I LEFT THE WORLD SO I COULD RETURN TO MYSELF - PART 2: THE HOMECOMING
Inside This Chapter
• How five years of deep inner tending rearranged my center
• The initiations that burned me clean and rebuilt my faith
• What wholeness feels like when it finally lands in the body
• How my voice, my work, and my way of serving transformed
• An invitation to reclaim your own return — on your timeline, in your truth
The Return Begins
Here’s the truth most women never say out loud:
sometimes you don’t choose the retreat — life drags you into it.
If you read Part 1, you know the rupture.
This is the return.
I didn’t disappear for aesthetics.
I disappeared because the life I built — the performance, the pace, the palatability — stopped letting me breathe.
Burnout wasn’t the problem. It was the messenger.
So I stepped out of the world and into myself.
Not to fix anything.
But to remember what was real underneath all the pretending.
I chose me for the first honest time in my life.
I sat with the shadows I’d dodged.
I took accountability for the parts of me I left unattended.
I said yes to the calling I’d been negotiating with for decades.
Five years later:
I am not the woman who left.
I’m closer to the woman I was born to be.
The Underworld Initiations
Silence didn’t protect me.
It initiated me.
The cocoon was abrasive.
Intimate.
Non-negotiable.
Everything false had to fall away
so everything true could finally breathe.
There were baptisms that cracked open my center
and rearranged my understanding of God.
Pilgrimages that reset the compass of my heart —
a solo descent into Sedona’s red stone silence,
first alone in Peru,
then again with my elder daughter beside me,
rewriting our lineage in real time,
seeking solace at Darbar Sahib in Amritsar and Damdama Sahib to reconnect with my Guru’s essence,
and a final communion with the powerful ancestral currents at Mount Shasta.
And afterwards came the slow, unglamorous work:
integration that felt like learning to walk with a new spine.
I unpacked wounds I once buried beneath perfection.
I met my ancestors not as stories, but as companions.
I stopped outsourcing my faith.
I moved from dogma to direct dialogue with the Divine.
The land became my teacher —
wind, water, fire, earth —
each teaching me how to listen,
how to bow.
And then came the initiation no woman asks for:
an emergency hysterectomy that stripped me bare,
a descent into Crone medicine — fierce, ancient, undomesticated.
Through breathwork and somatic practice,
I learned how to stay in my body when everything trembled.
How to feel instead of flee.
How to listen to the whispers beneath the wounds.
The medicine I once took for myself
became the medicine I was being asked to give.
So when I returned to Chicago — three years later —
I came back with new clarity, new capacity, new devotion.
As I healed, the women around me rose.
My family began their own becoming.
And the women around me seeking depth, not gloss,
found their way to the work I had grown in the dark.
The Sacred Silence & Remembering
Silence didn’t erase me. It revealed me.
Without an audience, the curated self dissolved.
And the parts I’d exiled — grief, rage, tenderness, desire — came knocking.
It was messy.
It was holy.
It was medicine.
In the dismantling, I discovered something I had forgotten:
Wholeness is not a finish line.
It’s a remembering — slow, tender, cellular.
Piece by piece, love reassembled me
into a woman who no longer needs to perform
to feel worthy of belonging.
I'm Not Here To Look Pretty
When you spend years in the underworld,
you come back different.
My body won’t let me pretend anymore.
She refuses the old performance:
the smile that hides depletion,
the softness meant to soothe everyone but me,
the version of Preet curated for comfort.
Silence reshaped me.
Initiation rewired me.
Devotion built a spine I can finally feel.
Now, when I show up, it’s because my body says yes—
a real yes,
a rooted yes,
a yes that rises from breath, not pressure.
And if my truth no longer feels familiar to you,
it’s okay to let this version of me go.
Releasing is a sacred act too.
This space is no longer a place for performance.
It is a place for presence—
for women willing to meet themselves
the way I was asked to meet myself:
honestly, fiercely,
without decoration.
As the return deepened, a path forward revealed itself.
An Invitation To Journey With Me
If you’re still here…
welcome home.
If you hunger for depth,
for ritual that brings you back into your body,
for truth that rearranges you from the inside out —
this is your path opening.
What I’ll share from here are the rites and remembrances that remade me.
The somatic unravelings.
The energetic recalibrations.
The nervous system repair and the ancestral healing.
The sovereignty that settles into your bones when you stop performing and start listening.
This isn’t just a story.
It’s an invocation —
yours, mine, ours.
The void trained me.
The becoming continues.
The return is now.
Here I am.
Here for it all.
The Next Chapter
Part 3: The Re-Emergence —
where I step back into the world
with a new spine,
a new voice,
and a new way of serving.
A season where silence
became teacher, mirror, and medicine.
With you,
Preet
P.S. If you don’t want to miss what unfolds next,
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my private newsletter where I share the transmissions that never make it online.
The rituals.
The reckonings.
The truths buried beneath the noise.
Each letter is a thread in our collective remembrance.
You’ll feel it when it lands.
