I was born in Tehran in the year of the revolution. My family carried me out of one world and set me down in Vienna, in a district where I was usually the only visibly foreign child, in a decade that had little room for one. I played outside when it rained, because then the others were not there. I experienced many forms of violence. There were many witnesses, but nobody named any of it, then or later.
The body learned early what bodies learn under threat. Stay quiet. Stay watchful. Take up less space. What I would later come to understand as complex trauma was already there: a slow, steady dimming.
I started training in 2003. Counselling first, then bodywork, then four years in transpersonal psychology and holotropic breathwork in the Sylvester Walch lineage. In 2009 I wrote my master's thesis on holotropic breathwork. More than two decades of breath and healing work taught me what the mind alone could not finish. That work also taught me how to hold a room. It did not teach me the form.
Then a life broke that I had built. I came to the Algarve in 2022 to find ground again. I practised breathwork on the cliffs, sunrise after sunrise, until the practice became something else. It became a daily ritual of witnessing the awakening sun.
Then it came through, not from. At Ozora in 2023, breath and dance fused in a way I did not choose. What I had been carrying without knowing started to take a form. At Boom in 2025, twenty minutes on the festival floor cracked my voice open. The third element fell into place. Two weeks later, at Pyramid Festival, a hundred people moved with me inside a ritual my body knew before I did, in sounds that are not words.
The form came from the body.
My Sun Ritual is what I bring back.
