Welcome! I’m Cynthia.

I am a long time devotee of the Goddess.
While there are a lot of things that are true about me: I’m an author, an educator, a yoga therapist.
I have spent a lot of time creating and leading yoga teacher trainings, and I have a deep passion for the sacred texts associated with yoga and tantra.
I have spent two decades immersed in many different forms of non-duality (yup, there are lots of them. Wild, right?).

These things are true, but they’re not honest.

What is honest about me is that I am a devotee. This means I’m interested in the world. I am interested in the sticky, tumbling, powerful experiences of being human, of being embodied.

Most spiritualities have deeply embedded patriarchal biases embedded in them.
There are so many layers of bias and conditioning that we can really only see a few currents in those trenched down waters.
My passion is teaching about the transcendence bias, which is one of the elements of this kind of spirituality.

The transcendence bias is when we are offered a goal in our spirituality: salvation, Heaven, grace. Samadhi, nirodha, mokṣa, enlightenment. So often we taught how to climb the ladder of what we’re not (I call this “let it go spirituality”), and then happily dropped off with a wink, a nod, and a farewell at that Gateless Gate.

We are so rarely taught how to climb back down that ladder: into form. Into body. Into the trouble. Into the condensation of our human power. Into the cave of the Heart, the cave of the Earth, the soil and darkness and mulchy things.

Who is the Goddess, Since People Ask:

This is the realm of the Goddess. Mother Earth, sound vibration, healing, pulsation, and power.

She isn't an archetype. She isn't a pattern within the whole, she's the whole itself.

She's the home. She's the rock and the loam-carpeted cave. She's also the wind rocking our adventuring boat, the dangerous sea that swallows rocks, the sting on the cheek and the rash on the thigh and the peace in the heart as we gaze at the dawn.

When we diminish her, we usually shrink her into the qualities that patriarchal models have used to describe the feminine. A pattern within the whole.
Nurturing. Overly emotional. Overtly sexualized.
But who said women are the intuitive ones?
Who said women are the emotional ones?
Who said men are the rational ones, or the aggressive ones, or the logical ones?
These are human qualities that have been randomly assigned to us and that have zero prevalence according to sex, culture, or gender.
They are just qualities.

The divine feminine is the new feminism. I assure you it is.

Twenty years of this work

I've been through kundalini awakening and spiritual crisis myself, and I've studied for decades with traditions and teachers who helped me understand both.

I am initiated into a traditional Goddess lineage and I do my best to keep learning both as a scholar and a practitioner.
I teach kundalini education directly. People in the middle of spiritual upheaval are often given very little real support.

I'm also a mother and a spouse, and a person who still catches herself bargaining with her own heart, saying I'll be happy when this or that finally resolves.
I get rigid sometimes. I lose myself and I have to find my way back to center.
I'm deeply imperfect and I go back to bargaining every once in a while. I pray a lot.
I meditate. I sit in the chaos and the busy and the insecurity.
I remember the Goddess.

What I keep finding on this path is that people want to do something they can incorporate into their lives that makes a meaningful difference.

Curiosity is what does that work. It's the thing that gets a tight jar lid open so you can look inside, and the Goddess loves to look inside.

I believe we can access life with curiosity, resilience, and the map of the heartbeat, which expands and contracts, evaporates and condenses, breathes in and out.

Curiosity is the heart. Curiosity is the divine feminine.

The book

Embodying the Goddess: How to Awaken Curiosity and Reverence on the Spiritual Path came out in January 2026 from Monkfish Publishing. It's drawn from twenty years of kundalini awakening, twenty years of study in the non-dual traditions, and the work of the great philosopher Utpaladeva.
Where so many traditions teach us to transcend, to move up and out, beyond the body and the everyday, this book offers the other half of the map, which is the return.

Blessed are those who know the Mother.

Embodying the Goddess book, released in 2026 (Monkfish), is inspired by 20 years of kundalini awakening, 20 years of study in non-duality traditions, and the work of the great philosopher Utpaladeva (900s CE). Blessed are those who know the Mother.

Come practice with me

Once a month I teach a live drop-in meditation on Zoom. We do a guided Amplification Meditation together, I give you a writing prompt, and then we sit in circle and share whatever came up. Bring a journal and an open heart. It's $15 and everyone is welcome.

You are not too advanced for this practice.
You are not too much of a beginner for this.

If you'd like to start smaller, I'll send you a practice from my companion workbook along with a code for your first drop-in free.

Credentials, for those who want them (and for what it’s worth, I do think they matter)

I've been a yoga teacher and yoga therapist for over twenty years, credentialed at the highest levels (C-IAYT, E-RYT 500). I
I hold a master's in Nutrition and am completing a master's in Yogic Studies with a focus on Tantra and Sanskrit, with an interest in early medieval Shaiva-Shakta texts.

For ten years I created and led 200 and 300 hour yoga teacher trainings focusing on the sacred texts, history, and philosophy of the yogic traditions.
I educate individuals and groups on non-dual self-inquiry, spiritual crisis, and the Goddess traditions, and I provide embodied practice techniques based in sacred scripture, subtle body anatomy, and modern science.

I've studied with many teachers over the years, including Dr. Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Dr. Ben Williams, who are my current teachers, and the late Sally Kempton, Rupert Spira, the late Dr. Bonnie Greenwell, the late Jazmin Lieb (lineage: Indra Devi), and Srivatsa Ramaswami (lineage: Krishnamacharya).

The Goddesses I work with are Kālī and all her forms including Kālasaṃkarṣiṇī, Cāmuṇḍā, the yoginīs, the Mātṛkās, Parā, Kuṇḍalinī, Kuṇḍaleśvarī, and Kuṇḍalī, and from outside the tantric traditions, Asherah and Ereshkigal.

I live in Santa Barbara, California.

“As a mother, yogini, teacher, and spouse—and most of all, a human being—Cynthia writes with kindness, humor, wisdom, and compassion for integrating transcendence and every day immanent life. Truly a valuable friend to have along the way!” — Hallie Austen Iglehart (author: The Heart of the Goddess)

The Goddess taught:
I will teach you the highest and most precious knowledge in a way so that you will understand the essence that is the true reality of the Goddess clan.
Standing above, the power of creation is the highest form of bliss. Divine power rains down a shower of nectar from the moon.
That reality you call dissolution is below, bringing about destruction through its rays, and that terrifying dissolution, endowed with a constellation of flames, is a treasure house of blazing light.
Shining bright in the middle of those two, beautiful with the bliss of both- fire and the moon, that should be known as the incarnation, the auspicious one pervading both.
Those two inter-penetrate each other: Fire is in the moon and moon is in the fire.
Emanation is the moon. And dissolution is the fire.
Oh supreme Lord! The sun is incarnation, situated in the middle.
— kālikākulapañcaśataka (krama)