Cynthia Abulafia

Cynthia Abulafia, a writer, educator and yoga therapist living in Santa Barbara, California, was initiated in a Shākta Tantra lineage of the Goddess. She studied in Naropa University's master's programme in yogic studies. For around twenty years she has explored different forms of non-duality alongside the scriptures of yoga and tantra, and for many years she designed and led yoga teacher trainings, among them as a lead trainer at Yoga Soup in Santa Barbara.

At the centre of her teaching are the divine feminine and what she calls the "transcendence bias": spiritual paths that show people how to rise above the body but not how to come back to it. Drawing on her own kundalini awakening, she supports people going through spiritual emergence with grounded practices of breath, the body, chanting and close reading of sacred texts. Monkfish published her first book, Embodying the Goddess, in 2026. She runs in-person workshops in California, a streamed course on the history and texts of yoga and Goddess tantra, a free book-club course and short talks on YouTube, and she writes on Substack.