The Woman I Was Wearing

I was the first-born daughter of an Assyrian family that had just immigrated to Chicago. I was not just a child. I was a symbol, a reflection of the family’s honor, their reputation, their standing in a community that watched everything and judged accordingly. And I arrived into that role dark-skinned, with one thick eyebrow that sat across my forehead like a dare, and more body hair than any of my classmates.

They called me Teen Wolf. I went home from school crying every single day. I tried to transfer schools. The district would not allow it because we did not live in the right zip code. I was stuck. So I did what I have always done when I cannot change the situation: I survived it.

In seventh grade, I prayed for breasts. I am not exaggerating. I lay in bed at night, grabbed my flat chest, and begged God to let something grow there. That summer I came back a 34C. Naturally. Overnight. Like God had been listening and decided to deliver all at once. Suddenly I was pretty. Suddenly I was getting attention.

I was not allowed to have a boyfriend. He called the house and pretended to be a girl. I say this not to paint my parents as villains but to paint an accurate picture of what it meant to be a first-born Assyrian daughter in an immigrant household in Chicago in the 1990s. The rules were the rules. The reputation was everything. And I was learning, very early, how to want things my world said I could not have and find creative ways to have them anyway.

I graduated early. I went to college, got my own place, bought my own car, and decided that if I could support myself, no one owned me. And then the ghetto fabulous identity arrived. The braids. The streetwear. The slang. An entire identity constructed to fit an environment. I thought that was me. It did not occur to me that there was a Rita underneath it who was waiting, very patiently, for permission to show up.

The Night the Universe Got Loud

I want to tell you something about that night. Not the part you might be expecting, not the fear, not the horror, not the violation of it, though all of that was present. I want to tell you about what my mind did.

It calculated.

While a man was trying to take my life and my body in a dark stretch of road alongside railroad tracks in Chicago, my mind was running scenarios. Noticing details. Constructing a strategy. And somewhere in the middle of the worst moment of my life up to that point, I laughed. Not because anything was funny. Because I needed him to ask me why. He did. I told him he would find out later. He stopped. He believed me. And in that pause, everything shifted. I got out of that car.

I ran. And then I turned around and ran back. Because I had watched enough Law and Order SVU to know I was going to need that license plate number. He went to prison for eighteen years.

Within days, my braids were gone. The pencil skirts came next. The blazers. The visual language of a woman who finally knew who she was. I did not know then what I know now. I did not have a name for what I had done. What this book is, in its simplest form, is the method underneath that instinct. Systematized. Named. Made available to every woman who has something in her life she has been managing instead of mining.

I became a teacher. Won an award my first year.

I graduated from Arizona State University Magna Cum Laude. My first year teaching I was chosen out of the entire state of Arizona as one of 8 teachers to win the Silver Apple Award and be featured on the news. My principal wanted me to keep the same students and roll up to 6th grade with them, because I took them from 3rd and 4th math and reading levels to 5th and 6th. The bad apples suddenly became A students.

And I kept realizing: whatever I do, I excel at fast. I don’t need one path. I’m here to live multiple lifetimes in one.

My soul screamed in a cubicle: THIS IS NOT IT.

My entire trajectory changed when my soul screamed in a cubicle, THIS IS NOT IT. I applied to a touring job on Craigslist, auditioned in New York with money I didn’t have, and got chosen out of the entire country. That tour gave me a microphone and I discovered my gift for commanding a room.

When it ended, I stood outside the MGM Grand arguing with myself. Be a good Assyrian girl and go home, or leap and trust. I stayed. That decision cracked open my destiny.

I’ve been cast in movies by accident, stopped in malls by people who altered my path, and offered jobs that aligned every piece of my life. A casting director stopped me at a mall in Las Vegas. He mentioned The Hangover. They put me in a white bikini by the pool at Caesars Palace and filmed for fourteen hours. Several months later I went to a theater and saw myself on screen as large as Godzilla. My first thought: my mom is going to kill me. My second thought: this is exactly how my life works.

Then I was offered a job as a Professor of Public Speaking at LaGuardia Community College in New York. The universe was going: hey, you are meant to be speaking. Here is the ultimate credential to silence the who-am-I-to-do-this voice in your head. I wanted to start a podcast. So I did.

The Channel Clears

In 2010 I watched a documentary called Food Matters and something cracked open that has never fully closed. I went vegan that week. Started juicing. Started reading everything I could find about toxic load, about the chemical burden the average body is carrying without its owner’s knowledge, about what happens to health, to hormones, to mental clarity, to intuition itself when you start systematically removing what the body has been fighting.

The people in my life thought I was crazy. I was talking about pesticide residue in produce, synthetic chemicals in personal care products, the connection between gut health and mood. In 2010. When none of it was mainstream. My cousins send me reels about it now like it is new information.

My mind got dramatically, noticeably, suddenly clearer. Decisions that had felt complicated became simple. Instincts that had been muffled became loud. The channel, which is what I now call the space in the body where intuition and creative power and connection to something larger than yourself actually lives, that channel opened.

Clean the body. The signal comes through. It is that simple and that profound.

I Am My Mother and I Am Dating My Dad

I want to tell you about a moment that lasted less than three seconds and changed everything. I was standing in the living room of the apartment I shared in New York with a man I thought I was going to marry. It was somewhere between two and four in the morning. He had not come home. He was not answering his phone. I had been calling hospitals. I had been calling police stations.

I picked up my phone to leave him another voicemail. And then I dropped it. Not because I lost my grip. Because something hit me with such force, such clarity, such sudden and complete recognition, that my hands just stopped working for a moment.

I was my mother. I was standing in the living room at three in the morning calling a man who was not coming home, leaving voicemails, imagining the worst, waiting, exactly the way I had watched my mother stand in the living room at three in the morning calling my father. I had watched her do that for my entire childhood. And now here I was, in a different city, a different decade, a completely different life, doing exactly the same thing.

The body remembered what the mind had agreed to forget. And in remembering it, it gave me the chance to complete what my mother never had. I did not repeat her pattern by staying. That is the whole story.

I attracted relationships that mirrored my wounds. Lies, betrayal, narcissism, because deep down I didn’t feel safe loving or being loved. I repeated my mother’s story until I finally left, got my dog Frankie to anchor my heart, and was catapulted into my spiritual awakening through Gabrielle Bernstein’s book, The Universe Has Your Back. That awakening reminded me I’m here to break patterns in my lineage. That’s when I realized: my energy wakes people up.

This is what becomes possible when a woman remembers herself.

I’ve helped women release 15 to 30 pounds, heal chronic pain, clear skin issues, leave toxic marriages, rebuild their lives, and come back into alignment after one session or retreat without diets, workouts, pills, injections, or surgery. Because when a woman calibrates back to her soul, her body recalibrates too.

I brought my own mother into a retreat in Bali, limping from knee arthritis, managing high blood pressure with daily medication, and watched her walk out seven days later without the limp or the pills.

That is why I created Honor the Vessel, Honor the Soul, and the Vessel Alignment Assessment. Not a strategy. A recalibration. A coming home.