ABOUT ME
A Life Story
Everyone who chooses this Path does so for a reason. Each of us, carrying our own wounds, seeking healing — and, most importantly, recognizing the need for it. And once you’ve truly seen yourself — the raw, unguarded self — judgment loses its power. Pride dissolves. Ambition quiets. What remains is presence. And grace.
I’m sharing my story not to dwell in the past, but to help you hear your own voice more clearly — to remind you that life begins not with the experience itself, but with the moment we acknowledge it.
I was 19 when I first heard the wailing sirens. I remember nothing else — only that deafening sound as I bled out in the back of an ambulance. When I woke up after surgery, I learned I had lost the baby. And much more than that — something inside me died too.
Six months later, my mother was diagnosed with cancer.
And that’s when I disappeared — not physically, but emotionally, spiritually.
For almost 15 years, I was gone.
Collapsed inward.
I know what violence feels like — both physical and emotional.
I know what it means to have a gun to your head.
I’ve survived car crashes and a litany of other silent catastrophes.
But no one knew.
Not then.
To the world, Lina was a radiant success — organizing the most prestigious international events: Paris Fashion Week, Le Mans 24, state-level cultural forums. Effortless. Brilliant. And all the while, she was hiding it. All of it.
Until her system shut down.
That’s when I realized: There was no life in me. I was just a biological organism performing its tasks. Yes, I practiced yoga. Yes, I meditated. Yes, I always had this quiet knowing that something greater existed beyond us. But that knowing was a sterile bandage a clean white patch I kept placing over a soul that was gaping, howling in grief.
And then Nepal happened. Just a one-week trip. But when I returned to Paris, something had shifted irrevocably. It was the point of no return. Three days later, I was back in the Himalayas. I shut down my business. My production lines. My former life. And I understood. As Shiva once said to Parvati: “The end is the beginning.”
From there, I traveled the world — learning how to live again in Tibetan monasteries, in the jungle temples of Java, the sacred silence of the Amazon, and the ashrams of India. I sat with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, with Paramahamsa Vishwananda, and most intimately, with my teacher — Lama Kalsang. It was a journey of shedding — layer after layer of ignorance and ego, pulling pain from the shadows and transmuting it into wisdom.
This is the essence:
Pain, shame, and unforgiveness are born from not knowing.
And knowledge — deep, embodied knowing — is liberation.
But here’s what I also learned: Healing on the subtle level is not enough. We live in bodies. Every trauma, every shock — it’s stored in our tissues, our bones, our nervous system. We are encoded by our genome. We are run by systems with their own chemistry, memory, and language.
Without tending to the body, the work of the spirit cannot hold. That’s why so many people find themselves stuck — cycling through retreats, therapists, and coaches for years or even decades. Tools become crutches. And we forget how to walk.
So my next step became the body. Its structure. Its chemistry. I began to seek out the finest somatic therapists in the world, masters of Eastern medicine, stewards of ancient healing lineages.
And from there, the real work began.
The long, meticulous labor of what would become SMATEOM — a project that weaves together thousands of years of wisdom, the gifts of the Earth, and the clarity of modern science.
One day, I found my way back home.
But it didn’t start with that word.
It started with a plane landing in Paris — a flight from Nepal that brought back someone utterly changed. Not “enlightened” — no. But someone who had seen, perhaps more than once, that somewhere along the way… she had turned in the wrong direction. And that recognition was so searing, so unbearably interesting, that three days later I found myself boarding another plane — this time heading not from somewhere, but to somewhere.
Back to the Himalayas. Back Home.
It was there that the unmistakable sensation of homecoming bloomed inside me — not a metaphor, but something fierce and undeniable in my bones. In that moment, I knew I no longer belonged to any country. The idea of citizenship, of labels and borders, felt hollow. I could live in the mountains, by the sea, in a valley — it didn’t matter. Administrative lines, names on maps, nations staking claims to eternity — none of it held any meaning for me anymore.
My first helicopter flight through the arms of the Himalayas — cradled by ridges and snow-bound peaks — that was when I first understood power.
True strength. Majestic beauty. And how silence is their native tongue.
Then came real Tibet. Upper Mustang. The Forbidden Kingdom of Lo... Ladakh... Spiti. And so many other places that left no room for a return to my former life. Once you taste that kind of stillness — once the mountains speak to you in a language beyond words — you cannot go back to how things were.