I trained in ballet on the pre-professional track for over a decade. It was an intense practice in embodiment, and the foundation for an unceasing inquiry into movement and the body. My training came to an abrupt end when I was given exercise restrictions that were life-saving but disorienting. I shifted from living with a nuanced awareness of my body to needing numbers to tell me what was safe.

The cultural context was Silicon Valley—I grew up with startups being built in my living room. I became a close user of wearable technology, which evolved into leading Pulse, the R&D of a wearable that gives people with cardiac restrictions real-time feedback to safely optimize their physical activity. I continued developing Pulse at the USC Iovine & Young Academy, where I earned a B.S. in Design, Technology, and Business in an intimate cohort of creative misfits. I had the opportunity to contribute product design and strategy to projects with Apple, Adidas, Samsung, Mattel, Harvard Business Publishing, the American Heart Association, and the USC Convergent Science Institute in Cancer.

I was designing for greater visibility into the body through new form factors of body-computing technologies. But in practice, I had become progressively disconnected from my body. I am deeply drawn to the feeling of intense physical movement, but intense physical movement was causing me harm. So I had learned to stop trusting what I felt and trust the technologies instead.

I committed the following years to research driven by the survival instinct to return to my body—studying what science understands now about the mind-body connection, and what contemplative traditions have long understood about perception of the body and the self. This work has included a 500-hour yoga training in Rishikesh, India, a Vipassana meditation training in the lineage of S.N. Goenka, and a Spiritual Architecture course out of Bologna, Italy.

Sakem is a child of direct experience. It is home to work that is exploratory in medium and focused in inquiry, grounded in curiosities that are timeless to humanity.