#217 A Goddess Worshipper...
On stepping into authenticity & the journey of becoming...
Before you dive into this I want to share with you the link to my Bali Bhakti class, Authenticity, which starts on June 7th. Until tomorrow you can get the earlybird discount ($20 off). Join us here.
Registrations have slowed down lately, for both my online programs and my in-person retreats. (The truth is - in entrepreneurship - there is an ebb and a flow that you adjust to! I’ve run a business for seven years, and I’m used to this flow of ups and downs. But lately, it’s been particularly slow.)
2026 started out incredibly strong: a fully sold-out India Retreat in February and a fully sold-out Yoga Teacher Training in March. (Though, to be fair, those were booked months, and in some cases a full year, in advance!) Everything since then has felt… slower. Much slower.
Someone asked me recently why I thought that was. “What changed?” he asked.
And I told him that I actually know exactly what changed. It’s because I’ve been focused on my own journey. My own journey into authenticity. A while ago, I decided it was time to stop dating men and start dating women.
I have identified as bisexual for a long time, though not really publicly. (If anyone ever asked me, I’d tell people I identified as an “Ocean Girl” - at which point they’d ask me, what does that mean?!?! and I’d explain that I didn’t really like the word bisexual, but I liked Ocean Girl because it meant my love was big and vast and could touch people of any gender, like the ocean is so big. After I said that to one of my friends last year, she said to me: “I don’t really like the bisexual label either, but I just use it because people understand what it means, kind of like sober.” This seriously made me laugh. I realize that Ocean Girl wasn’t very clear (and maybe that’s why I liked it, because I could hide in it more.)
As an Ocean Girl I’d been with a few women, but never seriously. My attraction to women, while I acknowledged it, always felt like something I could simply suppress or ignore. Dating men worked for me, and it was easy. Why would I stop?
And so being straight worked for me, until it didn’t.
Someone said to me about a year and a half ago, shortly after my sexual assault, “Something good will come from this.” I think about those words often. While it was definitely not the most trauma-informed thing to say to someone on day six of sexual assault recovery, I somehow knew she was right. Not that the violence itself carried meaning, but that the potential for post-traumatic growth was huge. For a while, I thought the “something good” was my next boyfriend, who I started dating a month after the assault. Our relationship ended a few months after that. And now, I think it was this: the complete shutting down of allowing new men into my life, and the gradual opening toward letting women in. And as this chapter quietly began, something else happened too.
A wall came up between me and all of you.
I could feel it growing as I stopped sharing what was most alive and relevant inside me. My writing became less personal and more generalized. I stopped writing much of the time altogether. I stopped recording new podcast episodes of Sober Yoga Girl. I still showed up for the community and taught yoga, but not fully as myself.
And maybe you felt that too.
In yoga philosophy, satya, truthfulness, is about living in alignment. About the painful and liberating work of allowing our outer life to reflect our inner reality. And as I shifted into dating women, I felt no longer aligned with the public version of me that I shared with the world in the past. It was a friction that felt like I wasn’t being my truest self.
But now, after so much time integrating, I feel ready to speak about it. Being a “Goddess Worshipper” is now simply part of who I am. (And by the way - the Goddess Worshipper concept gets all credit towards the first woman I dated, who gave me this idea of a label. I like it! It feels more clear than Ocean Girl, lol. And more true for this moment.)
After it integrated, it started to feel important, necessary, even, to step back into authenticity and share with you all. And so that is why I am writing this today.
Vipassana, Recovery & Remembering
The journey into queerness really started to solidify for me during my Vipassana training in December.
Vipassana is a ten-day silent meditation retreat where you cut off all contact with the outside world—no phone, no reading, no writing, no speaking, not even eye contact or conversation with the other participants. Just silence. Just meditation. Just yourself.
Up until that point, I don’t think I fully understood how much of my life had been shaped by distraction.
Alcohol, caffeine, sugar, food, men, instagram.
Anything to help me suppress emotions, soften discomfort, or stay one step ahead of experiences I wasn’t yet ready to meet.
This week I read something in the Recovery Dharma book that stayed with me:
“In our addictions, we nurtured the habit of distracting ourselves and for many of us, it became a survival technique. Concentration meditation gives us the opportunity to meet this habit with kindness and patience rather than resistance.”
And that is exactly what happened.
I met the habit with kindness and patience. Or at least… I tried to.
For the first three days of Vipassana, I mostly slept. I was that tired. There was a fatigue inside me that felt older than exhaustion, a kind of soul-tiredness I had been carrying for years without realizing it.
And then, around the third day, the awareness struck me with startling clarity: I need to start dating women.
Accepting this part of myself while on a silent meditation retreat was overwhelming. I began to be flooded with memories.
I have spoken about this before, but I haven’t gone into detail. All of a sudden I remembered things childhood friends had said to me. Things adults had said to me as a teenager and young woman. Things I remembered hearing from a parent while walking up the stairs.
It was as though memories I had quietly stored away in distant rooms of myself suddenly opened all at once.
I remembered the first girl I ever kissed when I was seventeen, and honestly, I had a lot of regrets that I didn’t date her instead of all the terrible men I was with, lol. If I could go back in time, she would absolutely be my prom date.
The flood of remembering was overwhelming. And yet, beneath the overwhelm, there was relief too.
In yoga philosophy, there is the idea of avidyā, misunderstanding or misperception, as the layers of conditioning that prevent us from seeing clearly. Awakening is not the discovery of something new - it is the removal of what has blocked what was already there.
That awareness in Vipassana felt big - but the truth is that it had been growing ever since the assault. After the assault, the only time I found myself attracted to men was during or after kirtan. And honestly, I think I was more attracted to their hearts, their souls, and the energy of devotion than anything else. Kirtan led me back to my heart.
I’ve been leading kirtans since the beginning of 2025, and that is when this awareness really began to deepen. Facilitating a kirtan was an intensity of focus and devotion that felt unparalleled in any other meditation experience I had known.
Bhakti has a way of softening the armor. The strange thing about devotion is that it does not let us stay disconnected for very long.
So after Vipassana, I decided once again to detox from Instagram. And for a while, I was totally fine being off it. Then January came, and I had a huge relapse with it. I became acutely aware that I would continue relapsing on my Instagram addiction until I accepted this part of myself. And so that became my work.
The Body Keeps the Score
I started regularly seeing my Cranio Sacral Therapist.
Our sessions are a combination of talk therapy and bodywork, and this became essential for me, because my repression was so deeply unconscious that I often couldn’t consciously speak about it.
Sometimes we would talk for an entire session and not discuss my queerness at all.
And then we would move to the body. And that’s where we would find it. Pain, grief, fear, in tissues, in muscles, in nervous system. The body keeps the score.
There were a lot of things I was afraid of when it came to accepting this part of myself. I was afraid people wouldn’t like me anymore. I was afraid people wouldn’t want to come on my retreats or trainings. I was afraid people would unfollow me on Instagram. I was afraid of asking a woman out.
In heterosexual dating, things had often felt easy and passive for me. There were scripts I understood, roles I knew how to play. Dating women felt like an entirely different universe. How would a woman even know I was interested? Drunk experiences with women had been one thing. Sober experiences with women felt like stepping into completely new territory. A whole new ballpark.
I shared all of these fears at the end of a Narcotics Anonymous meeting with someone in February. He listened compassionately and then asked me: “What can you control about this situation?”
I stopped, reflected, and answered: “Nothing.”
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
I want to fit into the world. I want to belong. But I can’t control that I am queer. And I can’t control if people cancel out of my retreats because of that. I can’t control if people stop liking me. I can’t control if people unfollow me. The only thing I can control is whether or not I choose to be my most authentic self.
And I want to be my most authentic self.
There is a teaching in the Bhagavad Gita that I have come to again and again: "You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action." Aka: I can live truthfully, but I cannot control how the truth is received.
The conversation with this man in Narcotics Anonymous stayed with me - because underneath all my fears, I realized that I wasn’t really afraid of being queer. I was afraid of being vulnerable, and being seen. And these are two different things.
I wasn’t planning on beginning to come out more publicly during my India retreat.
But that’s where it happened. India has a way of shaking you up and revealing to you what exactly needs to be revealed.
In moments where I was sitting with a student in a tuktuk, quietly chatting over dinner, or waiting for a massage in a spa - people kept asking if I was dating anyone. It was casual conversation, catching up. This retreat was filled with women who had been part of my life for years - students and clients I had walked alongside for one, three, sometimes six years.
Women who knew me. And again, I felt that wall come up, when I said I was dating no-one. That familiar hesitation. That moment where I could either protect myself, or tell the truth. So finally, I did. I started telling people: I’m starting to date women.
And it was… completely fine.
No one had a negative reaction.
Honestly, it almost made me laugh afterward - how much fear I had carried around something that was met with such simplicity, and so much love, and acceptance.
And that has mostly continued to be my experience. No one has reacted negatively. But at times, it has still felt isolating.
I think sometimes people ask no questions because they feel awkward, or because they don’t want to make you uncomfortable. But I’ve appreciated the people who have asked questions because every conversation has given me another opportunity to understand myself more deeply.
The Unfolding
Something I was never afraid of in all of this was telling my family I was queer.
I knew they would love and accept me. And I am deeply aware of what a privilege that is, because many people around the world do not have that experience.
My dad had one of my favourite reactions. He said, “That’s great! That’s so great!”
And then: “It doesn’t surprise me based on the horrible experience you had with a man.”
And I know he’s right. This was brewing inside of me for a long time, but being drugged and raped by a man I was dating forever changed my sense of safety and comfort with men. If I ever do date a man again, it will be extremely different.
Other than my ex-boyfriend who I dated last year, who had been a long-term friend before we started dating, I have not slept in a bed with a man in the last year and a half since the assault. I also have not been to a man’s home since the assault. And most of the time now, when men ask me out, I simply say no.
I’ve been saying no since around October or November - which honestly is something completely new for me.
I haven’t completely stopped being with men - I still have still been with a few men during this time. And there are moments when I still feel drawn to men. Just this week, I saw a man from my past and felt this warmth, this pull, this desire to be near him again.
But the sense of safety I feel around women feels different. Softer. Safer. Something I am drawn to, and more honest to where I am right now.
There is so much to share about this that I do not even know where to begin. Because the truth is, I kept so much of it privately to myself. The unfolding and acceptance happened in small, quiet moments. It was not some dramatic overnight revelation. It was not one moment of certainty followed by immediate confidence. It was gradual. Private. And maybe that is important to say. Because sometimes we imagine self-discovery as lightning. But this was more like a really, slow sunrise - a truth becoming visible bit by bit. And each awareness simply felt too vulnerable to share, so I didn’t share it at all.
The first woman I dated after I fully embraced this part of myself feels, in many ways, like a unicorn. I wish she had been the right match for me. Because in many ways, she was perfect. She is so beautiful, so talented, so cool.
And yet, whether or not we were meant to stay together, she played a profound role in my life. She initiated me into the world of Goddess Worshipping.
When we connected, there was an immediate soulmate pull between us. And I think, in many ways, our relationship helped me shed parts of myself I was already ready to lose. It helped me step more fully into my truth. Losing that relationship was enormous, because it was not only the grief of losing her, it was also the grief of losing what she represented.
The grief of becoming. Being with her cracked me open in a way that hiding now feels impossible.
Authentic Devotion
I sat down today with absolutely no plan of writing any of this for a Substack.
My original plan was simple: Send you all a link and say, join my next Bali Bhakti series.
That was it. But as I sat here, I started writing, and I couldn’t stop. I realized that I cannot keep connecting with you all unless I release this wall I built between us and continue living more truthfully.
Today I am buzzing with this strange and beautiful feeling of happiness.
Not because everything is figured out, not because heartbreak is gone, or grief has disappeared, but because I feel so happy stepping into this version of myself.
Last week, one of my straight friends asked me what it was like to date a woman.
I said to her, “It was the most beautiful experience of my life.”
Someone said to me at a meeting a few months ago: “I’m excited for you. It’s like dating your best friend.”
And that is exactly what it felt like. I have never felt so seen. I made a video about a week after we broke up, and honestly, it is so cute when I watch it back now.
In the video, I was completely heartbroken. In shock. And yet I was grinning at the same time. For all the things that this relationship revealed to me, and the ways it allowed me to stop abandoning parts of myself.
Bali Bhakti: Authenticity Starts June 7
So this is why the upcoming theme of my Bali Bhakti series is Authenticity.
It’s been something I’ve been living for the last year and a half. It feels like remembering - peeling away conditioning, softening shame, and returning to what’s always been true underneath.
In all the Bali Bhakti series’ so far we’ve been offering devotion towards the divine.
This fifth series is a pivot. It’s about devotion towards ourselves. It’s about authenticity as a spiritual practice.
And so this next Bali Bhakti series feels deeply personal to me.
We meet once a week on Monday mornings at 7:30am Bali time (7:30pm EST on Sunday evenings). It is a 75 minute class where we learn a mantra, explore mudra, and move through themes connected to authenticity, belonging, healing, and the heart.
Here is what I have planned for you:
A 12-Week Journey Through Mudra, Mantra & the Heart
June 8 – Week 1 – Returning to the Heart
June 16 – One week off for YTT start date
June 23 – Week 2 – Safety & Grounding
June 30 – Week 3 – Releasing Shame
July 6 – Week 4 – Voice & Truth
July 13 – Week 5 – Devotion Over Performance
July 20 – Week 6 – Softness
July 27 – Week 7 – Grief & Longing
August 3 – Week 8 – Belonging
August 10 – Week 9 – Courage to Be Seen
August 17 – Week 10 – Divine Feminine
Note: My mom will be visiting Bali during these three weeks in August, and we may be travelling around the island. Depending on our location, my videographer may not be present for those classes—but I will still teach from wherever we are, the video quality might be more basic and OG! :)
August 24 – Week 11 – Surrender
August 31 – Week 12 – Authentic Devotion
“Who am I becoming when I stop pretending?”
If you join us today, you can still receive a $20 earlybird discount—though the extension ends tomorrow, May 27.
I hope you join us.
And I hope to keep sharing little pieces of this journey as I continue learning how to live it.
I am proud of myself.
I am so proud of how brave I have become.
Sign up for Bali Bhakti here.
Can’t Join Bali Bhakti? Here Are Two Other Ways to Practice and Study Online With Me.
Want Some Yin & Philosophy?
Resting with the Sutras: Starts June 25
My next Resting with the Sutras series begins June 25.
This section of Resting with the Sutras is for anyone longing to soften their grip on life and deepen their spiritual practice.
Together, through Yoga Sutras 1.15–1.27, we will explore Patanjali’s teachings on non-attachment, meditation, devotion, and surrender—learning how to release compulsive striving and cultivate greater peace within ourselves.
These sutras ask beautiful and challenging questions:
What happens when we stop grasping?
What remains when we loosen our attachment to outcomes?
How do devotion and inner stillness become anchors during uncertain times?
Through yin yoga, Sanskrit chanting, philosophy, and meditation, this is not simply an intellectual study of the teachings—but an opportunity to experience them in your own body and heart.
If you are moving through change, healing, recovery, heartbreak, or simply longing for a more meaningful connection to yoga beyond the poses, this series offers a grounding and transformative space to practice, reflect, and rest in timeless wisdom.
Want Some Straight-Up Philosophy?
The Dharma in Difficult Times Starts July 7
Sometimes life changes us in ways we never planned: Loss, uncertainty, grief, identity shifts. Moments where the path forward feels unclear.
And yet, these are often the very moments that ask the deepest spiritual questions.
Beginning July 7, we will gather for an eight-week philosophy and book study exploring The Dharma in Difficult Times by Stephen Cope.
Together we will explore how the wisdom of dharma and the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita can become a compass through life’s most difficult seasons.
Rather than seeing crisis as something that pulls us away from our path, Cope invites us to consider another possibility: that difficult times may actually reveal our deepest calling and truest self. Through discussion, reflection, meditation, and community, we will explore themes of courage, purpose, grief, spiritual resilience, and the timeless question:
What is life asking of me now?
If you are navigating change—or simply seeking greater meaning, clarity, and guidance—this circle is an invitation to walk that path together.
Ready to Get on a Plane to Bali?
One Spot Left — 200 Hour Yoga Teacher Training
And finally -
If your heart is calling you to immerse yourself fully in practice, we still have one spot remaining in our upcoming 200 Hour Yoga Teacher Training, beginning June 14 in Bali.
This training is far more than learning how to teach yoga postures.
It is an opportunity to deepen your relationship with yoga as a lived practice—through vinyasa, yin yoga, meditation, philosophy, chanting, community, and personal transformation.
Whether your dream is to teach or simply to deepen your own path, this training is designed to support both inner growth and practical skill.
There is something incredibly special about practicing in Bali - waking with the sun, moving together in community, and giving yourself permission to step away from daily life and fully immerse in yoga.
We would love to welcome you.
You can learn more and sign up here: