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, where Hindu and Buddhist traditions are woven into everyday life. Sacred images fill homes and temples. Incense, bells, prayers, festivals, ancestral customs, and reverence for the natural world shaped the atmosphere around me.

This spiritual richness existed alongside the complexities of caste, creed, gender, social expectation, and rapid globalization. I learned early that tradition can offer beauty and belonging while also carrying powerful expectations about who a woman should be.

Later, as I moved into technology and the corporate world, I became fluent in another language: strategy, performance, leadership, evidence, and measurable outcomes. This world strengthened me. It taught me to think structurally, lead through complexity, and bring ideas into form.

But across these different worlds, I began adjusting how much of myself I allowed others to see.

In professional spaces, I could speak about organizational systems, but not sacred relationship. I could speak about insight, but not inner knowing. I could speak about resilience, but not the spiritual practices that had helped me survive, heal, and return to myself.

In other spaces, my education, ambition, professional identity, or evolving worldview could create distance. There, too, I learned to soften my voice and conceal parts of my knowing so I could remain familiar and accepted.

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 feared being dismissed as naïve, irrational, or “woo-woo.”

But hiding my spirituality was only one expression of a deeper pattern.

I had learned to diminish different parts of myself in different spaces so that I could belong.

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