Sensorial Portals
Things that moved me, opened me, and reminded me who I am.
The most powerful experiences I’ve had this year have been the most intimate, nourishing, tender and precious that quietly enriched my soul. Silent things we cannot see with our physical eyes, yet are felt in the soft stirring of our hearts. Synchronicities that cannot be quantified, but leave you immersed in awe and soaked in joy. Shimmering glimmers intrinsically woven into life, like hidden threads of light stitching the seen and unseen together. Ancient threads slowly re-awakening, unfolding and making themselves known, whispering the eternal song of becoming.
Lately, I’ve noticed how frequencies lingers long after the physical experiences have passed. Not because the experiences were loud or grand, but because love radiated in gradients: understanding, care, respect, trust, humility, reciprocity, devotion, and freedom, all rippling outward and touching deeper parts of me.
Note on language & lineage:
When I speak of frequency, I am drawing from sound mysticism and devotional traditions, including Sufi teachings such as those of Hazrat Inayat Khan, Naam Simran and Kirtan from my Sikh tradition, and Nāda Yoga where vibration is understood as the subtle movement of consciousness, and frequency is the quality of movement. A living resonance that remains alive in the heart, body, and spirit long after an experience has passed through physical time.
These experiences feel like intimate portals, gently expanding and inviting me to remember and reclaim — myself more fully. They shape not only how I see myself but remind me that what we create and share in the world is a natural extension of ourselves, connected to ancestors and lineages that have passed through us.
When we don’t engage with our gifts or honour them with reverence, what is the cost to our soul?
Something in me finally sees the threads weaving my tapesty: my zines, embroidery samples, lino and gelli prints, flowers, and sacred objects on my altar. I see my heart expressing itself through the seasons it has travelled. I feel frequencies shaping everything I create, allowing me to experience both myself and the unseen movements around me.
Throughout my journey, I have been reorienting home, toward a radiant frequency of beauty and truth. I have been travelling life through sensorial thresholds that create reverberation, where the unseen manifests in form, to be held with humility and reverence, offered back, and shared as a gift.
As the year closes, I reflect on some of the potent thresholds that have most deeply stirred my heart and opened my soul:
A living communion
Recently, I spent an afternoon with a friend at the Tate Modern experiencing the Emily Kam Kngwarray exhibition. Her work felt alive, filled with memory, meaning, myth, beauty, rhythm, and the primordial spirit of the Aboriginal landscape. Each piece seemed to breathe: colours vibrating, lines rippling with life force, textures moving beneath my skin. The more I opened to it, the deeper I was pulled in, drawn into the rhythm of each artwork. I was so moved by her visual language and the sacred connection she holds with land, community, womanhood, rituals, ceremonies, and dreams.
The experience left me asking myself: What memories of my land are woven into my skin? What myths are braided through my hair? What symbols form the ecosystem around me? And what legacy do we leave behind?
Sacred thresholds
For me, my altars are living communions with Shakti. I learned this from watching my parents light the diya and incense every day. It is a sacred union, a portal of remembering and resonance, a threshold between the physical and unseen, always felt. It is where we connect with past, present, and becoming, shaping perception beyond the dense physical world.
I have two altars: one for my art, one for my ancestors. They are deeply interwoven, always dancing and flowing in harmony. Each element on my altar carries deep significance: flowers, water, incense, colours, objects, artworks are imbued with presence, memory, intention, and the potent wisdom of my ancestors, each alive vibrating with its own sacred frequency of intimacy.
After completing The Artist’s Way about a decade ago, creating my artist’s altar came naturally. Julia Cameron writes: “An artist’s altar should be a sensory experience… pretty leaves, rocks, candles, sea treasures… all remind us of our creator… It should be fun to look at, even silly.”
This invitation felt like understanding. My sacred sanctuary is my visual mood board, filled with treasured frequencies gifted, gathered or made by my own hands. I move in a quiet, living conversation between the unseen and the seen, expressing the seasons of myself as they emerge and rise, letting my inner world express itself fully and freely, taking up the space she deserves.
Voices of devotion
Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan describes music as the intoxication of the Beloved, “the language of colour and sound is the language of the soul.” Music reaches far beyond words, it softens into my cells and peels my heart open. This year, voices of devotion stirred me again and again.
The minimalist videography of Arumugaswami Virutham – Ancient Recital to Our Lord ArumugaSwami feels like something ancient in me also remembers and offers itself to the Divine. The softness and intimacy of the art, reminds me of Amrit Vela, the sacred pre-dawn hours in my Sikh tradition. Amrit is nectar, divine essence; Vela is time. In these moments, I remember: I am more than bone and flesh, thought and feeling. I am a divine being blossoming in the cosmic garden.
Listening to the Carnatic composition Annapoorne Visalakshi, sung by Kavya Ajit with her 90-year-old grandmother, melted my heart. Annapurna, goddess of nourishment, is praised for her luminous eyes. Listening felt like a portal, celebrating intergenerational wealth: intimacy, warmth, self-expression, and beauty. Truth transcends the borders of time.
Dianna Lopez’s voice has been another revelation, translating inner landscapes into sound and story. Each note opens, heals, and invites surrender to the unseen. Soulful music this year has been my bridge to the divine, stitching fragments into luminous wholeness. When an artist awakens, their inner life reorganises around a deeper rhythm. What they create carries the frequency of soul, and it reaches those who recognise it not with the mind, but with the heart.
Voice notes, too, have become rich portals of intimacy, depth, and soul. They capture the qualities of presence, breath, and truth. Recently, while recording one for a friend, I realised:
“Reciprocity, inspiration, depth, presence, truth, humour, gratitude, honesty, trust and love are vital ingredients that support critical thinking. Without these portals of sense-making and remembrance, something in me withers and decay.
Hearing a loved one’s voice creates bonds that text cannot replicate. Voice notes feel like photographs: raw, intimate, and alive. They allow us to wander, speak unfiltered, and hear ourselves reflected back with gentleness. Witnessing someone’s unfolding this way feels like intimacy with the human spirit.
When I find myself struggling to write, I record a voice note to myself to speak freely, inviting myself to take all the time I need. Voice notes have become love letters to myself - to the parts that need more permission, more celebration, more compassion and more space. Practicing naming my experiences out of my body, and off the page has supported me to express myself more authentically.
I am still learning to speak more fully and freely - not to be agreed with or liked; but to stay in resonance, to feel the depth of my connection with my truth, and the place I share from and to honour my emergent process. I am making sense, I don’t need to refine my voice or be perfect. Even if no-one else is listening, God is always listening. I am listening. Even if no-one cares, I deeply care. God cares deeply.
Zines as ritual and acts resistance
After exploring sound and voice as portals into the unseen, I notice the same currents moving through my hands and the objects I create. Music carries vibration through my body; zines carry it through touch, stories, colours, fonts and formats. Both are acts of translation — internal worlds made tangible, invitations for others to enter, taste, and remember.
Making zines has become central to my art practice. They feel like love letters from past to present to future self. Folding the first page, I enter a space of remembrance, feeling held and arriving home. Care and intention live in every choice. Magic reveals itself in the slow process, not the finished page.
I feel like zines are acts of resistance to hyper-productive culture, they are vessels of liberation. Their slowness and intimacy reclaim the relationship with time, which I experience as non-linear. A client once said our work helped him “decolonise his relationship to time,” naming a process that felt alive to me the past few years. Zines are somatic medicine. They create a container where the body can soften, reorganise, and remember its own rhythm as a lived, embodied experience.
The Fatboy zine issue “multi-heritage, together not apart” felt like gathering with a rich tapestry of souls. Chris’s reflection on heritage resonated:
“…we accept, learn, and share the deep, complicated, and beautiful heritages of these things far more easily than we do our own. Is it too painful, too personal to allow ourselves the same acceptance?”
His words rippled through me, inviting me to reflect on my ancestry, food stories, and discoveries still waiting to unravel.
The sacredness of eating together
Just as zines are gestures of care, of sharing stories and heritage, so too are meals. Eating together becomes a ritual, a language of presence, a way to embody generosity, memory, and belonging. Both practices — making and sharing — are invitations into cultivating presence and sacred space, whether through the intimacy of textures on a page or the warmth of offering bread with your hands.
There is something profoundly sacred in sharing the richness of my culture with friends. This year, many tender, heartfelt moments have unfolded through eating together with our hands, embracing non-Western ways of being and sharing.
I invited a friend to the Gurdwara, and as we sat cross-legged, eating daal, roti, and aloo sabzi (careful not to spill on my chunni) and listening to kirtan, a portal opened. The space felt alive with the vibration of my ancestors, and I was reminded that langar is not just nourishment—it is a living, sacred practice preserved across generations, an act of sharing lineage, memory, and care. In this communal act, the structure itself teaches us: eat slowly, waste nothing, be humble, contemplate and meditate on God, and put God at the centre of life.
Another portal of intimacy emerged in more familiar spaces. With my dearest friend ( a life-long world-weaver and seeker of truth), we often celebrate with South Indian feasts: dosa, chilli paneer, gobi manchurian, lassi, rounded off with frothy filter coffee. Eating together with our hands becomes a mirror where we see ourselves more fully, a space to reflect, share ideas, and revel in our journeying together. These embodied practices—whether in the Gurdwara or at home—are vibrant frequencies that open into sensorial portals for heart and soul connections.
These emergent experiences are unified by the same thread of resonance: deep respect, intention, trust, care and embodied connection. They remind me that sacredness doesn’t only live in ceremonial spaces — it is pulsating everywhere — but I notice the vibrancy is more alive in some places than others, because it is being consciously activated, and integrated into daily life.
Through music, zines, voice, and shared meals, I’m learning that life itself is a web of invitations — to feel, create, witness, share and offer back to life. Each portal of frequency opens me a little further into myself, into others, into the unseen.
I am learning that being in the right relationship with myself, others, and life is a gentle practice of resonance, alignment, integrity, depth, and soul. Being with those who seek and see truth—those of care, reciprocity, and presence—creates the soil from which emergence grows. There is still so much awakening in me, and I am ready to move gently, reverently, and fully into the next season of life.
Thank you for journeying with me, for witnessing, for holding space, and for walking alongside these tender portals of reflection.
May we continue to move with curiosity, openness, and reverence for all that is still waiting to unfold.
May we listen and follow the frequencies that call us back to our textures of truth, allowing the unseen to guide us into the ever-unfolding realms of presence, connection, and creative aliveness.
Thank you for sharing your inner world, wisdom and guidance 💜💜💜💜