Bella’s Story
No clean breakthrough.
No before and after.
There was no single moment when this stopped being theory for me. No clean breakthrough, no particular crack, and no clear before and after. Living as my true, sovereign self has been an ongoing process that continues to happen through me every day.
Fifteen years ago, I entered a dark night of the soul that lasted for several years. It was not something I could understand, explain, or consciously navigate while I was inside it. The frameworks I had known could not reach the depth of what was happening. It was far darker and more total than the unraveling of a few identities or beliefs. It reached into the deepest layers of my being and altered my relationship to life, reality, the body, and the soul itself.
Even after the darkest years had passed, the process was far from complete. I often say it took around seven years for my soul and my cells to catch up with what had moved through me. The integration happened slowly, beneath language and beyond anything I could force. Only later could awareness begin to meet what had already transformed me.
Since then, the work has become lighter, more conscious, and more participatory, but it has never become finished. Over the past three decades, plant medicine, tantric and Taoist practice, dance, movement, fascia work, and conscious relating have been essential pillars of that unfolding. They have helped me meet what cannot be transformed through knowledge alone and continue to deepen my capacity to live what I know.
For me, sovereignty is not a state I arrived at once. It is a living process of becoming more available to truth, more fully inhabited by my own life force, and more willing to let awareness and embodiment reshape how I live each day.