Wait for the beautiful thing

There's a turn in my Q&A with international spiritualist and healer Ati Sundhari that aspires to be a twist. And that's fine

Wait for the turn. It’s a sharp one.

This turn comes about in the last act of my conversation with Ati Sundhari, my former yoga instructor and naked bike ride collaborator. In the video podcast version of our Q&A it’s visible how thrown I am.

Sundhari—whom you’ll see me refer to as Ati Donoso—rocked my world in the sweetest way a decade ago, at the 24-Hour Fitness in Beaverton, Oregon. Radiating feminine power, she helped revive my long-dormant yoga practice and get into good enough shape to start getting into legitimate condition. Ati and I also teamed up to do one of Portland’s famous naked bike rides, joining along the way with Debbie Baxter, mother to The Nest Project.

Through her social media presence I’ve consumed Ati’s aphorisms and watched her lead mostly women through yoga classes in exotic settings. Still, only now do I feel like I know her. And now, from a “magic town,” near Guadalajara, here’s the longest conversation I’ve ever had with one of my mid-life’s more resonant influences.

DA: We have a guest from deep in the archives of my life. [Laughter] But you do live on. It’s not like you’re ancient history

Ati Sundhari: Well thank you.

DA: A little Ati with me every day. We’re going to find out exactly where she is in Mexico, but this Ati Donoso: A yoga genius.

AS: Thank you for that introduction.

DA: I have so many questions about our past interactions, because there’s something about you that’s pretty unique. I’d like to figure out what that is.

AS: I’m excited and curious to find out together. [Laughs]

DA: Where are you exactly?

AS: I’m in a town near the city of Guadalajara. It’s called Ajijic . It’s known as a magic town. It’s next to the biggest lake of Mexico. We have the lake and we have mountains and we live right in the middle of it. It’s like living in a valley.

DA: Why are you in a magic town? Did you go there intentionally or did you just land there?

AS: I think that’s a double question. It’s a magic town because Mexico declares certain towns that meet certain criteria to be named as “magic towns.” What defines a magic town is the amount of art, how much they beautify the place, how they keep it clean and how safe it feels.

And magical because I was not meant to get here. I was only stopping by the city of Guadalajara on one Saturday six-and-a-half years ago everything changed. And I’m still here—I never made it to my final destination.

DA: Can you tell us how it changed? Or is that personal?

AS: No, it’s actually quite fascinating. I was on my ninth day of my travels. Coming from the north, I was a very plan-based person, just everything mapped out. And I was continuing all the way to the south. I had about 10 to 12 more days to drive, to get to my destination. I stopped in Guadalajara and my friend—from Portland, actually—she said, “Hey, I’m landing in Guadalajara, where are you?” I told her that I happened to be in Guadalajara myself.

So she invites me to this town for the weekend, to rest, reflect. I got there on a Friday. On Saturday I was offered a job here, managing a project—restoring a boutique hotel. I was like, No, I’m going to the beach. [Laughs] I have to go with my plan, I was thinking. Thank you, but no thank you.

That was at two in the afternoon. At 4:30 I get a call from the people in Talum, where I was moving to, and they said, “Ati, we’re sorry. but we cannot rent the home to you. Here’s your deposit.” A half an hour later I get a call from the supposed job I had, saying, “Oh Ati, the boss is going through some things, and…”

So everything complied for me to revise my entire plan—that one day, in the expanse of three hours.

DA: That doesn’t happen often.

AS: Exactly. I have so many beautiful stories that took me there. I’m actually writing about it. It’s going to be a fun adventure to read and keep up with. But that was the day that I decided I’ll start listening. Like [hands to chest] from the heart. From within the heart. To start listening to the synchronicities of the universe.

DA: I want to get all philosophical later. In 2013 I was about 242 pounds, and I had this talk at The Smithsonian Institute, so I was trying to get in shape, right? I had about six months to get ahead and I had worked out in my life. I ran cross country in high school, was never a heavy person, but had gotten that way.

That’s when I committed to making yoga part of my exercise regimen. I’d done it off and on since the nineties, but had never committed. That’s when I met you. I was just starting and really struggled at the beginning. [Laughs] Where were you in 2013?

AS: Hmm… 2013 I was on my fourth year of teaching yoga, in my career life. In my personal life, yoga had opened up portals and gates within myself that gave me so much awareness of the things I had kind of put away and ignored about myself and how I truly felt about my purpose.

My personal life was going through some rocky moments as I realized the partner that I had spent or was spending so much with, we were on a different channel. Yoga was a beautiful thing for me in the sense of redirecting my life and bringing myself back into this spiritual journey where I felt very familiar. Then my personal life was kind of struggling, because I was awakening. I was waking up to a different me. I was looking around me and thinking, “uh-oh”—with all due respect to the family and everything we built together—“is this it?”

DA: I didn’t know you well, but you seem a much more confident person than you were then.

AS: I do not recognize the person I see from that time. It’s honestly been such a fascinating shift for me that I’ve come such a long way. And I really feel the building of myself.

DA: You have an aura about you period, but in one of our early sessions you held your hand above me, very close to me. My eyes were closed the whole time, but I felt this energy very much affecting me. I was like, “What’s going on here?” [Laughter] Did you know initially that you were especially connected to yoga and that it was a thing that you should be doing professionally? How long did it take before you were “good at it”?

AS: I think my fascination with working with the body and body wisdom, first it was something that I felt and I knew before I actually made it official to go learn. Now that I’m looking back I realize that I have always been body wise. I’ve always had this deep, intuitive way of knowing where and how and it’s like I’m able to meet you there, in the subtleties of the body. We can call it that I can connect with your body in an energetic way and a physical way. And in a subtle way.

DA: You said “body wise”?

AS: Yes

DA: I don’t think I’ve heard that term before.

AS: Yeah. Body wise, body wisdom. Something that comes from a very intuitive place. I aways say “Capital Knowing”—profound knowing that you don’t know where it’s coming from. And I don’t really bother anymore to start asking the questions as to where and how? It’s more like, Oh—I have been this way since I can remember.

My personal pain—my personal struggles with my body took me into the specifics of yoga.

DA: What were you going through?

AS: I had 23 years of chronic back pain. I went to San Francisco doctors, different cities. I went to different places and they always suggested that I have surgery. I was thirtysomething years old, thirty-two maybe, and I was like, “I cannot have a back surgery. That can’t be the only solution, to have medication or surgery.”

That really started to tip for me: What are we not looking at? Why are we going straight to this assumption that’s the only way of healing the body? That put me on the journey to finding out what was happening with my anatomy. And the anatomy took me to, What’s happening with my emotions?

DA: I want to ask about what you’re doing today and talk about what you’re doing on Instagram and social media, but I can’t move forward without talking about the Naked Bike Ride.

AS: What a great time—I really do miss that kind of freedom and… madness.

DA: I feel like a little of that has gone out of the world since the pandemic.

AS: Yes.

DA: It’s obviously unfortunate. There’s a moment I remember from it very distinctly. You know, it’s a lot of people—thousands of people—and most people have never seen or done it, for sure. And you get kind of bogged down and we got bogged down at this intersection. There was this Black girl of unusual size; she might have been six feet tall, 200 pounds or whatever. She had glasses, I remember, and she looked at me and said, “I could never do that.”

[Laughter]

DA: I said, But you could, that’s the thing. There’s not one perfect body out here. She could, and I’d like to think she did do it one day.

AS: Me too. It’s a very magical place to be, because for some reason it doesn’t matter. I remember the possibilities of being hard on myself. We’re always demanding of, in some way. It’s human nature, right, not to be satisfied fully or completely. There’s always something else different to be doing. Can you relate?

But it felt so freeing, like that one day it did not matter. Anything judging was not there.

DA: Here’s the carryover that I didn’t expect. Because we’d had all of those police issues in Portland, bubbling up to the surface and leading to the kind of protest you saw with George Floyd in 2020, I as a pedestrian felt so much more free because I had been completely free in those streets. Actual freedom in these streets. The city felt different, just walking around. It felt like a kind of ownership—

AS: Absolutely!

DA: That other people don’t necessarily have. [Laughter] Where are you from? I don’t remember.

AS: I was born in Chile. South America. I left my country when I was 10. That’s thirty some years now of being gone.

DA: Do you go back there?

AS: I did actually did—not this Christmas, but past—I went and stayed with my dad—with the men of my life, which is my dad and three brothers.

DA: So you were raised with three brothers.

AS: I was not, actually. My story is pretty fascinating, because it’s been all over the place. I actually had not seen my dad since 2008, when I went to see him. Before that it was twenty some years. It’s a complex-yet beautiful story.

DA: Well, I made it needlessly complex as I realize you left when you were 10. Did you come to the United States?

AS: No. When I turned 10 we went to Peru and Peru was kind of like my home base. Then my mom marries my stepdad and we all kind of become like art dealers. My step dad still is an art dealer. He has a gallery in Miami, in Coral Gables. Our life was traveling the world, so from 10 to 20 I had already lived in about eight to ten countries. When I got to the age of 20 that’s when I was like, no more. I need to have some roots. [Laughs] That’s when I told my parents I wanted to stay in The States.

DA: You were where?

AS: Initially in Florida.

DA: Hmm.

AS: I know. Of all places. I knew people that I went to boarding school with—I went to school in India and Italy, Peru and Brazil—and there were different people from around those schools who were living in that place. That’s kind of my point: Let’s start a life here. Then soon after I started my family. I had kids and got married and all of that. That stage of my life.

DA: Your marriage brought you to Portland.

AS: Ha! What brought me to Portland was a dream. Believe it or not.

DA: Okay. I would like to hear that.

AS: Yeah. We were celebrating our seventh year anniversary. We were in South Beach at the hotel that Madonna made? It was, like, beautiful house music. A great night. I go to sleep and I have this dream that I could smell it so deeply. Like, this wet dirt and humidity. Everything was green. I wake up, and I’m like, “Where is Oregon?”

I’ve never heard of Portland before. Portland, Oregon. In my dream I asked my brother-in-law, “Where are we?” And he goes, “Portland.” So I wake up right away and say, “Where is Portland?” He tells me, right. That was on a Friday morning. Monday afternoon, my was-band—that’s the name that I’ve given him—my was-band, he says, “Uh, I just got an offer from Portland, Oregon. To move there with all of the expenses paid, to transfer from Miami. He said, “What do you think?” I said, “Is there anything to think about here?!”

Literally, based on all of the synchronicities again, we made a huge move.

DA: What struck you about Portland?

AS: A sense of freedom, a sense of individuality. Laidbackness, in terms of art. Also very rooted in enthusiastic ways of seeing the world and how they’re going to live their lives… green… I mean, all of the things that we love of this beautiful place.

DA: Where were you?

AS: Initially we were in Southwest Portland, which by the way felt so unnatural to me. It felt really strange to be a housewife going to the schools around there and I felt so out of place.

DA: How far out were you? Beaverton?

AS: No. Like, Huber. Huber Street. There’s a school over there, was there when my kid was going. The demographics were a little disconcerting for myself.

DA: Tell me what you mean. Was it just super white? Is that what we’re saying?

AS: A little bit, yeah. Not even in the sense of the skin. More like the way of living and thinking. You know, from living in so many countries I have never really had the challenge of co-existing and adapting to any culture, any color. It’s never been something that…. I really care [about]. But there are two places in the states where I felt the difference: Florida, where my color, my way of being, sometimes confronted people. The same thing in Southwest Portland. I said, “I think this is not our neighborhood.”

That’s when we made the move to Southeast—59th and Hawthorne. The schools were always kind of what inspired us to choose the places where we lived. So that’s something that took more of an importance in the moment.

DA: I met your daughter… did your family like Portland initially?

AS: Yeah. My kids are still there. They went to California, then they moved back and are still there now.

DA: Portland’s a great place to be young. Why did you go down to Mexico?

AS: Ahh… it’s something that you’ll read in my book.

DA: You better tease it.

AS: To say it very bluntly and honestly, I was heartbroken. I had gotten divorced. In the divorce my ex-husband chooses to take a new job in California, and the kids decided to go with him. I was not at all prepared for them to make that choice. What was happening inside of me and outside of me when they left and how I was feeling in Portland scared me at some point. I was really heartbroken. Everywhere I turned there was a memory of family and there were so many emotions loaded and weighing heavy on me.

I remember being in a parking lot at Adidas, after a class. And I had this conversation: What do you need, Ati?

DA: Adidas. You were teaching a class on its campus. And what did you ask yourself?

AS: I asked myself, What do you need, Ati? Because I literally could not warm my hands and my feet and the part of the back of my body for almost a year-and-a-half since my kids left. I was deeply saddened. There was something inside me that was turning off, as if a light was going off.

So I had this conversation with myself in the car: What do you need? The immediate answer was, I need my sunshine back. My sunshine. Not the our sun. Of course in Portland we can all use a little more sun. But it was literally, Where did my inner sun go? I had a very clear moment earlier in that year when I was in Talum, teaching a retreat. Remember?

And I just remember feeling the embodiment of the sun, the feeling of being in the frequency of the sun and having this life force run through me. And I said, Well, I guess we’re going to Mexico. In two months I orchestrated all of the movement and all the change.

DA: I see you on social media and how you engage people, but I guess I don’t know enough. Is your practice geared toward women?

AS: I think so, because it comes from a very personal place that more women can relate to the work that I’m sharing. It’s not intentionally like that though. It really is for whoever feels touched or enlightened. Just a little bright light of inspiration.

DA: You just mentioned offhand teaching on the Adidas campus. I think a lot of yoga instructors would be like, Wow. That’s amazing. I’m curious whether you could give me your top five interesting places that you’ve taught yoga. Most interesting classes, combine them however you want.

AS: I’ve thought about this before. One of my favorite places to teach was 24 Hour Fitness.

DA: Why?

AS: Because I’ve counted up to 87 students in a class. And to be able to hold space for such a quantity of people and really, truly feel plugged in, connected and being aware that every single individual there is within my sight and within my awareness? That’s fascinating. I used to get high off of that. I didn’t need anything else, but to be in the presence of all of you and witness you.

You go into a studio because you like the style that they teach. Or the teachers. Or they have a good philosophy, but a 24-Hour Fitness is just raw. You go in there because, I don’t know, you want to try it out. You want to stretch. It’s such a more—I feel—genuine, humble, straightforward way of approaching yoga.

DA: That’s super interesting… Number two!

AS: Number two was Root Yoga. We created a beautiful family there. Northeast, off of Broadway. I cannot remember the street right now. The third one would be Adidas. Adidas was five years of the same group, and that’s another thing I experienced in 24-Hour Fitness. All of the classes were super crazy big; it was a relationship with people of five, six years. The same thing with people at Adidas. The pleasure that I get and the honor that I get to watch people grow in their practice? I mean, I saw your transformation. I saw how you came in and what was challenging for you. I saw your middle part—Oh, I can flow and breathe at the same time. I can breathe, I know where my right and left are. You know, the progress of presence and embodiment. And then see people kick ass, transform their bodies, ask you questions about yoga—just beautiful.

DA: It’s helped me so much more off the mat than on the mat, and you’re a big part of it. I can’t imagine your perspective, especially when you’re talking about those big 24-Hour Fitness classes. I’m not in your position. But the energy is a big part of why I’m there. The volume of it is so different from practicing on your own.

Two left.

AS: Oh, People’s Yoga. People’s Yoga.

DA: Is that in Southeast?

AS: They have different ones. I used to teach at the one on Hawthorne, and then the one in Northeast. They have like five. Hawthorne would be my fourth, then Southeast is the firth. Just the philosophy of People’s Yoga is just beautiful. An affordable way of sharing yoga. I also felt this beautiful community within the teachers, which was not always something that lended itself very easily. That’s always something that I kind of craved. It felt like we lacked in the yoga community. There’s really this bond and this beautiful nurturing between the teachers themselves. Not to be just running to one studio after another and meeting once a year. Yeah, community within us.

DA: What’s your community like there? Your yoga community.

AS: Umm… I have some news for you. I don’t teach yoga anymore.

DA: Oh my goodness. When did stop doing that?

AS: [Laughs] I stopped teaching when one day, a year and a half ago, I had a conversation with me. I have this inner voice that I am very close to. I call it intuition, I call it sourcing. I call it many ways, but it’s just me. My higher self. And I heard: We’re done. I felt this kind of empty feeling in my heart. But it was like, You’re done. You’re done. We’re done because you’ve learned, go feel who you are. Kind of like the accomplishment, the assignment of moving and moving and moving and feeling and stretching, the poses? It’s over; you know who you are. You’ve felt yourself.

DA: Interesting.

AS: Yes, and it’s been a year of witnessing myself and this inner chaos—because before we go reinventing ourselves we really have to go through this stage of finish and destruction and darkness. [Laughs]

DA: So, is that what you’re doing? Reinventing yourself?

AS: I have. And the funny thing is that I’ve gone back. There’s nothing really to just remember.

DA: Explain what you mean.

AS: If I am really, truly in synch with that inner voice, I will be able to listen to my higher purpose. Ever since I was a little girl, living on an ashram, growing up as a monk, I was always aware that there’s higher purpose to be on this planet. So, I’m aware that I’ve made choices that have allowed me to grow and find who I am and how to serve the planet. The journey of my life.

I got to the point where teaching yoga wasn’t really fulfilling me at a soul level. It had given me the gifts of feeling my body, understanding it, accepting it, healing it, and then extending that experience to everyone around me. “What’s next?” was the question that would not leave me alone.

What I’ve done is garner my life experience and turn it into the things that I want to share with the world. I am a writer. I sing. I’m a body alchemist. That is the name of the work I do now. I work with people on the table. We are able to synchronize what is happening with you on a physical, energetic, and spiritual level. I am able to access that and help you if there’s the releasing of a somatic experience that needs to be happening. Or, if there’s a memory. Or a message that needs to be channeled for you. It’s fascinating work, because never in my life would I have imagined my work becoming what it has become.

DA: Is this a form of massage, reiki?

AS: You could say that. It takes the form of massage, because I work at a massage table. I have three types of modalities. The first one: I’m hurting, I can help you with your physical body because I’ve been working with the body for 20 years—I can help you in a technical way. So, we can just do a massage and I’ll help you out and you’re out the door.

The second one is: I’m hurting emotionally. Those emotions are somatized in my body. I need someone to help me find those and release them all. Right? So we will go into breathing, into me finding the points where your trauma is… me helping you and guiding you to remember that you can reconnect with you. I’m just a conduit.

And then there’s that are remotely, that I don’t need a body. That’s something that is fascinating, because I can read your energetic field.

DA: All of this is going back to where we started, that first time I realized there was something unique about you. When I felt your hands above me. What you were able do there is not something I’ve known humans to do, generally. I think we’ve taken it back full circle. What would you want to be happening next in your life?

AS: My goal and objective is to become more self-sufficient in a way that I don’t have to be in one place to work, that I have more and more freedom to travel—to share what I’m doing through my books, my online course—I made an online course called 30 Days of Beauty.

So, things that really come from this place of reinvention, reconnection and reconciliation. I’ve been invited to Belgium in April to be a speaker at a workshop. So, my work has definitely taken me outside of my comfort zone and outside of working with small groups. I’m getting more into sharing with a different audience.