KNOT MASTER: HOW KNOTS BECAME MY FIRST TEACHER

I didn't realize it growing up, but untying knots has been my quiet apprenticeship since childhood. Whenever a necklace chain or bracelet became impossibly tangled, it somehow ended up in my hands. My mom, my aunts—everyone just passed it to me with this unspoken trust that I could fix it. Anything drawstring out of the laundry, impossibly and tightly wound around itself? I loved freeing the cotton. And while most people grew annoyed or impatient, I would sit there with a calm, almost meditative reverence. Knots felt like little mysteries. Something inside me loved the challenge, the stillness, the intimacy of working slowly until something impossibly stuck suddenly came undone.

I didn't know then this ability would become a metaphor for my life.

Years later, in my late twenties, I began my first Vision Quest, a beautiful Lakota initiation into the medicine wheel of life. The preparation includes tying 432 prayer ties on one continuous string—each little square of cloth filled with tobacco and prayer. The East represents childhood, the South adolescence, the West adulthood, and the North your elder years. Each tie is a prayer you breathe into the corresponding phase of your life. For my quest, I made 108 for each direction, preparing them in Toronto before travelling to Upstate New York. When I arrived at my place on the land and began to set up, I unwrapped them and saw the entire string had tangled into a massive, chaotic knot. Four hundred and thirty-two prayer ties, intertwined like a cosmic joke.

The sun was beginning to set. I hadn't even started my fast. And all I could do was laugh—truly laugh—because in the moment I felt like my whole life had been preparing me for exactly this. So I sat down on the ground, cross-legged outside of my tent, and began untying the knots one by one, the way I did as a child. With presence, with breath, with patience, with devotion. It took hours. It was absurd and beautiful and symbolic all at once.

And then something clicked: this is what I do. Not just with necklaces or laces or prayer ties, but with people—in their bodies, in their relationships, in their lineage, in their emotions, in their business, in the unseen parts of their life they can't quite name. Wherever something is tangled, blocked, or stuck, I naturally move toward it with the same calm curiosity I had as a child. Not forcing, not rushing, not prying—just sitting with it until the thread reveals itself.

I'm a knot master, but really, I'm also a "not" master—not a master of anything at all. I'm a human becoming, devoted to my own death and rebirth process over and over again. I don't claim perfection or mastery. I simply follow what I've been guided by my whole life: the ability to sit with what others can't or don't want to, the ability to see where something is crossed, twisted, or hooked, and the ability to gently help it find its way back to flow.

And my hope is always the same—if you come to sit with me, something in you feels empowered, softened, seen, brave enough to face the knots you've been carrying. And if you're too scared to untie them alone, it's okay. We can do it together.