The Dharma of Hair

It’s becoming a ritual—this little chat at the desk.

What starts as a stream of thought often turns into a teaching, a personal reflection that ends up shared in class. These are the moments when I allow wisdom to flow through me—when I become a hollow bone for whoever needs it. And somehow, there’s always someone who needed it. After class, someone will come up and say, “I felt like you were speaking directly to me.” Or: “That was exactly what I needed to hear. How did you know?”

This isn’t something I learned from a YTT manual. Sure, there are tools and techniques to deliver dharma well in class—and I’ll teach you those if you wish. But the real juice? It comes from doing my own work: learning to accept, forgive, and understand my humanness so I can offer the same to you.

Wisdom doesn’t come from books.

It comes from experience.

From pain, from love, from mistakes.

From getting quiet enough to notice—and becoming a master in the art of paying attention.

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A Story About Hair

She came up the stairs with a twinkle in her eye, and I hardly recognised her. Ieda looked radiant, like sunshine walking into the room.

“Your hair! It’s curly, it’s bouncy,” I said. “You look so youthful. Did you get it curled?”

She smiled. “No. This is my natural hair.”

“What did you have before?” I asked, realising I couldn’t even remember—it had been so long.

“It was straight,” she said. “I’ve been chemically straightening it my whole life. Actually, it was my mum who first straightened it when I was 12. She didn’t know how to deal with it.”

“What made you decide to stop?” I asked.

“I didn’t,” she laughed. “I had no idea what I really looked like anymore. I forgot. Then I was in Bali and had a chemical breakage—my hair fell out, about a centimetre above the roots. It was terrible. I felt so naked. But slowly, it grew back—strong, curly, alive. And I remembered:

This is me. This is my natural state. I’m curly.”

And such is life.

We’re conditioned by beliefs passed down from parents, teachers, and society. We adapt to survive, to protect ourselves, to hide our tender parts—our quivering hearts.

We straighten ourselves out. Cover the mess with chemicals. Build armor around the softest parts.

And in doing so, we forget.

We forget who we are.

We shape ourselves into what we think the world wants us to be, we learn to please, to meet expectations.

But life happens.

A breakage, a divorce a death a loss, a burnout a bankruptcy.

Sometimes it knocks, other times, it breaks down the door and burns the whole house to the ground.

And then we alchemise. We enter the chrysalis, where everything breaks down. Mush. Mess. No shape.

But from that, something new forms.

Whole.

Changed.

A butterfly.

A curly-haired girl bouncing up the stairs.

Thank you, life, for teaching me how to be human.