Anna Inyskaya

My Path

Newcomers often ask me how I came to this Path. How I opened the school, what pushed me to it.

Many expect a tearful story about some illness that struck me, after which I went looking for a way to heal and so found the spiritual path.

Others, knowing that I hitchhiked across the whole country alone, expect a story about a rock girl who came into the light of truth after knowing the rot of all being.

And many, knowing that I have spent more than fifteen years in charity work, expect gentle stories in which I raise others like a mother, rescue them, and "open" in them a love of themselves and an acceptance of their bodies.

But my Path began long before this life. I was born into a shamanic family, on both sides. I spent my childhood and youth in Siberia, Mongolia and the Altai mountains, near Belukha.

I was meant to stay in Mongolia and continue the line of healer shamans, but I always knew my own story, so I left with a light heart.

I have lived through several clinical deaths. My heart stopped more than once, and each time they brought me back. In those moments I hung in Spirit beside my own body and watched them revive me.

Death is a natural state for me, and I have never made it a reason for hype.

It also happened that I passed through several initiations of Death.

By the joking ones I mean the times they buried me in the earth, leaving nothing but a long hose to breathe through.

And the real ritual ones, where under the guidance of Lamas I was buried in a coffin and given a new name at the same time.

And one more, performed at Imbolc by my Teacher, in another tradition, in the sephira Daat.

And yes, to be clear: I do not count clinical deaths as an initiation.

In 2015 I left to study in Japan, closing another chapter of my life.

By then I was already a qualified psychologist, in practice since 2008. Alongside that I always pursued my real calling, and I already had students and clients outside my professional work.

I worked with healing, runes, tarot, sephirotic and ritual magic, shamanic practice and lucid dreaming, and I meditated a great deal. In that period I completed a ten-day fast and practised five- and seven-day fasts throughout. There were many experiments with diet, qigong, yoga, breathing practice and sound.

In the same years I added to my education and took a course in history, philosophy and cultural studies. It was not the last of my studies, and others followed.

And no, none of it was ever "too much" for me. I have always wanted to learn, and I am still learning.

After I came back from Japan, three years of karmic work began, in which I managed to change professions several times, divorce my second husband, and settle at last on the intention to found my school.

Moving from the mountains of Thailand to Vietnam, I took initiation into the Order, and settling in a small village in the Vietnamese mountains I shaped my way of working without hurry, because by then I understood what I wanted to keep working with and what no longer held my interest.