No two people carry the same wound. Every session is shaped around your experience, your pace, and what you actually need.
Drawing from somatic therapy, depth psychology, trauma-informed care, and presence-based awareness. What the work calls for — not what is easiest.
Not symptom management, but genuine transformation — in the quality of how you relate to yourself, to others, and to life itself.
At twenty-one, everything she thought she was dissolved — and in its place, an encounter with the intelligence that holds all of existence. A life given over to understanding that, and to helping others find their way home to it.
"The recognition of what you already are is not an event that happens once. It is the simplest, most ordinary thing — available in every moment, as this moment. Nothing needs to be added. Nothing needs to be removed."
Maitreya speaks about the kundalini awakening with a quality that is rare: not mystification, not performance, but the same clear directness she brings to everything. She is precise about what happened because imprecision would dishonour it.
"It was not a vision. It was not an emotion. It was the sudden, total, physical and consciousness-wide recognition that I was not what I had taken myself to be. The boundary between me and everything else dissolved — not poetically, but actually. And in that dissolution, what remained was not nothing. What remained was an intelligence so vast, so intimate, so undeniably present that the only honest word for it is love."
"Not love as a feeling, but love as the fundamental nature of what exists. And I — the thing I had called me — was made of it. Had always been made of it. Was, in some sense I could not fully articulate, it."
What struck her most forcefully — and what became the seed of her entire teaching — was not the bliss or the expansion or the cessation of suffering. It was the recognition that this was not exclusive to her. Every person she looked at was made of the same intelligence. Was held by the same love. Was, at the most fundamental level, the same awareness wearing a different face. They simply were not seeing it.
"The awakening showed me what everyone is. The teaching is simply the long work of helping people look in the direction of what they have always been."
Maitreya lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she has made her home for over fifteen years. She cooks. She walks. She reads — widely, across disciplines, with the same quality of attention she brings to a satsang. She maintains close friendships, some spanning decades, and considers these ordinary human bonds among the most important teachers in her continuing life.
"Awakening doesn't make you superhuman. It makes you more fully, more honestly, more compassionately human. Which is, I think, the whole point."
Students who have worked with her closely speak of someone who is at once absolutely clear about what she teaches and entirely unassuming about who she is. There is no performance of wisdom. No cultivated mystique. No distance maintained for the sake of an image. She is, by all accounts, as present in the supermarket as in the retreat hall.
She is candid about the fact that recognition does not eliminate the ordinary challenges of being human. Relationships require care and honesty. Old patterns resurface and require meeting. The body has its needs and its complaints.
"I am not an example of a perfect life. I am an example of a life that is no longer at war with itself. That turns out to be more than enough."
This candour is itself part of the teaching. Seekers who arrive expecting a superhuman guide find instead a human being who has simply stopped pretending to be something she is not — and discovered that this, precisely, is what freedom looks like.
Maitreya's meeting with His Holiness in Dharamsala marked a formal recognition of her work by one of the world's most respected wisdom traditions. The encounter reinforced what students already knew: that what she transmits is not a system but a living quality of awareness — recognisable across traditions precisely because it underlies all of them.
She continues to maintain dialogue with teachers and scholars across lineages — Advaita, Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and contemporary non-dual inquiry — always returning to the same essential message: the peace you are seeking is already here.
Over the years the recognition has given rise to several distinct expressions — each a different channel for the same essential work.
Everything you are seeking is already present. The only question is whether you are willing to look in the right direction.