On the outside, things looked just right.

At 35, I had a job many would dream of. Weekends at festivals and workshops and retreats. Camping trips, parties, surfing. I was doing everything I could to feel alive — and a lot of it worked.

But it wasn’t enough.

Something still didn’t click. Not dramatically — not a crisis. Just a quiet, persistent feeling that something underneath wasn’t aligned. My love life wasn’t working. And no amount of surfing or festival magic could fill the gap I felt when the music stopped.

And slowly, I started to suspect it wasn’t my circumstances that needed to change.

I had to be willing to question everything I believed was true — even the things I held sacred.

That willingness is where it all began.

The beliefs about who I was, what I deserved, how life worked — maybe they weren’t as solid as I thought. The way I saw things — in me, around me — maybe that was the cage I’d never seen.

“Don’t live a life you’ll regret,” a ten-year-old girl inside me kept saying. “Stop wasting your time.”

She wouldn’t let me sleep. So at 35, I listened.

Not to escape. To get distance. Because the people, opinions, and beliefs I’d grown up inside were too close to see clearly. I needed new faces, new languages, new mirrors. I needed to stand far enough away from everything familiar to finally ask: what’s actually true? And what have I just been told?

I came ready to change. Ready to question things I’d held sacred. Ready to break foundations inside myself if that’s what it took — not to destroy my life, but to see it clearly for the first time.

And that readiness is what allowed things to reveal themselves.

What followed was a year-long journey across three continents and roughly 12,000 miles. A festival in Denmark where a stranger sat down beside me while I was crying and changed the course of my week. A morning yoga practice where a tree gave me a message I’d carry for the rest of the journey. A secret retreat in a castle in France. Circling in the Netherlands, where I learned to speak only from what’s alive in me.

Then months of writing alone in LA and San Francisco. And with the freedom came loneliness — deep, unexpected, the kind that makes you hug palm trees on the beach because you need to hold onto something.

That journey stripped away everything I thought I knew about myself. It was raw. Uncomfortable. Transformative. And eventually, when I stopped searching, everything I was looking for found its way to me.

But I’ll let the book tell you that story.

I had to face my own limitations — many I hadn’t even realized existed. I learned to let go of judgment, toward myself and others, and instead approach life with curiosity, playfulness, and compassion.

And slowly, I started to see a pattern. Four invisible cages that most of us build without knowing it — from the comfort of staying in a life we didn’t fully choose, from the forces shaping us from underneath without our knowing, from thought patterns running on autopilot, and from the stories we mistake for truth.

I saw them in myself first. Then I started seeing them everywhere.

I wrote it all down. That became Breaking Cages.