Akara Campbell
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Kundalini Activation Practioner and Sound Journey Guide
I value being at home in the world. And sharing that sensation with others.
I was 17 when my parents started their 10 year battle in court before getting divorced. My immediate response was to hop on a plane to Uganda, East Africa. I figured keeping my perspective and reality in check was a priority. It was there I really learned how to trust. Upon returning, I enrolled in my bachelor’s degree, studying journalism & communication in Ottawa, Ontario.
“Give voice to the voiceless,” became my mantra, a teaching my professors shared with me on the first day of my undergrad.
Immediately after graduating, I returned to East Africa as a journalist. Whether I knew it at the time, “Where and what is home?” became the leading question of my quest. I traveled through Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia before landing in Ghana for six months. There, I was a reporter with an organization known as Journalists for Human Rights. My focus was on the state of the ocean, and how we – as a global society – were disposing millions of liters of human liquid waste into the waterways everyday.
WHERE IS HOME?
If the Earth, our planet, is not respected as our home, then what is? Perhaps our planet is the most seemingly “voiceless” of us All…
These pains, questions, and insights inspired in me a deep exploration of conscious living. From the mountains of British Columbia, Canada, to the Himalayas in India, to the beaches and jungle of Costa Rica, I then traveled; forming an intimate relationship with nature along the way. The people I met became my teachers, friends, and international community.
I was seeking answers to waking up.
In Costa Rica, 2014, I discovered dance as a form of therapy. I formerly knew dance through sport and choreography. On the same journey, I fell in love with surfing, learning under the guidance of someone deeply in tune with the rhythms & tempos of life. And the Ocean.
In 2015, I became a 200hr certified yoga teacher from a school in Rishikesh, India. I later returned to India for six months in 2017 to study the work of Gurdjieff (Sacred Movements) and Reiki healing. (The year in between, I was teaching dance therapy and working as a radio journalist in Revelstoke, British Columbia, while snowboarding on all weekends and lunch breaks!).
From India, 2018, I returned to where I was born and enrolled in courses in solutions-focused brief counseling & cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) out of the University of Toronto. At the same time, I began to study design thinking out of Ryerson University’s design thinking lab.
I soon got swept away to the Bay Area in California where I really fell in love with design thinking, while continuing to pursue my captivation with psychology, dance, yoga, and surfing. I enrolled in my master’s in counseling psychology at Santa Clara University, while I simultaneously taught movement arts & yoga to both children and students at Stanford University and other schools in the surrounding area.
As I deepened all of my practices, there was no denying that there was an underlying current to all of my pursuits…
And that was my love of Sound.
The more I taught dance, yoga, and facilitated healings, the more I surrendered to the power of music. And its abilities to heal. To transcend. And ironically, bring you to a space of stillness. As my favorite quote says…
“Music is the silence between the notes.”
What I once tried to capture as a journalist as “voicelessness,” grew into a relationship with silence. A few near death experiences revealed to me that “the void” – nothingness – is where it all begins. It is both where we all come from, and where we go back to. It’s free of any set location or physical thing. It is a place of complete and utter peace…
It is Home.
Though seemingly ironic, it was my relationship with silence – stillness – inspiring my pursuits to become a DJ. Where movement meets stillness, it’s on a dance floor, in a moment of complete and utter let go, I watch my participants enter into that deep sense of belonging. Of being. Of contentment.
With California as my home base, mid master’s program, I traveled to Ecuador to host a dance therapy workshop in January 2019. It was in Ecuador I met one of my DJing mentors. The same year I started to DJ, I very coincidentally stumbled into KAP, Kundalini Activation Process, and became a certified practitioner by Venant Wong & Sigrid Brelid. KAP is a form of energy transmission work, pairing beautifully with counseling, dance, DJing, and hosting musical/sound journeys in general.
In 2020, I graduated from my master’s in counseling psychology and have been offering a fusion of modalities ever since. Whether it’s dance therapy, ecstatic dance, coaching & counseling, energy transmission work, yoga (or building a badass tech venture for youth!!)… It’s All for the same reason.
And that’s to help guide people “back home.”
Being at home in the world is not isolated to a singular location, or attachment to any physical thing. It’s not about attaining some status, accomplishing something, or getting to “some place.” It’s a sensation of oneness, belonging, nondualism, and contentment. It’s a point of remembering, and living in connection to reality that everything we need to be is already here.
It’s finding stillness in the movement. And being alive in this moment.
~Akara Campbell
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