Theo Allyn, Independent Licensed Ishtara Teacher

I am a writer, performance artist, actor, and gloriously messy human who occasionally embodies the energy of a woodland creature or divine pixie of some kind. 

 

This work has been an excavation of the truth of me. Because for so much longer than I even dared to realize, I felt at the mercy of my existence. I was nothing more than a reluctant survivor, trapped in the freefall of surrender: to never being seen, never being met, never being safe. And what’s more, I was certain that kind of life was the best I could hope for - that excruciating pain was what I deserved. I made sense of my trauma by assuming I was to blame. I made sense of what I carried by believing that no matter what good I did, no matter how I tried to love, no matter how little space I tried to take with my being, I would never be enough and I would always be too much.

 

My body wasn’t home to my heart, because no place could ever be home. That’s what I believed.

 

And then I danced. I danced so much, my friends. Sometimes quiet hip circles in a public restroom. Sometimes an epic extravaganza, moving to music until my soul was sweaty with all the fire I once kept caged. But always always always, it was a starlit coming home to myself. A reclamation of what I thought could never be mine: power, love, courage, intimacy, sovereignty, bliss, vulnerability, sensuality - my absolute and extraordinary aliveness.

 

Dear ones, this work is sunlight that woke me all the way up in a way I never imagined was possible.

 

I desire that for you too. I desire to bear witness to you remembering how to sing the full-throated song of who you are to the great big world - without apology, and without shame.

 

Because what if each of us gets to step into a life that is worthy of our magnitude? What if each of us gets to claim the kind of life that, even in the ache, even in the agony, meets us with the spectacular capacity to celebrate it all? What if we get to love the mess of ourselves, because sometimes the mess is exactly where our magic lives?

 

No matter what we’ve carried, no matter where we’ve been, or WHO we’ve been because we had to be, we are a freaking masterpiece - and we deserve to feel the truth of that in our own body.

 

It is my sacred privilege to shine the light calling you home.