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: three concentric rings of archetypal storylines.
These storylines offer a narrative arc to help us see what happened to us as children in a new way. In doing so, the potential is for our grown-up selves to witness unconscious patterns and make conscious, aligned choices to rewrite the story in the direction of our choosing.
We become the authors of our own story, instead of following the script our survival set out for us.
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. I give you the mantra I held close: healer, heal thyself - within your pain lies 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 (passed on since 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.
In the belly of New York City, 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, the city was a cold and hard place. I was exposed to everything very early on: both the beautiful and the truly sinister. My seer’s vision was trained on this epicenter of creativity, but I also saw the shadows that others passed by: desperation, madness, abuse. 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. The earthly part of me transformed with the pressure of prolonged endurance: like sand into glass.
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. I learned to be softer, to release my armor and feel safe in my vulnerability. 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 Ruptured 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 ruptured: 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, in hopes he might love himself as I loved him. I took on his perfectionism, his meticulous eye for detail, his aesthetic vision, his Southern storytelling 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/I was worthy.
This is the FlowForm Archetypal story of the Ruptured Bridge: a 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, the pinnacle of this path - I cracked/the survival system did. My spirit woke up and began the long process of peeling off his face so I could see my own. 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.
At 16, I found my way back to Europe as an exchange student in France. Upon return, I was a 17-year-old full of life: wearing thrifted dresses from Berlin, drinking wine from a straw at house parties, now reveling in NYC 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, but our societal condition and shared environment prevented this from being actualized on a physical level. 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.
Instead, he worked to extinguish the invisible parts of me through emotional and psychological manipulation: he tried to kill my spirit. To protect myself, I hid an essential part of me in the spirit world where he could not find it. I understand now, this where my shamanic path was initiated. After four years, I had built enough illusion for his ego to believe I could never escape, while my real self became invisible and finally slipped free. From there, it took me over fifteen years to uncoil myself from the trauma in my body, shed the toxic ideas I had to take on in order to survive, and finally feel safe enough to connect to my creative force and express it into the world.
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 readers and anyone who sends me a message saying that what I share means something for them. Having lived this work, I now can guide people through their own FlowForm journeys.
I welcome you to explore my offerings and learn more about the FlowForm™ Archetypes and how they might apply to you.
This work is my story and my story is the work. Like any Saga, it is immense, uncontainable, and has no end.
