Embracing My Spiritual Truth

For much of my life, I learned to make parts of myself smaller in order to belong.

I grew up in Kathmandu, Nepal, surrounded by Hindu and Buddhist traditions, went to Christian school- sacred images, prayers, festivals, ancestral customs, and reverence for the natural world. This beauty existed alongside caste, gendered expectations, and powerful ideas about who a woman should be.

I was fortunate to be raised by a socially aware father in a relatively liberal home. I had more freedom from the have-tos and shoulds placed on girls. I could love Krishna and Radha, Shiv and Shakti, Mother Mary and Jesus without having to perform patriarchal imposed religion rules in order to belong. I remain deeply grateful for that spacious beginning.

At seventeen, I moved to the United States and entered technology and corporate life—a world of strategy, leadership, evidence, and measurable outcomes. It strengthened me, but between East and West, I began editing myself. In professional spaces, I could speak about systems, but not sacred relationship; resilience, but not the practices that helped me heal.

In some personal spaces, my ambition and evolving worldview also created distance. Outside the freedom my father had protected, spirituality could become tangled with rules, rituals, and expectations. What had once felt like love began to feel soul-tightening.

Over time, I learned I did not have to abandon my spiritual inheritance to be free. I only had to return to the love within it, the part that never asked me to become smaller to belong.

I practiced yoga, meditation, and energy work quietly. Words such as divine feminine, sacred space, and spiritual guidance felt too vulnerable to carry into public view. I still feared being dismissed as naïve, irrational, or “woo-woo.”

When Adaptation Becomes Self-Abandonment

For a long time, I believed this adaptation was necessary.

There was the professional woman: capable, analytical, responsible, and composed.

There was the spiritual woman: intuitive, tender, devotional, and connected to mystery.

There were also the mother, scholar, seeker, leader, and ambitious woman—each appearing more fully in some places and becoming quieter in others.

Within Women’s Personal Ecology™, we understand that these are not separate compartments. Our intellect, body, emotions, spirituality, work, culture, relationships, and ecological belonging form one living system. Each affects the others.

When an essential part of us is repeatedly silenced, the whole inner ecology feels its absence.

For me, that fragmentation appeared as disconnection—from purpose, relationships, my body, and the quiet sense of aliveness I knew was possible. From the outside, I remained capable and productive. Inside, something was asking to be reunited.

Looking back, I do not judge the woman who learned to make herself smaller.

She was navigating different worlds, each with its own expectations of who she should be and how much of herself it felt safe to reveal. Her caution carried intelligence. It helped her preserve connection and remain accepted within relationships that mattered to her.

But protection can become confinement when it continues beyond the conditions that first required it.

What began as adaptation was gradually becoming self-abandonment. Belonging purchased through self-diminishment could never offer the wholeness I was longing for.

Listening to the Hummingbird

During this period, the hummingbird became one of my spiritual guides.

I do not offer the hummingbird as a universal symbol or suggest that it must hold the same meaning for anyone else. Within my own spiritual life, it became an intimate reminder to notice what is subtle, recognize joy without denying difficulty, and trust the persistent movement of life within me.

The hummingbird did not arrive with a complete answer. It returned as an invitation to listen:

Beneath the identities I have learned to perform, what remains true?

Which parts of myself have I made smaller so that I can belong?

What kind of life could hold my intelligence and intuition, ambition and tenderness, discipline and devotion?

Slowly, I understood that I was not being asked to abandon the capable woman I had become. I was being invited to welcome her into relationship with the rest of me.

I did not have to choose between being strategic and spiritual.

I did not have to choose between softness and strength.

I did not have to choose between the life of the mind and the knowing of the body.

The invitation was integration.

From Aura Coaching to Women’s Personal Ecology™

Following that invitation eventually led me to train as a life coach and meditation teacher. What first emerged as Aura Coaching became a space where I could accompany other women through transition, uncertainty, and the return to their own inner knowing.

As the work deepened, I began to understand that women are not individual projects requiring endless improvement. We live within interconnected systems—families, workplaces, cultures, histories, economies, ecosystems, and inherited ideas about womanhood.

Our inner experiences are shaped within these relationships.

A woman’s exhaustion may not be a failure of resilience.

Her uncertainty may not be a lack of confidence.

Her disconnection may not be repaired by another productivity method.

Sometimes she has lived too long within arrangements that require her to divide, diminish, or abandon parts of herself.

This understanding became part of the foundation of Women’s Personal Ecology™.

The work is not about creating a more perfected woman. It is about helping a woman listen to her whole living system and recognize what is asking to be restored, released, protected, or brought back into relationship.

Reclaiming the Feminine Without Becoming Another Ideal

My earlier language centered strongly on “awakening the divine feminine.” I still honor what that language opened within me, but I now hold it more spaciously.

The feminine sacred is not one fixed collection of qualities. She is not only gentle, nurturing, receptive, or serene.

Across the spiritual traditions that have shaped me, feminine power—Shakti—can be creative, protective, abundant, discerning, fierce, and transformative. She can nurture life and confront what threatens it.

Reclaiming the feminine does not require performing another ideal of womanhood.

It may mean releasing the demand to be endlessly accommodating.

It may mean allowing rest without proving it has been earned.

It may mean honoring anger as information, listening to the body after years of overriding it, or speaking a truth that unsettles an old arrangement.

It may also mean remaining tender in a world that has taught us to mistake hardness for power.

Softness and fierceness are not opposites. Both may be necessary expressions of an ecology returning to balance.

Welcoming Myself Home

Eventually, I had to ask whether hiding still protected me—or whether it now prevented me from living and serving with integrity.

Embracing my spiritual truth did not mean revealing everything to everyone. Wholeness does not require complete exposure. Discernment remains sacred.

It meant no longer treating my spirituality as an embarrassing contradiction to my intellect. It meant allowing the coach, technologist, mother, scholar, seeker, leader, and woman of devotion to belong to one life.

That integration is still unfolding.

I am not sharing this story from the other side of a perfectly completed transformation. I am sharing it as a woman practicing greater congruence—bringing her inner truth and outer expression into a more honest relationship.

Perhaps there is also a part of you that learned to remain hidden—not because it lacks value, but because becoming smaller once helped you preserve safety, acceptance, or connection.

You do not have to force that part into visibility. You might begin gently by acknowledging that it exists.

Instead of asking:

Which version of me will be acceptable here?

You might begin asking:

What would it mean to live in relationship with more of who I am?

You are not required to divide yourself to be credible.

You do not have to abandon tenderness to become powerful.

You do not need to become smaller to belong—or become someone new before you can begin returning to yourself.

Your wholeness may already be quietly asking to be welcomed home.

With love,

Salana Aura