Welcome, friends
My name is Saga and FlowForm is my heart work.
If you’re interested in a classic bio, please visit my portfolio page. Here, I tell you my story through the lens of FlowForm: a layer-cake of 3 Archetypal storylines.
These stories reveal both what happened to us as children and offer a map for our grown-up selves to follow. The destination: our most expansive, authentic expression.
Saga means story, and mine is the story of FlowForm: what I had to survive, how I had to heal, the gifts the journey gave me, and what I now am able to offer. There is a saying: healer, heal thyself. What is your journey is also your medicine for the world.
My early childhood, seen through the lens of FlowForm Archetype 1: The Floating Starseed.
I was born in New York City in 1988. My mother (still with us), was an OBGYN and Human Rights activist from Finland who left her country and family to follow her heart. My father (he passed away in 2019), was an elderly gentleman from Kentucky- 25 years her senior - who had moved to the West Village in the 1960s. He was a professor of Russian History, an ex-Baptist minister, and a champion of Human Rights.
Human Rights was the love language that brought these two worlds, my parents, together. I am a child of the idea that every human has the right to a peaceful and flourishing life. My work today continues to reach for this original promise.
Our house was tucked away, inside a courtyard with a fairy garden. Here, there was safety. But outside, there was not. I was a sensitive portal of a child, blasted wide open with feeling. To my spirit, New York City was a cold and hard place. I could hear the wails of the desperate people, the madness of the lost people. Everywhere, I saw pain and pain and pain again. I did not know how to be with this pain, and so part of my spirit decided it was safer to not come down to the earth at all. I stayed in the realms of the imagination. I could travel anywhere in my mind. The make-believe was my home and magic was my reality.
This is the FlowForm Archetypal story of the Floating Starseed : a part of the spirit who stays away from the earthly plane, because something in the original environment (pre-age 4) is unsafe. The call of the journey is the call to be here, on earth, and find home. As an adult, I became the safe ground to land on. I ceremonially called my Starseed home to the soil of myself. Rooted in myself, I could now be with the pain of the world. It is then that I was finally able to step into my authentic expression, my true Form.
My middle childhood, seen through the lens of the FlowForm Archetype 2: The Broken Bridge.
At the age of 7.5, my world flipped upside down. My brother was born and my family moved to Finland for a year, while my mother was on maternity leave. During that year, I went to school with Finnish children, and my dreams changed language. It was a loss, but what followed was a new connection. My heart found a new home in Finland. Even when we returned to the States a year later, my heart connection remained there, and led me back to Europe for almost a decade in my late teens and early twenties. The breaking and healing of this bridge gave me the ability to live in many worlds, to inhabit multiple perspectives, and to move across real and multidimensional borders.
But during this window of childhood, another bridge broke: the bridge to my father. My father was plagued by a deep sense of unworthiness his entire life. He began to age and found himself a new parent once again. I was moving further away from girlhood. In this time, he began to retreat into his mind, into the voice of his unworthiness. I lost my connection with him. I had learned the art of shapeshifting, and so I took on the image of my father so that he might see himself. I took on his perfectionism, his meticulous eye for detail, his aesthetic vision, his Southern charm, and his intellectual mind. I also took on his anxiety and his struggles with self-love. Through academic accolades and degrees at top institutions, I sought to show him that he was worthy through me.
This is the FlowForm Archetypal story of the Broken Bridge: a rupture or profound loss of connection in middle childhood (ages 4-11) creates a heart wound. Where a bridge has been broken, instead of healing and repairing that bridge, an artificial one is built in its place. Underneath, a chasm of isolation and longing for belonging.
Wearing my father’s image was my artificial bridge. The cost of it was great. At a graduate program in Yale School of Architecture, my anxiety boiled over. I descended into a Dark Night, and my spirit woke up. The subsequent decade of profound spiritual transformation led me into my own power and to this final door of my heart. I was asked to surrender my father’s image in order to truly see myself. To do so, meant feeling the initial heartbreak all over again. In allowing my heart to be cracked open, Flow was finally able to move through the bridge of my heart, into Form. I had lost my father, but I had found myself.
My late childhood, seen through the lens of the FlowForm Archetype 3: The Secret Garden.
My ability to build bridges led me to spend a year in France at the age of 16. Upon return, I was a 17-year-old full of life: wearing thrifted dresses from Berlin, drinking wine from a straw at house parties, exploring the city with friends, and following my artistic impulses wherever they led. Fashion, acting, singing, dancing, cooking, drawing, photography, reading and writing: my creative appetite was unstoppable. And then I met a guy. In an alternate reality, this guy is the usual high school romance: chosen primarily for his height and musculature (he did not still look like a 7th grader). In this reality, we play a fun game of girlfriend and boyfriend that ends naturally with the transition to college. It becomes an awkward laughing point with friends later, looking at high school yearbooks; the girlfriends say, “I can’t believe you went out with him!”, followed by fits of giggles.
The real story: at 17, I met a guy, and could not see the trap laid before me. I was a child who still played among the fairies. I got caught in the trap, and was plunged into a deep, dark hole of Narcissistic Abuse for four intense years. I went in a child, but I did not come out one. What can I say here except this person wanted me dead. I know this in my bones. He, being a Narcissist, cared for his appearance overall. While he wanted me dead, he would never hurt me in a visible way, and so no one knew. There were no bruises to show my pain.
Instead, he worked to extinguish the invisible parts of me through emotional and psychological manipulation. He tried to kill my spirit. But he could not. To protect myself, I hid an essential part of me somewhere where he could not find it. I made myself small and flat enough, so that after four years, I could slip away through a crack. It took me a long time to uncoil myself from the trauma in my body, from the toxic ideas I had to take on in order to survive, and from my fear of sharing my light with other people.
This is a heavy version of the FlowForm Archetypal story of the Secret Garden. In it, experiences in the teenage years send the Creative Spirit into hiding. Inside: a bright and wild light, pure magical Flow. Outside: a smooth wall of “acceptability”, which will not elicit judgment or violence - a masterfully crafted (artificial) Form that gains external validation while starving the internal spirit. The journey for this Archetype, the journey for me, has been to feel safe opening up to Flow again, safe sharing the inner light. Healing this requires finding a place, among real people, where it is safe to unlock the gates to the garden, and let them see you who really are. To welcome them in, knowing your light - which is love - protects you.
In the play of my life, this person was a villain in the first few scenes, who sets the action in motion. Within the heart of the story are the many big, central characters who have supported me in my healing. I am in deep gratitude to all of you: my husband, my mother, my heart-friends, the web of healers and witches where I find my belonging, the spirit guides and guardians, my newsletter community, and all those who send me messages on Instagram saying that what I share means something for them. Having lived this work, I now can guide people through their own FlowForm journeys.
This work is my story and my story is the work. Like any Saga, it is immense, uncontainable, and has no end. Welcome in.
