When Corporate Cracked, the Goddess Walked In

Cynthia Sciberras
May 6
3 min read

Updated: Sep 3

A personal story of unraveling the hustle, answering the call of yoga, and birthing YOKE from the ashes of burnout.

by Cynthia Sciberras

There was a time I wore corporate life like armour—in heels and tailored ambition—moving through the hallways of fluorescent-lit logic, KPIs, and the false promise of control. My cubicle was my safe container, softened by a dream board that pointed elsewhere: to the ochres and golds of India, the goddess Durga, and the spine of the Himalayas. A paper portal to another way of being.

From the outside, I had it made. The title, the salary, the scheduled certainty. But inside, I was quietly coming undone.

The language of metrics and margins was not the language of my soul. The smoke and mirrors of so-called success left me dulled, displaced, and drifting inside a fog that had no name. My body knew before I did—it whispered “enough” in sleepless nights and breath held too long.

"I learned that truth doesn’t scream—it hums. It waits in stillness. It breathes in the belly."

When Life Whispers Before It Roars

There was nothing inherently wrong with corporate life—except that it demanded I shrink what was most alive. The emptiness of accomplishment without meaning, the choreography of disconnection… it began to corrode something essential. The part of me that remembered that life is not a race—it is a rhythm—and as life tends to do, it whispered before it roared. The breakdown didn’t arrive all at once, but as a slow unraveling. Like a spool of thread, I began to come loose. And somewhere in the tangle, yoga found me.

The Practice of Re–membering

Yoga wasn’t a lifestyle upgrade—it was a return.

A re-connect to the body, not as something to manage or push, but as a sacred site of memory, mystery, and meaning. I learned that truth doesn’t scream—it hums. It waits in stillness. It breathes in the belly. And for the first time, I began to truly listen.

That listening led me to India—not as a vacation, but as a pilgrimage.

I traded in my power suit for colourful dupatta's and early morning solutes to the sun. Dodged naughty monkeys and out-of-control auto–rickshaws, sipped chai in clay cups on the roadside, followed the ancient sounds of chants into hidden temples. It's true! I wasn’t chasing enlightenment. I was circling back to myself.

I didn’t return back home with a five-year plan. But I did come home with a prayer.

That prayer became YOKE.

YOKE was never just a magazine. It became a living altar—for creative inquiry, for conscious living, for sacred connection. It became a place to ask not just how we live, but why. A rebellion against the sterile and the superficial and the status quo.

And most of all, YOKE gave me community, it gave me deeper nourishing encounters. The true nectar of gathering. The quiet miracle of healing that happens when we’re witnessed. In holding space for others, I somehow made space for myself.

As cliche as it may sound– yoga truly saved my life, by bringing me home to myself.

YOKE saved my life by giving that self a place to serve.

Now, my work is not about climbing. It's about weaving. Weaving women together.

Weaving stories into culture.

Weaving the sacred back into the everyday.