Maria Claudia Montes

I was born in Bogotá, Colombia and came to New York at seven. I lost my mother at fourteen and my father at eighteen.

What I learned early is that survival meant staying useful. Staying focused on everyone else. Because looking inward felt too dangerous and unsafe.

I lived that pattern for years. Through addiction, anxiety and depression, through the complicated relationship with my own body that so many of us know intimately, through the slow erosion of self that happens when you give everything to everyone and call it love.

It wasn't that I didn't want to live. I just didn't know how.

And then something cracked open.

There came a moment when I could no longer ignore the distance between the life I was living and the one I could feel waiting for me. A moment when my blood began to remember, and invited me to return home. To my ancestors, my heritage, and those who held the wisdom that ran through my veins.

And thus the journey home began in earnest.

What brought me back was not one thing. It was many — grief, yoga, clinical training, the ancestral wisdom of Colombia's Indigenous communities, and the gradual, honest practice of learning to find safety within me and the act of place one hand on my heart and ask what I actually needed.

The return was daily. Sometimes two steps forward and one step back. And it was completely possible.

That journey is why I do this work.