A Short Bio

I was born in Lebanon in 1976 during a civil war. My childhood was filled with drawing, daydreaming, and the scent of orange blossoms. I encountered magic and mystique quite mundanely, especially while playing in the village fields when we escaped the battles in the city. I still feel that magic and mystique dwell in the everyday mundane.

I grew up and underwent multiple subjectivations. I moved to Holland and ‘became a biologist’. I moved to Japan and ‘became a marketer’. I moved to Dubai and entered corporate. I moved back to Beirut looking for roots and rootedness. Somewhere in my mid-thirties, I started having a recurring dream of a mandala-shaped house interior with a sea just outside. My individuation phase was announcing itself. I discovered Jung and later Grof, and became interested in transpersonal psychology and theory.

By 2018, my individuation was in full blossom. I experienced it as a typically messy mixture of ego micro-deaths, difficult learnings, confusion, loss of references, and moments of great awe and beauty. This internal process was mirrored and amplified by the outside circumstances in my home country (the 2019 Revolution, the 2020 bomb in the Beirut port, the sense of the collective, the new, transient forms of community building) and globally (the pandemic, the collective return to self, the shock of hyperobjects, the revenge of micro-beings).

Early in 2023, I started a professional training program with the Alef Trust that would bring together the threads of the themes that became dear to me– subjectivity, our individual and collective sense of ‘I’, individuation, the psyche, reality vs. the Real, our strategies of accessing experience, our ethical projects, our ways of being-in-the-world, and of course the relationship of all those to the transpersonal, to what’s beyond the ‘I’. Most importantly, my journey with the Alef Trust allowed me to bring those then-theoretical concerns into practice (or shall I say ‘praxis’?). After a year of deep immersion, I am now certified and accredited as a Transpersonal Coach by the IATCM.

Read my essay ‘Dismantling Subjectivity and Meaning-(re)Making in Transpersonal Practice’.

If you are undergoing a challenging or life-defining process and are comfortable enough to explore it from a transpersonal (non-ego) perspective, I’d love to support you on your journey.