A few words from Morteza.
The pivot
For over two decades I worked in cybersecurity. Constant alerts, high pressure, output without end. I knew “wired but tired” intimately. It was my baseline. I started in the summer of 1992; I stopped in October 2020.
When COVID arrived and the world paused, I volunteered to get laid off, with the intention of going back to the corporate world in a few months. I hitched my trailer and drove north. Northern Cali, Oregon, Washington, the long line of the Pacific.
A month into the roadtrip, I was camped by Hood River on a cold October afternoon, alone in a deserted camp site. I’d just finished a yoga practice and dropped into meditation as the sun was going down. And in that quiet, somewhere between breath and not-breath, I knew I wasn’t going back. Not in a few months. Not at all.
I haven’t been to a corporate office since.
What changed
The years that followed were a long, slow turning toward the body, the thing I had treated as a delivery vehicle for my mind for most of my life.
Yoga reached me first, and it reached me through a screen. Elena Brower’s voice cut through; for years I practiced with her remotely before finally meeting her at a festival, giving her a hug of gratitude. My yoga teacher training brought me Randi Schiffman, who later became my Thai bodywork teacher. Twice she opened a door I didn’t know was there. More recently, Tara Megan and Chantelle Raven of the Embodied Academy have shaped how I hold both practice and presence; I joined the support team for their work, including a nine-day retreat in Portugal in late 2025.
Some of the most important learning came not in a training but in friendship. A chance connection with three brothers in Humboldt County became a kind of brotherhood, a small circle that held what each of us had been carrying alone. Out of that circle came The Wisdom Within, a men’s retreat we offer when the time is right. The June 2025 gathering in Washington was, for many of us, the most powerful container we’d been part of.
Each of these teachers and friends gave me something I couldn’t have given myself: permission to stop performing the body, and start listening to it.
Arum, and where it comes from
I was born in Iran. At eighteen I migrated to Canada, put myself through college, and arrived in Silicon Valley in 1995 as a young software engineer. The career that followed lasted nearly three decades. In 2023, I co-created an art project in honor of the women of Iran and the woman, life, freedom movement, which in so many ways reconnected me to my own roots. It has begun a quiet reopening of something I had set down at eighteen.
Aram is the Persian word at the root of this practice. It describes a quality of settled, undisturbed peace. In casual, intimate speech it softens to arum. To name the work Arum Within was to weave a thread between the country I left, the lands I made my home in, and the practice I now carry.
I am not entirely Iranian, not entirely Canadian, not entirely American, but a mix of these, with my own entanglements and my own perspective. The work I do is shaped by all of it.
What I bring
Trained in: Traditional Thai Bodywork · Hatha and Yin yoga (RYT) · Sound Therapy (Harmonic Sounds) · Integration Facilitation · Embodied tantra (Embodied Academy) · Certified Zendo Sitter.
What grounds me
The same tools I bring to clients ground me: meditation, yoga, time in nature, ideally all three at once. I dance. I play. In the past year, tantra has joined the rotation. I am still a beginner in all of it; that is part of why I can sit with you in your beginning.
What I am not
This work is non-clinical. I am trauma-informed but not a trauma therapist. I am not a substitute for medical care. I do not promise outcomes, only presence, attention, and a room to slow down in.
