Who is your master?

Someone asked me that on Sunday.

We had just finished five days together. Five days of something I still do not have proper words for. Four women came into a room as strangers and left as something else entirely. I watched them open. I watched them shake and cry and laugh and go completely still. I watched them find things in themselves they had buried so deep they had forgotten those things existed.

And then, just before our closing session, one of attendees asked in a conversation:

"Who is your master?"

I stood there for a moment. Genuinely shocked. Not offended, just... surprised that the question still exists. That the assumption was still there, that somewhere behind me there must be a person. A name. A lineage. Someone who gave me permission to do this.

There isn't.

The teachers who pointed, and the ones who showed me what I never want to become

Yes, I have teachers. People whose work I carry in my body. Ramana Maharshi, whose words I do not read with my mind anymore, I feel them. Scott Peck, who taught me that the road worth walking is always the harder one and that real love requires real courage. Joe Dispenza, who gave me the science for what I already knew was true long before I had words for it. James Nestor, who reminded me that the breath was always the most direct route home. And many others.

I am grateful for all of them. Genuinely.

And then there were the others. The ones I did not align with. The ones whose work I sat with and felt something close quietly inside me. The ones who taught me through distance, through discomfort, through watching how they held power and knowing in my body that I would never do it that way. Those were teachers too. Maybe the most important ones. They showed me exactly who I do not want to become. What I do not want to carry. How I do not want to stand in front of a room full of people who are trusting me with the most vulnerable parts of themselves.

That is also a gift. Even when it did not feel like one.

But master? No. None of them.

Two years of trusting the thing inside me that already knew

Two years ago I started training facilitators. I want to say that again because I am only just beginning to feel the weight of it. Two years. In that time something has quietly, completely changed in how I understand this work, how I hold space, how I trust what moves through me when I am standing in a room full of people whose nervous systems are wide open and whose energy is doing things the mind cannot follow or explain.

I had no map for this when I started. No senior teacher watching over my shoulder. No lineage handing down permission. There was just this thing inside me, quiet and very certain, saying: you know this. You have always known this. Trust it.

So I did.

And this training, the one that just finished, felt different from every one before it. Not louder. Not more dramatic. Quieter actually. More settled. Like something had finally stopped needing to prove itself and could just be what it is.

That is two years of trusting the master within me. Not perfectly. Not without doubt or fear or the moments at 2am where I wondered what on earth I was doing. But consistently. Returning to it. Choosing it over the voice that said go find someone who knows better, go find someone with a bigger name, go ask permission.

We are so trained to look outside

From the very beginning, we are taught that someone else knows more. Someone older, someone qualified, someone with the right title or the right following or the right number of years. And so we hand them everything. Our trust, our instinct, our sense of what is true. We build this whole hierarchy in our minds and we put ourselves somewhere near the bottom of it and we spend years, sometimes whole lifetimes, trying to climb toward a knowing that was actually inside us the entire time.

I see this in the people who come to sessions. The ones who arrive already disconnected from themselves, already looking at me with eyes that say please just tell me what I am, please just tell me if I am doing it right. And what the work does, what Kundalini activation does when it is held properly, what breathwork does when it goes beyond technique, is not give them answers. It strips away the question. It brings them back to the body, to the energy, to the direct knowing that does not need a certificate or a permission slip.

This is also what non-duality points to, not as a concept you master intellectually, but as something you recognise. The realisation that what you have been searching for outside was never outside. The master, the knowing, the source, it was always here. The search was always pointing in the wrong direction.

There is a difference between a teacher and a master

I am not saying do not learn. Do not sit with teachers. Do not let yourself be moved and changed by people who have walked further down certain paths than you have. Please do all of that.

But know the difference between a teacher and a master.

A teacher points. A master owns you.

And nothing and no one should own you.

Not me. Not anyone.

Sunday, standing in that room with women who had just spent five days remembering themselves, I felt it clearly. This work does not create followers. It does not create dependence. It creates people who finally stop looking outside for what was always already inside them.

That is the only thing I am here to do.

Two years in, I am more certain of that than anything else.

My master is me.

Yours is too.

“

Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakes.

- Carl Jung