I was born in a small town in Italy, near the Venice area, and later during college, life brought me to California, where I ended settling down.
Since a young age, I’ve always been interested in the mystics and spirituality since a young age – consistently scouting for information on every possible religion, myth, and deity at every chance I got; reading many archeology books about ancient Egypt and Mesoamerican cultures, palmistry, spells, and crystals.
It was here in California that these interests had the opportunity to grow and be developed. Unbeknownst to me the apartment I lived in was extremely close to both the Kabbalah Center and the original home of Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan.

For a few years, I explored the mystical teachings of Kabbalah: it gave me a good basis on how the universe works and which forces are at play within the process of creation and manifestation from the divine realm into our plane of existence.  Then, a friend shyly confided he wanted to try energy healing, and I spontaneously wanted to join. Training Reiki allowed me to re-discover my interest in crystals, as often crystals are used to assist the healing process and transmission of energy. I personally loved the idea of supplementing energy healing with crystals’ metaphysical properties, and I started creating jewelry pieces to constantly carry crystals on me.

At the time, everyone around me was mentioning meditation, either taking some sort of workshop to learn it, or experimenting with different methods via YouTube Videos, Meetup Seminars and Yoga Classes. I wanted to learn how to meditate too, and still my mind. By then, I had been working in corporate America for about 7 years. This experience was showing me first hand, on my own skin, how bad work environments and relationships paired with general life stressors, can impact workers’ performance and happiness; ultimately compromising their overall general health. I didn’t want to be stuck with that.

I checked for Yoga studios in my neighborhood. To be fully transparent, up to that moment in my life, I had never been too interested in Yoga. It was just one of the trendy thing to do in LA, and I already had my own physical training. My main leisure activity had been Capoeira (a Brazilian martial art) for quite a few years. I found Capoeira dynamic, active and fun – and when compared to it – Yoga was just total boredom. Yet I had to learn to meditate. So, I dragged myself to that close-by studio – and I was faced with experiencing Kundalini Yoga for the first time in my life. I am not sure I fully understood what was really going on in that class: we had to breath in weird patterns, and hold uncomfortable postures for lengthy amount of time, that felt like an eternity. But then there was the relaxation portion of class – and with it, the sweetest sound I have ever heard: the sound of the Gong.

I never experienced the Gong before – but I was sold and in love. For the first time ever in my almost 30-year of life I was free of thoughts. I was relaxed. I was calm and quiet, and my brain wasn’t running at 100 mph, yet I was awake. The gong was sweet. It was pure magic that manifested itself in real life. It was a blessing and a bliss. I needed to have a gong. I started noticing I needed Kundalini Yoga in my life. If I didn’t go to class, my week would feel unbearable and harder. Kundalini Yoga, the meditations and the sound of the Gong were helping me deal with life challenges in a more balanced way. I was going through some major life changes and a divorce, and I truly needed all the support I could get from the community around me. I wanted to learn more about Kundalini Yoga. My mind was noticing its benefits, and I knew there was something there. So – I just used pretty much all my savings to sign up for Teacher Training. After all, what better option did I have to celebrate a divorce? (Ok – I get it, I could have gone to Vegas and gamble it all away…)

But my life started spiraling down even more, week after week, during the Teacher Training process. Within 3 months I got laid off, many of my friends settled down and moved away from the city: depression started sinking deeper and deeper into my soul, leading to the loss of my confidence. I felt everything was just crumbling apart and I had no way to salvage it. I was looking for help, for community, for love. Kundalini and the gong were keeping me sane. Whenever I was in that space, things were somewhat ok. So, I explored more.

I meditated a lot. I experienced any gong session I could. I took trainings on additional energy healing modalities such as Light Healing, and Crystal Healing. Keeping up a spiritual practice wasn’t easy, but it was showing me glimpses of positivity and hope. I started experiencing on myself how a regular meditation practice can help increase focus during my Capoeira game, improve my performance and reaction time, and keep me full of energy. A daily yoga practice helped my body getting stronger, more flexible, and it tremendously improved my balance and perception of space. I was slowly getting stronger, both physically and mentally.

I wanted to use all these tools to balance and ground myself first, and eventually to help others from feeling the way I was feeling. At that moment, I just had a name: Soulful Cup, but no real plan of action. I was confident that eventually, it would have taken shape. I kept helping in the community every time I could, especially for sound healing events, making jewelry pieces, and learning more about energy and crystals.