A personal journey from rigid belief to soft surrender—how I let go of religion and quietly came home to my own spirit.
Childhood & Religion
I was born into a Muslim family in the south of Kerala.
Not the strict kind, but the kind where rules still wrapped around your wrists like invisible bangles.
The kind where full sleeves were expected, questions were not.
Where we were told what to believe, how to behave, what to wear, and when to bow.
I went to madrasa. I sat through lessons in Arabic –
a language none of us knew, taught by Ustads (teacher) who told us what it meant, but never let us ask why.
It never made sense to me.
Not even as a child.
But back then, you didn’t say that out loud.
You followed, quietly. Because that was what a good girl did.
That was love, that was family, that was God.
Or so I was told.
And I did follow.
Until the age of 26, I fasted every Ramadan, prayed, obeyed.
And truth be told—I loved the festivity of it all.
I loved the smells, the gatherings, the laughter of big families in tight kitchens.
I loved the food, the joy, the feeling of belonging.
I loved love and community.
Marriage & Unraveling
But then came the marriage.
Arranged.
A Muslim family that looked like ours from the outside,
but on the inside, it was something else.
Religious only in performance, cruel in practice.
Lies, manipulation, betrayal wrapped in the name of piety.
I was divorced within a year and three months.
But the real heartbreak wasn’t the marriage.
It was what came after.
It took me four years to legally separate.
Four years of losing respect not for religion itself, but for the people who wore it like a costume.
I watched them lie, judge, exclude, condemn – all in the name of God.
And then came the rejection.
Not just from them.
From my own.
For choosing to leave, for refusing to play the part of the enslaved, obedient girl-child.
I became a burden. An embarrassment. A problem.
And suddenly, I was alone.
I worked. I survived. I had friends, yes, but no one who truly knew what I was carrying.
I didn’t have time to heal, or to understand.
I didn’t find spirituality then.
All I found was how to let go,
bit by bit,
until there was nothing left to prove.
And then… years later, I went to Australia.
I lived there for four years.
And I loved. Deeply.
A relationship that broke me open, that showed me grey where I had only known black and white.
It brought me to nature. It showed me poverty. It stripped me raw.
And when it ended, I chose to leave –
the relationship, the country, the familiar.
Return to Self
I came back to India.
Alone again.
But this time, I wasn’t running.
I was ready to meet myself.
I had always practiced yoga—but now, I experienced yoga.
Every morning, body in motion, breath steady, mind softening into silence.
Something shifted.
There was no religion here. No dogma. No name. Only Breath, and body, and the soft clarity of being with myself fully.”
It didn’t happen all at once. But slowly, I began to feel clarity dripping into me like rain.
Not answers from outside – answers from within.
I became the observer.
And in that stillness, I saw myself.
Truly.
For the first time, I knew. I had remembered who I was.
And I was home.
I didn’t go looking for another religion.
I didn’t need a new set of answers.
What I found wasn’t in a book or a temple.
It was in the quiet between things.
In the exhale after a deep breath.
In the pause at the end of movement.
In nature’s rhythm—so ancient, so patient.
In the way my body began to trust me again.
I began to sense something larger—not above, not outside—but within.
Always within.
And for the first time, I wasn’t searching for truth.
I was resting in it.
It didn’t demand obedience.
It didn’t shame me for asking questions.
It simply held me, and let me see.
What unfolded wasn’t a conversion.
It was a soft returning to myself.
A quiet undoing of all the noise.
And beneath it—a wildness.
A softness.
A stillness.
And now, in this stillness, something new begins to bloom.
Not a project. Not a brand.
But a space.
A remembering.
Wild Lotus Rising is that space.
Born not out of certainty, but out of surrender.
A gentle place where women can exhale,
be bare, be bold, be quiet—
and most of all, be real.