FACE WELLNESS | WELLNESS MONTH | BALI EDITION
There are journeys that take us across countries, and then there are journeys that take us deeper into ourselves. This month, FACE Magazine opens a new chapter with the launch of FACE Wellness—a dedicated editorial space exploring the many dimensions of human wellbeing, consciousness, healing, spirituality, mindful living and personal transformation.
As part of this special Wellness Month, FACE Magazine has appointed Priyangee Porwal as its Global Wellness Editor, bringing together conversations, experiences and stories from individuals and institutions shaping the evolving world of holistic wellbeing.
To deepen this exploration, Priyangi recently travelled to Bali, a destination deeply associated with retreat culture, spirituality, conscious living and holistic practices. During the journey, she experienced wellness retreats, connected with practitioners and explored different approaches to healing and self-discovery through a series of exclusive editorial conversations.
One such conversation was with Alina Avdyukova, a spiritual practitioner and Kundalini Activation facilitator whose own journey began far away from the retreat spaces and spiritual communities she works within today.
Alina’s story is not simply about spirituality. It is about what happens when a person who has spent years achieving, producing and performing begins to ask a much more fundamental question:
Who am I when I stop trying to become everything the world expects me to be?
In this exclusive FACE Wellness conversation, Alina speaks about her transition from a successful corporate career in New York to a life centred around energy, consciousness and healing; her relationship with Bali; the importance of embodied experience; spiritual discernment; intuition; motherhood; and why authentic spirituality is not an escape from life—but a deeper way of meeting it.From Achievement to Inner Alignment
For Alina, the spiritual journey did not begin with a dramatic revelation. It began with a growing sense that something was missing.
As a child, she describes herself as naturally sensitive and deeply connected to intuition and energy. But as she grew older, achievement, logic and external success became increasingly important.
She eventually built a successful corporate career in New York, working with some of the world’s leading companies. From the outside, everything appeared to be moving in the right direction. Internally, however, she felt increasingly disconnected from herself.
Her healing journey became an invitation to rediscover the parts of herself she had learned to silence.
Through energy work, therapy, mindfulness, movement, spiritual study and different healing modalities, Alina began reconnecting with her body, intuition and inner truth.
The deeper she travelled into her own transformation, the stronger became her calling to support others.
A pivotal turning point came when she discovered Kundalini Activation—an experience that, in her words, opened a profound connection to her own energy and introduced her to a way of experiencing healing beyond intellectual understanding.
For Alina, healing became something that could be experienced through the body, energy, emotion and direct experience, rather than understood only through the mind.
Understanding Energy, Intuition and Consciousness
For someone encountering spirituality for the first time, concepts such as energy, intuition and consciousness can seem abstract.
Alina approaches them through something much more familiar: everyday human experience.
We have all entered a room and immediately sensed tension, warmth, safety or connection—even before anyone has spoken.
That, she suggests, is an example of how continuously we receive information through our bodies, emotions, nervous systems and intuition.
For Alina, energy is the subtle quality of our internal state and the way we experience and relate to ourselves, other people and the world around us.
Intuition is different. It is the quiet inner knowing that can communicate through sensations, emotions, images, synchronicities or a deep feeling of resonance.
Importantly, she distinguishes intuition from fear and urgency.
Intuition, she explains, tends to feel clear, calm and grounded—even when it asks us to take a courageous step.
Then there is consciousness: our capacity to become aware of our thoughts, patterns, emotions and experiences rather than automatically being controlled by them.
Perhaps most importantly, Alina believes spirituality does not necessarily require a belief in something outside oneself.
At its heart, she sees it as the practice of becoming more present, connected, compassionate and aware.
Bali: Learning to Slow Down
Bali has played a deeply personal role in Alina’s evolution.
After years in New York, she knew how to achieve, produce results and keep moving toward the next goal. Bali introduced her to another way of experiencing life.
A slower way. A more present way. A way of appreciating simple moments without constantly measuring life through productivity.
She describes the energy of Bali as deeply healing—an environment that invites people to reconnect with nature, community, ritual and parts of themselves that can easily disappear beneath the pace of modern life.
Her relationship with Bali is also deeply personal for another reason: she became a mother there.
Motherhood, she says, has itself become one of the most powerful spiritual practices of her life.
Healing Begins With Safety
In a world filled with self-help advice, healing programmes and endless searches for answers, Alina believes the first step towards genuine inner healing is surprisingly simple:
Create enough safety to be honest with yourself.
Rather than immediately asking what needs to be fixed, she encourages people to become curious about what their emotions and experiences may be trying to communicate.
The body and emotions, in her perspective, are not obstacles to overcome. They carry information.
When we learn to listen to them without judgment, we create the conditions for transformation.
Healing, therefore, does not necessarily require understanding an entire personal history or solving everything at once.
Sometimes, it begins with simply refusing to abandon yourself when you need your own compassion the most.
The Patterns We Carry
Through her work, Alina encounters people at very different points in their lives: people searching for purpose, navigating major transitions, moving through grief or loss, experiencing spiritual awakening, or trying to understand a new relationship with energy and consciousness.
She also encounters people carrying childhood wounds, the effects of abuse and sexual trauma, and other difficult experiences.
But one pattern stands out repeatedly: the difficulty of authentic self-expression.
Many people, she observes, have learned to suppress their emotions, minimise their needs, remain quiet or “bite their tongues” in order to preserve peace or belonging.
Over time, this can create a profound disconnection from one’s own voice and truth.
People may arrive carrying emotions they have never allowed themselves to fully experience, alongside the belief that they must remain strong, hold everything together and manage life alone.
The work, therefore, is not simply about giving people answers.
It is about creating a safe environment where those protective patterns can begin to soften—and where individuals can reconnect with their voice, emotions and authentic selves.
Understanding Is Not Always Transformation
One of the central ideas in Alina’s approach is the difference between intellectual insight and embodied transformation.
A person can understand exactly why they have a particular pattern and still continue repeating it.
Why? Because patterns may exist not only in the mind, but also in the body, nervous system, emotions and unconscious beliefs.
This is where direct experience becomes important. Through Kundalini Activation, Alina creates a grounded and safe environment where participants can experience their inner world rather than simply analyse it.
Emotions, memories, physical sensations and insights may arise naturally.
Her role, she explains, is not to tell people what their experiences mean or to “fix” them.
Instead, it is to hold a safe, heart-led space in which people can reconnect with their own inner intelligence.
Understanding opens the door. Embodied experience helps us walk through it.
Authentic Spirituality Requires Discernment
As spirituality becomes increasingly visible across the world, Alina believes it is equally important to develop discernment.
Not every teacher or facilitator has necessarily done the depth of personal work required to hold space responsibly.
She is particularly conscious of what she describes as spiritual ego.
For anyone exploring spiritual work, she recommends paying attention not only to resonance but also to safety.
How does your body feel around a teacher?
Do you feel respected, grounded and free to be yourself?
Or do you feel small, dependent, afraid or pressured to become “more spiritual”?
For Alina, the idea of the guru is changing.
A healthy teacher should not position themselves as perfect, unreachable or superior. Nor should they create dependency or make someone believe that they need a particular person in order to be spiritual.
The purpose of a good teacher, she believes, is ultimately to help an individual reconnect with their own inner wisdom.
That requires asking questions, feeling with the body and developing discernment rather than surrendering one’s judgment.
When the Path Changes
Leaving a familiar corporate career and creating an entirely different life naturally brought uncertainty.
Alina admits that she questioned her path, particularly before fully stepping into spiritual work.
But discovering Kundalini Activation and eventually facilitating the practice for others created a profound sense of alignment.
That does not mean she believes a life path should remain fixed.
Quite the opposite. People change. Priorities change. New chapters emerge.
For Alina, the more connected we become to ourselves, the more gracefully we can navigate those transitions.
Regular spiritual practice helps her recalibrate, quiet external noise and return to what feels true in the present moment.Learning to Trust Intuition
Intuition, for Alina, has an important place in everyday decision-making—but it should not replace logic, information, critical thinking or professional guidance.
The strongest decisions, she believes, come from integrating the wisdom of the mind, heart and body.
The challenge is that modern life can make that inner voice difficult to hear.
Fear, expectations, conditioning and the opinions of others can create so much internal noise that intuition becomes almost impossible to recognise.
Her recommendation is simple: create moments of quiet.
Journal. Meditate. Walk in nature. Spend time without constant stimulation.
And, importantly, notice how different choices feel within the body.
Intuition often speaks softly. The more connected we become to ourselves, the easier it becomes to distinguish choices rooted in truth and inner alignment from those driven by fear, conditioning or the need for external approval.The Practices That Keep Her Grounded
Kundalini Activation remains central to Alina’s life.
She describes it as transformative across multiple dimensions—spiritually, emotionally, relationally, creatively and financially.
But her approach to wellbeing is not limited to spiritual practice.
Therapy has also played a significant role, giving her language and support to understand her history, relationships and patterns.
She believes spiritual and grounded, science-informed approaches can coexist.
Energy work may provide access to experiences that are difficult to reach through words alone, while psychology and nervous-system education can provide valuable frameworks for understanding and integrating those experiences into everyday life.The Responsibility of Holding Space
For someone who facilitates transformational experiences for others, personal practice becomes even more important.
Alina believes healers and facilitators need to maintain an even more consistent relationship with their own inner work.
Her personal practices include meditation, energy work, ongoing therapy, professional supervision, studying sacred texts and spiritual teachings, spending time in nature, moving her body, resting and continually recalibrating her inner world.
The principle is clear:
You cannot consistently hold space for others without also caring for the space within yourself.Spirituality Is Not About Being Permanently Positive
Perhaps one of Alina’s most compelling perspectives is her rejection of the idea that spirituality means becoming permanently peaceful, positive or “high vibrational.”
Real spirituality, she believes, does not require us to avoid grief, anger, fear, uncertainty or uncomfortable parts of ourselves.
It does not mean transcending our humanity.
Instead, it means learning to accept, understand and integrate the parts of ourselves we would rather not see.
Real inner work includes contradictions, boundaries, emotions, responsibilities and the less glamorous realities of being human.
Sometimes it is beautiful.
Sometimes it is deeply uncomfortable.
And that discomfort can be part of the process.
For Alina, spirituality should ultimately bring us back to life, not away from it.
It is easy to feel peaceful while sitting in silence in the Himalayas. The deeper practice, she suggests, is finding that stillness when work becomes demanding, relationships become complicated, children need us and everyday life becomes chaotic.
Spirituality is not an escape from life. It is learning how to meet life with greater awareness, presence, responsibility and love.Where Science Meets Spirituality
Alina envisions a future in which science, psychology and spirituality increasingly interact with one another.
She sees all three as different languages and approaches exploring many of the same dimensions of the human experience.
Neuroscience, psychology, nervous-system research, meditation research and growing interest in the mind-body connection are already creating new opportunities for dialogue.
At the same time, she emphasises the importance of humility.
Not every spiritual experience can currently be measured or explained, and scientific terminology should not be used to make claims beyond available evidence.
One of her personal ambitions is to participate in research exploring what happens in the body and brain during Kundalini Activation sessions.
For her, the intersection between spirituality and science is not something to fear—it is something to explore with curiosity and discernment.A New Chapter of Her Own
Alina is currently entering another significant chapter, launching a Kundalini Activation Facilitator Training designed to initiate and mentor facilitators in the art of holding space through a grounded, heart-led and trauma-informed approach.
The training goes beyond simply learning a technique.
It incorporates energy work, nervous-system awareness, psychology, ethics, practical facilitation, embodiment and the development of each facilitator’s individual approach to serving others.
Alongside the training, Alina continues to facilitate Kundalini Activation sessions online and in Bali.
For those who feel genuinely called towards this work, she describes it as an invitation to explore—not simply as a practice, but as a personal journey.What If Your Life Is the Dream?
At the end of our conversation, Alina leaves FACE Magazine readers with a thought-provoking question.
Imagine waking up one morning to discover that your entire life had been a dream.
What would your first thought be?
Would you think:
“What an incredible dream I had?”
Or:
“Thank God, it was only a dream.”
The answer, she suggests, may reveal more than we expect. If something in our lives no longer feels aligned with who we are, perhaps we should not wait for the perfect moment to change it. We do not need to have everything figured out. We do not need to know exactly where the path will lead.
Sometimes, the beginning is simply noticing what feels alive and meaningful—and having the courage to follow it. Start small. Be gentle with yourself.
Trust the process. And see what happens.
A powerful Kundalini Activation session with Priyangee Porwal and Alina Avdyukova—energy aligned, spirit awakened.
FACE WELLNESS — THE JOURNEY CONTINUES
The conversation with Alina Avdyukova captures precisely what FACE Wellness seeks to explore: wellbeing not as a trend or a destination, but as an evolving relationship with ourselves.
Through its Wellness Month and the editorial leadership of Global Wellness Editor Priyangi Porwal, FACE Magazine is taking readers beyond conventional conversations around wellness to explore consciousness, healing, purpose, spirituality, emotional awareness and the many ways people are redefining what it means to live a meaningful life.
From Bali to the world, FACE Wellness continues its journey—one conversation, one experience and one deeper question at a time.
Because sometimes the most important journey is the one that takes us back to ourselves.
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