mothers, who are silently holding everything together. I had created containers for others to heal but there was no real container around me for my struggles still—no cultural permission to fall apart, no system of care that recognized the unique weight of my circumstances.

So I did what I had always done: I powered through. I didn’t ask for help. I carried everything silently—grief, responsibility, rage, pain—and convinced myself that this was just how life was. No one will catch you. You have to do this alone.

Then came the accident in 2022. Another rupture. Another moment of collapse. It was terrifying, physically traumatic, and disorienting. But it also reinstated everything I had observed years earlier—that when crisis hits, the systems around me do not hold. There is no collective slowing down. There is no village.

And yet, something changed in me after the accident. This time, I began to notice not only the external absence of care—but the ways in which I had internalized it. The ways I upheld the very culture that was harming me. I didn’t just suffer because care was absent—I suffered because I never gave myself permission to ask for it.

I began to recognize my part in the suffering. The lack of boundaries. The instinct to override my needs. The belief that resilience meant never needing help. That self-worth came from doing more, faster, better.

So I started to unlearn.

Falling down taught me the many layers of rising up.

Since then, my healing has been as much about rebuilding my internal world as recovering from the external injury. I began to put clear boundaries in place. And over time, I built not just an inner container, but also an outer one—relationships, spaces, practices, and systems—that allow for growth, healing, awareness, and harmony.

Along the way, I also began to ask myself a question I now return to often:
Which spaces and people remind me of who I am not—and which allow me to be who I am?
This inquiry has become essential to how I move through the world. It’s helped me recognize the environments that support my becoming, and gently release the ones that do not.

Living with an invisible disability also opened up new awareness. I’ve had to confront internalized ableism—my own and that of the world around me. A story shared with me stayed close to my heart: a friend recounted a conversation with Dr. Victor Pineda, a disability rights advocate, in which he said:

“You are not the disability. You have different ways of perceiving and moving, but the built world and cultural ways of being create the obstacles and the handicap.”

Dr. Pineda also shared how, while many describe India as inaccessible, he experienced unexpected care there—strangers spontaneously carrying his body up hundreds of temple steps and into the Ganges. No infrastructure. Just people willing to respond with presence and compassion.

That story stayed with me. It reminded me that accessibility is not just about infrastructure—it’s about culture. It’s the container we create for one another.

And so now, three years after our original travel plans, after the accident, I find myself back in Jaipur, reclaiming what we lost. The trip we never took. The homecoming that was delayed. We are here now, and it feels like a quiet triumph.

I still carry the memory of trauma in my body. As I prepared to travel again, anxiety showed up. I saw it in the fear of autumn leaves on the ground. I felt it in my decision to avoid cycling before the trip. These choices might not make sense to others—but to me, they are acts of wisdom and self-preservation. I listen now. I honor the signals.

Throughout all of this, yoga therapy and Ayurveda have remained the only systems that have never failed me. They’ve been there from the beginning—rooted, whole, and alive. That is why I continue to share this wisdom in its original and complete form. It has always been my practice—as a yoga teacher living in Germany—to offer these teachings with integrity, depth, and devotion.

My own lived experiences have given me insights into liberation, healing, and love that go beyond intellectual study or formal certification. These are lived truths, not borrowed ones. And they are what guide my practice, my teaching, and my way of being.

I’ve learned that healing is not linear. That disability is not the problem—ableism is. That grief doesn’t go away—it evolves. That the body remembers. And that slowing down is not failure—it’s wisdom.

Since 2018, I’ve endured more loss and disruption than I ever imagined I could survive. But I’ve also undergone deep transformation. I’ve learned to stop outsourcing care to broken systems. I now intentionally build a life that includes rest, slowness, softness, and space—both within and around me.

Today, I sit in India surrounded by beauty and love. I feel grounded. I feel whole. A new cycle begins.

We try again.
We reclaim what was lost.
And we begin—this time with awareness, with gratitude, and with care.

As this seven-year healing journey comes to a close, I feel myself arriving at a new threshold—not just personally, but in my work.

The shift is not from intellectual to embodied—my work has always been rooted in embodiment—but now moves into an even finer integration. One that brings together not only my formal training in yoga therapy, Ayurveda, trauma healing, sound healing, and anti-racism facilitation, but the depth of my lived experience: moving through trauma, navigating life as a migrant mother, and practicing alongside communities for over 12 years.

My work in Germany began with teaching yoga and facilitating social justice spaces—supporting individuals and groups in dismantling racism, ableism, and capitalism. That foundation remains. But as I transform, so does my service.

I am now guided by wisdom that emerges not just from books or teachings, but from long practice, integration, and deep listening. I’m no longer here just to name what is broken—I’m here to participate in what is possible.

To build.
To create.
To embody the worlds we are longing for.

To practice liberation not just as resistance—but as presence, relationship, and culture-making.