The Thread
Jun 03, 2026
Yesterday, someone who hasn’t spoken to me since high school said something along the lines of how she can’t reconcile the Fally she knew back then with the stories I tell about myself today.
Which is funny.
Because after the initial sting, my first thought was, thank G-d.
Thank G-d I am not still the girl she knew in September of my junior year.
Thank G-d life has humbled me, stretched me, refined me, shattered me, rebuilt me, and forced me to become a woman that girl could not yet have imagined.
And also?
Ouch.
Because as ridiculous as it felt to be appraised by someone working with information outdated by more than two decades, I realized I do the same thing to myself all the time.
I keep comparing myself to an old version of me.
A younger, messier, less tested, less refined, less resourced version.
And then I wonder why I still feel like I have to prove I’m allowed to be here.
When I get asked to appear on podcasts, I always make a little bit of a fool out of myself at first.
Because if the host doesn’t have a clear idea of what they want to interview me about, I end up not knowing what to tell them either.
What is it that I do again?
Sure, I'm all of the cool things.
And also, in many ways, still the awkward frizzy haired, braces and glasses wearing teen who never fully felt like she fit.
So I end up talking way too much, trying to explain myself into legitimacy.
Which is exactly what happened earlier this week.
I was rambling a little, trying to figure out who I am, what I do, and how I have the right to pretend I belong here, when the host reflected back to me,
“It sounds like resilience is what you do best.”
And that stopped me, mid thought.
Because yes.
That’s the thread.
I will probably always have a ton of random, fun, strange, meaningful, obsessive interests.
I’m curious and I love learning.
I love chasing the place where Torah, the body, breath, motherhood, responsibility, sound, survival, intimacy, laughter, and Hashem all start talking to one another.
And yes, from the outside, that can look like I don’t really belong anywhere.
But when I look back, there has always been one underlying theme.
My commitment to a higher value system has always been there.
Last year on my birthday, my friends invited me to make a wish.
I knew I was heading into a year that promised to be brutal, painful, and soul destroying.
So I didn’t wish for it to be easy. I didn’t wish for it to end quickly. I didn’t even wish to be rescued from it.
I wished for the strength to stay committed to my values.
I wished to be able to arrive at my next birthday, look back, and be proud of the person I became and the values I kept along the way.
A birthday later, my wish has more than come true.
I am not the same person I was a year ago. Most days I barely recognize the foreign terrain my life has become.
But the most important things have not only stayed the same.
They’ve gotten stronger.
My beliefs.
My values.
My willingness to keep becoming, even when becoming costs me the version of myself other people preferred.
That’s the part people never acknowledge.
They remember the awkward version of you; they don’t always know what life carved into you after that.
They don’t know the battles you fought in private. They don’t know the times you chose integrity when no one clapped.
They don’t know the nights you stayed awake begging Hashem not just to get you out, but to also help you stay you while you walked through it.
They don’t need to know.
Because at some point, we have to stop waiting for the people who knew our unfinished selves to validate the person we've become.
At some point, we have to stop introducing ourselves through the eyes of people who have not updated their information in half a lifetime.
So what is it that I actually do? How did I get here?
I teach resilience. I teach what I’ve had to live.
I teach people how to breathe when life steals the air out of the room.
And sometimes that looks like Azamra breathwork.
Sometimes it looks like hypnotherapy.
It looks like teaching Torah, and Vessel, and Ignite.
It looks like motherhood, music, laughter, tears, silence, or a really honest conversation on a podcast where I ramble a little before I find the thread.
But the thread is always there.
I’ve been following the same thread for decades; into every room it has ever asked me to enter.
And next week I enter Azamra.
Azamra's third cohort of breathwork facilitators begins their training in just a few days.
Starting Sunday, I get to immerse myself again in one of the most stunning containers I’ve ever had the privilege of creating.
Because Azamra is not a place where I have to explain how all the pieces fit.
It is the place where they already do.
The breath. The body. The Torah. The music. The survival. The surrender. The laughter. The tears. The learning. The becoming.
All of it belongs there.
It is not the place where we have to choose one version of ourselves and leave the rest at the door.
It is the place where the thread becomes visible.
And I feel deeply proud to step back into it again.
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