How It All Started

From disassociated to living life on my own terms

For most of my life, I didn’t live in my body. I learnt to disconnect early on, as a form of safety from adults that didn’t know how to regulate their emotions, which in turn I learnt to embody. Event after event kept happening, reinforcing patterns I would go on as an adult to repeat until I finally took responsibility over my actions and decisions.

The rollercoaster of emotions I encountered from an early age made me learn coping mechanisms early on, growing up in a home where my parents did their best to provide for us and more, unfortunately having no clue how to show up emotionally. While they were no older than I am right now, my single dad with two kids in tow, newly married to my new mom, just 27, combined with what Indian relatives would call as “a broken family”, was too much for me to process as a six year old kid.

I got really good at bottling it all up, and by the age of 8, I was the “angry” kid. The teen years would see me shed this persona, proudly replacing it with the “Ice Queen”. Known by my family as She Who Never Shows Emotions. I wore it like a badge of honour, lamenting how nothing could hurt me. A thick skin, and a heart made of stone.

It was my protection, my armor - when I knew how fragile I was on the inside. From the age of 13, bouts of depression would hit me long & hard, often triggered by anything my inner critic would deem a threat to my fragile sense of self. It lasted as long as my teen years stretched, which at that point felt like a lifetime. Self-harming and disassociating would soon become not just routine, but a ritual that made the pain inside disappear just for a while.

Worthless, Useless and all the other -less adjectives became common vocabulary I started to internalize and believe as Truth. When it came time to leave the nest, I only knew of one acceptable option - university. Already deemed a privilege for a minority in this country, there was no way I would have even considered any other route. I was eager to leave the nest, which at that point felt like a golden ticket to freedom.

What I didn’t realize was my body was on autopilot all this while, and would continue to be for the next 5 years, as I slowly started learning about childhood patterns, inner child, attachment styles and all sorts of explanations as to why I was the way I was. I was discovering in real time that I was fucked up from all the things that had happened to me outside my control.

Something had to change

The turning point came when I started to slow down and connect with my body. Learning how to sit with my emotions. Staying with them when I felt like running away. It was too hard to confront who I was, when I hated every fiber of my being.

My first experience of connecting with my body was when I started self-tying. I had already been struggling to accept my body my whole life, but when I tied my first tutorial-followed tie, I remember looking at my thighs (which had a short silver-glazed scar, a reminder of the time I was not too kind to my body) and thinking, Wow - my thighs looked pretty good. It was the first time I saw my body in a new light, one that didn’t make me gag.

I kept tying myself, practicing on myself & my pillows, at first with a cheap hardware store rope, partly because I didn’t want to spend money on a hobby I would yet again discard to join my embroidery kit, jewelry making kit, painting supplies and other assortment of crafts I got to convince myself that I needed a creative hobby.

Before I knew it, the world slowed down. I felt every fiber of the rope graze across my skin, allowing me to just be. No pretense, no mask. Sitting to accept all parts of myself. I sat in front of my mirror, influenced by “mirror-work”, and kept practicing.

I combined it with other practices that I was doing, like breathwork from kriya and kundalini yoga. I’m not sure why I resonated so deeply with kundalini first, then kriya yoga. I wondered if it was my ancestors, the women in my lineage that never got to experience sensuality for themselves, channeling themselves through me to experience liberation from the shackles placed on their bodies and their pleasure.

Sharing this with the world

Suddenly, I had an effective tool that always brought me back to my body whenever I felt out of balance. When I had an emotional burst, I found that the ropes brought me back, stopped me from spiraling out of control. Tying myself, as I noticed my breath soften and heart slow down. Of course, I didn’t have the vocabulary back then that I was regulating my nervous system.

Over the past 5 years, I’ve spent countless hours trying to understand why this works. I’ve shared my practice with hundreds of people that have told me straight to my face that it helps them relax, regulate and connect with themselves. I kept myself learning about our nervous system, how it impacts our thought processes, cognitive function and even emotional processing.

It has been the topic most fascinating to me, maybe because I never even dreamed that I could one day have the tools to regulate my emotions. I always thought people were born “anxious” and “stressed” and would remain that way till the end of days. I didn’t expect it was a skill one could learn.

One thing I have observed, is that just because you know all about regulation of the nervous system, doesn’t mean you will never be stressed or anxious or out of balance ever again. Reality is - life happens, circumstances change, and stress can always come back. The question is - how long does it take you to get back to your baseline?

This is how SOROPA* was born. It’s a method I’ve been developing and over the past 5 years of practicing it, I got the confirmation I needed that this method works. I saw it time and time again, people that came up to me and told me how a tying session unlocked something in them, or just helped them relax and finally sleep well that night after bouts of insomnia. I’m finally ready to share it with you, so you can take this practice and make it your own. Incorporate it into your routine or use it as a base as you discover what you need to feel connected with your body.

*SOROPA is derived from “soma” (the body) and “rope” — a method that uses rope as a gateway into embodied awareness.