About Me
Rita C.Silva
Transpersonal Psychotherapist in Supervision at AlmaSoma Instituto do Transpessoal
I could tell you where I trained and which modalities I work with — you'll find all of that above. But none of it explains how I came to understand healing, spirituality, relationship, and what it means to be human. The text below does.
Em formação na Escola Portuguesa de Biossíntese
Especialização Avançada em Técnicas Energéticas em Transpessoal - Almasoma Instituto de Transpessoal
Psicologia e Psicodinâmica Transpessoal - Almasoma Instituto de Transpessoal
Psicopatologia: Terminologia , Critérios de Diagnóstico e Diagnóstico Diferencial - Almasoma Instituto de Transpessoal
Reiki Usui Tibetano Shiki Ryoho Nivel I
BA Fine Arts- University of the Arts London- Central Saint Martins
My story
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I WAS BORN with a strange feeling of detachment. When I look back, as far as memory reaches, there is this sense of being an observer, of watching my parents from somewhere slightly behind my own eyes, unable to quite understand how I got here, or why. I did not have words for it then, but I have since learned that almost every contemplative tradition has a name for that quiet presence that watches: the witness. As a child, I did not experience it as a gift. I experienced it as distance. Ever since I can remember, I have felt alone around people — different, not quite belonging, as if everyone else had received instructions for being human that never reached me.
There were, from the beginning, two worlds for me. In nature I was whole. I relished the earth with a sense of wonder, deeply connected to the land and to animals, and I carried myself in the wilderness with a confidence and authenticity I could find nowhere else. Among trees I never asked myself who I was; I simply was. Human beings were a different story altogether. They were confusing to me — their codes, their performances, the things they said that were not the things they meant. Looking back, I think my body always knew what my mind took decades to learn: that we are not visitors to the natural world but expressions of it, and that a nervous system raised by wind and animals and slowness will always recognize the wild as home before it recognizes a crowd.
One could say I had a wild and free childhood. Very lonely, but autonomous and creative — and that description, in truth, covers most of my life. I grew up on a farm, though not in a very farmlike way, so I never understood how essential nature, quietness and slowness were to me and to my nervous system. They were simply the water I swam in. The early free years went by quickly and the farm slowly turned into an isolated prison where I felt out of touch with the world. I longed for connection. I feared it deeply, and I longed for it — a contradiction that, if I am honest, still lives in me today.
Growing up, I had this strange sense of being adrift, of pursuing things because that is what one does, always shadowed by the feeling that life cannot just be this. I was not spiritual, but I was philosophical. I asked myself: Who am I? Why am I here? What is the meaning of life? Is there a purpose to any of it? I looked at the ordinary daily life of contemporary society and it felt so shallow. I could not find in it the wonder, the depth, the sheer fuss of being alive. I did not know it then, but those questions were themselves a spiritual life. I just had not yet learned that questions can be lived rather than answered.
There was another exile, quieter and deeper: I was out of touch with my own body as a woman, and so I did not know how to express myself in the world. I never understood or valued my femaleness. It seemed weak to me. I wanted to be like the boys: free. I wanted to run and play football. It felt like boys were allowed to be anything, while girls were there to amuse them, to watch from the sidelines, to be so privileged as to be looked at, perhaps chosen. So my femaleness turned into something rigid, protected, hidden. As I grew up it took on a sense of performativity — as if I were showcasing, in a shop window, a version of what the world thought female was, while inside I was completely estranged from it. My energy channeled itself in a driven masculine way. Year after year I built a barrier between myself and the world, almost impenetrable. Nobody really knew me, and I did not really want to know anybody — and yet, strangely, I was known. There is an old idea, kept alive in folk tales and retold by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, that every woman carries within her a wild, instinctual nature, and that a woman severed from it slowly starves. I did not know those stories then. But I was living one.
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I always sensed something wild inhabiting me, but I never came to understand it. So my life swung between intense periods of discipline and chaotic periods of breaking free, rebellion and adventure. The wild periods were the ones that made me feel alive and also the ones that left me deeply ashamed. I tucked my wilderness away in a dark place, and my body resented it; my whole being resented it. I was scared of it. I believed I had no control over it or over how it would erupt — but that was only because I had never taken the time to talk to it, to understand it, to know it. Jung called this buried territory the shadow: everything we push into the dark so that we can be acceptable. What we refuse does not disappear. It waits, and leaks out sideways — as shame, as chaos, as sabotage — until we finally turn around and face it. I would learn that the hard way. My rebellions were not the opposite of my spiritual life. They were my exiled vitality, knocking.
We humans are beings of contradiction, beings of duality. That is our condition. We cannot escape all that we are, and I dare say we can be a little of everything there is to be in this world. I have been cruel, greedy, jealous, selfish; I have lied and manipulated. And I have also been enormously generous, kind, forgiving, empathetic, loving. None of it makes me a bad or a good person. It makes me a human. Wholeness, I have come to believe, is not the same as purity. A spirituality that only admits our light is just a prettier shop window too — just a prettier one.
It was pain that woke me. Not insight, not a book, not a teacher — pain. It shook me from the deep sleep I had been walking through and threw me to the ground, and it was from the ground that I found my path again. I understand now what was happening: a crisis is exactly as violent as our grip on what needs to die. The longer I held on to outdated structures — identities, defenses, stories about who I was supposed to be — the harder life had to shake to bring them down. The pain was not the punishment; the pain was the demolition. What the mystics called the dark night, nature simply calls a forest fire: everything rigid burns so that the soil can breathe again. My structures did not fall gently, because I did not hold them gently. But they had to fall, so that new, more honest ways of being could be born in their place. I don't see my breaking as the interruption of my path. It was the path, announcing itself.
Because of my story, when I look at spirituality I do not see something outside of me, but something I found within me. I found it in my body, in my connection with others and with nature, in my capacity to embrace the mystery of life. Transcendence, for me, is not out there in the sky. It is in my relationships- with myself, with others, with the world. I have come to believe that the ultimate spiritual practice is not found on a mountaintop or in a temple, but in the two most ordinary and most demanding places there are: inside the body and in front of another human being. The body, because it is the only place where life can actually be experienced. And the other, because nothing exposes us like relationship. It is in the meeting with another that our presence is truly tested — our wounds surface, our masks are named, our love is asked to become concrete. Martin Buber wrote that the divine is not found in me, nor in you, but between us, in the space where two beings truly meet. I believe that. Two people in a room are always speaking beneath their words — nervous system to nervous system, body to body, calming or alarming each other without knowing it. We do not heal alone and we were never meant to. Anyone can be enlightened by themselves on a mountain; staying open in front of another human being is the real practice.
In my journey I have used doorways: altered states of consciousness, ceremonies, breathwork, plant medicines, regressions, deep trance. They can crack a life open in a single night. They can dissolve the walls of the ordinary self and show us, with overwhelming clarity, that we are more than we thought we were. These experiences are real and I honor them. But I came to understand that a state is a visit, not a residence. Without integration — without the slow, unglamorous work of weaving the experience into the body, into habits, into the way we think and perceive the world — even the most sacred journey evaporates, and what remains is hunger. And so the chase begins: the next ceremony, the next dose, the next session, each one reaching for a sensation that was never meant to be fetched again but carried — carried inside, into traffic, into arguments, into Tuesday afternoons. The sacred gets outsourced once more, only this time it does not live in the sky; it lives in the next appointment. I noticed a subtle way of using the light to avoid the wound, of floating in transcendence precisely so I did not have to feel what was unresolved in me, in my body, in my relationships. The measure of an awakening, I have learned, is not how far you traveled or what you saw. It is what you carry back with you.
For as long as I held on to the idea of a universal source of unconditional love outside myself — of home being elsewhere, of having been cut off from somewhere and dropped onto this earth — I could not fully grasp being alive, here, in this body. I relished states where duality dissolved, where the body dissolved and there was only peace. And I despaired, waiting for an angel to arrive and tell me what to do with my life, waiting to finally see and hear guidance.
And then I gave up.
And in giving up, I stumbled onto something essential. I believe we all carry the divine within us — that each of us has a higher self, a deeper knowing, that can guide us through this life. But the way we access it, the way it speaks, the way the connection is made — that is profoundly personal, untransferable and subjective. For some it arrives as images, for others as a voice; for others still as a felt sense in the body, a knowing in the gut, a dream, an animal crossing a path, a silence that suddenly has weight. There is no standard doorway to the sacred, no single language it is obliged to speak. And that is why I think this quest must be undertaken free of preconceptions and expectations because that was precisely what held me back. I was searching for someone else's description of transcendence, waiting for spirituality to materialize in ways that weren't my own: the visions, the voices, the angel with instructions. I was holding a borrowed map and despairing that my territory did not match it. It was only when I gave up — when I let every borrowed image dissolve — that space finally opened for my own authentic expression of the sacred to emerge. The guidance had been there all along. It simply did not speak the language I was trying to listen for.
I realized that life is not meant to be thought. It is meant to be lived, experienced. And for me, so are transcendence and spirituality. Giving up the search, it turned out, was not a failure — the seeking itself had become the thing standing between me and what I was seeking. For me, the experience came through pleasure. The pleasure of being in a body, of being alive, of simply being, of doing. Pleasure is where body, mind and spirit stopped being three separate things for me. Through it I touched the divine, and it was not out there — it was inside me.
I am not speaking of the pleasure that numbs — the consuming, the escaping, the filling of an inner emptiness with sensation after sensation, which is really just another way of leaving the body while appearing to indulge it. The pleasure I mean is the opposite: it is presence itself. It is the full inhabiting of a sensation — the warmth of sun on skin, the taste of food actually tasted, the aliveness of movement, of touch, of breath — without rushing past it, without guilt, without leaving. It is the experience of energy itself moving through the body — a warm, vibrant current, a subtle hum beneath the skin that is running through us in every moment and that we almost never notice. It is aliveness as a physical sensation. It is warm. It vibrates. It rushes. And yes, it is erotic. It can make you wet, make you ache with desire, not for anyone or anything in particular, but simply for being alive.
The traditions that honor the body have always known this: that the sacred is not only transcendent, hovering above the world, but immanent, humming inside it — inside skin, breath, appetite, joy. When I understood that on a cellular level, everything changed. I realized that the power of creation and destruction lives inside me: in my thoughts, my emotions, my actions. Suddenly I held so much space within myself, as if life were an abstraction: a series of continuities and discontinuities, meant simply to be experienced. Everything is experience, and everything comes from experience. I looked back and understood why I had felt so alive in the craziest moments of my life: I was experiencing something. And I saw how much time I had wasted thinking about life instead of living it.
I no longer believe there is a right or wrong way to do life, no way to edit it, curate it, make it pretty. Life is wild — a wild adventure. And a spiritual person, as I have come to understand it, is someone who goes through this adventure without losing touch with their own wilderness; someone who stops waiting for the angel, stops kneeling before the shop window and creates their own wild adventure on this earth.
I understand now that this adventure is not a path toward a destination. It is a constant relationship of curiosity — with myself, with the other, with the world. The questions that haunted me as a child have not been answered; they have been transformed. Who am I? is no longer a cry from the sidelines but a way of meeting life, asked fresh each morning: who am I today, beneath yesterday's conclusions? Who are you, really, under everything I have decided about you? What is this world, when I stop assuming I already know it? Curiosity, I have found, is what wonder becomes when it survives growing up. It is love in its investigative form.
And inside that curiosity lives a choice: the choice of wholeness. The choice to stop amputating the parts of myself that are unpresentable and instead keep widening the circle until everything I am fits inside it. From that place I began to see that beauty is ugliness repeated. What we call ugly is simply what we have not looked at long enough. The scar, the storm, the decay of autumn, the asymmetry of a face, the mess of a real human story: repeated, held, looked at with patience, they become the very things we gasp at in nature and in art. Nothing that is whole is ugly. And if that is true of the world, it is true of us. We are inherently lovable — not because of what we polish and put in the window, but as we are, in all our repetitions of shadow and light.
Because of everything I have touched in this life I can say this now with certainty: the most beautiful thing there is, is to love. To stand in front of another human being completely present, undefended, and give all of yourself without any guarantees of being chosen, of being held, of even being understood — that is the wildest and biggest adventure there is in life.
I still fear connection, and I still long for it, a little bit like always. There are still days when I leave my body and live in my head, days when the old discipline hardens me, days when the borrowed maps look tempting again. But something is different: I come back. My practice today is not spectacular — it is remembering to feel my feet on the earth, to taste what I eat, to stay in the room when intimacy gets uncomfortable, to listen to the wild thing in me with curiosity instead of fear. Some days I manage it; some days I don't. I am learning that it is not about arriving, but returning, again and again to the body, to the present, to the other. That is the practice.
I began as an observer who could not understand why she was here. I do not have the answer yet — but I have stopped asking it from the sidelines. The witness finally stepped into the life she was watching. That, for me, is what spirituality is.
