Tanis Fishman: Your Guide to Yoga Nidra & Spiritual Growth

A quiet companion in soul-centered spaces.

I tend language as a place of refuge, and hold silence as a doorway to deeper knowing.

I walk alongside those who feel called to gently transform their pain, live with greater truth, and remember the wholeness that has always lived within them.

What I share comes from lived experience, a reverence for spiritual wisdom, and a deep compassion for the beautiful complexity of being human

The Journey of the Founder of the School of Sankalpa

I didn’t walk into this work. In many ways, life initiated me into it.

From an early age, I trained as a high-performance athlete. As a member of the Canadian National Ski Team, my world revolved around competition, discipline, and constant refinement. Even within that life, something in me felt slightly out of place. My body was fully committed to the path, but inwardly I carried questions that had nowhere to go.

There was little room for the language of the soul, or for the quiet curiosity that stayed with me beneath everything I was doing.

When I was nineteen, I was in a serious car accident. One of my closest friends was severely injured. I walked away physically unharmed, but something in me shifted in a way I could not yet understand.

During the crash I experienced what I can only describe as an out-of-body awareness. My perception lifted above the scene and I watched the event unfold from a place that felt spacious and still.

Something opened that day. It left me with the clear sense that consciousness was not confined to the body.

Not long after, I tore my ACL. My skiing career came to an abrupt end. The life I had been living closed almost overnight, and I found myself standing at the beginning of something I had not yet learned how to name.

Years later, while on a meditation retreat in India, another experience unfolded.

One morning I was walking along a quiet road. As I passed a cow, the usual sense of being a separate person dissolved. The boundaries of body and mind were no longer there in the way I had always known them. There was only a vast field of presence. The road, the trees, the sky, the animals moving nearby all felt part of the same living fabric. Everything was permeated with a deep sense of unity and love.

This remained for several days. I barely slept. I barely ate. I rested in a quiet sense of being that felt deeper than anything I had previously known.

Eventually it faded.

I had no framework to understand what had happened. For many years I spoke about it to no one. Like many people who encounter such experiences, I tried to return to it through meditation, prayer, and devotion. I believed I had touched something ultimate.

Over time another question appeared. The experience had come and gone.

Something remained that was aware of both its presence and its absence.

That question followed me into the deeper terrain of human life.

The birth of my second child. The unraveling of my marriage to the person I believed was my soulmate. These events dismantled many of the identities I had built around myself. My nervous system collapsed under the weight of it all. The spiritual understanding I thought I carried no longer helped me.

I met grief, anger, fear, and a deep vulnerability I had not fully known before. The only movement available was to stay with what was unfolding.

To remain in the body and feel what was there.

During that time something clarified quietly within me. Through what felt like an inner unfolding, many layers of identity fell away. Beneath them was a simple presence that did not move with the circumstances of my life.

A steady sense of being.

What many traditions call the I AM.

When that recognition settled, the search that had shaped so many years of my life came to rest. It wasn’t something I decided. It simply dissolved.

Since then, my work has grown out of lived experience.

I accompany others as they move through their own processes of remembering — the gradual release of what is not essential, and the rediscovery of what has always been present.

Human life itself is the path. Every moment carries something that asks to be seen, felt, and integrated.

Sometimes the sacred becomes most visible in the places we once wished were not part of the journey.