The story of Fragment Assembly is the story of a woman who went everywhere looking for herself — and finally understood she had been there all along.
I am Kabyle. Amazigh. Daughter of the Atlas Mountains of Algeria.
Every part of what I do today — the yoga nidra, the hypnosis, the way I sit across from a woman and know what her body is holding before she finds words for it — was seeded in me before I could speak. It came through the women of my lineage. It came through Berber mantras I heard before I understood language. It came through a great grandmother who put clay jars into a six year old's hands and let her hold the medicine.
I am not new to this work. I was born into it.
Founder, Fragment Assembly · Creator, The Yidra Method · Known as the Hoopoe
I was seven years old when I asked my father how the universe has no end.
I told him — if I stand on this highway and I cannot see three hundred kilometers ahead, it still ends somewhere. So how can something have no end? His answer was: maybe one day you will discover it, my daughter. I don't know.
He was an architect. A man who built shapes and sizes and endings for a living. And his daughter was asking him about infinity.
That child did not need fixing. She needed a world big enough to hold her. She never got one. So she learned to make herself small instead.
I had a CEO brain and a Type 8 soul — a leader, a builder, someone born to take up space and hold space for others without losing herself. But I picked up the Type 2 as a shield. As a way to belong. As the only language love had ever spoken to me.
I grew up in Algeria in a lineage I did not choose — I was born into it. My great grandmother was a shaman, a fertility healer from the Atlas Mountains. She was well known. Women came to her from different parts of Algeria — women whose bodies were carrying what their culture and religion had never allowed them to name. Women who had been asked to give themselves without consent, whose bodies had quietly recorded every moment their voice was not heard.
My great grandmother did not ask them to explain it. She worked with her hands, with clay jars filled with sacred herbs, with ancient mantras in Berber — our indigenous language from the mountains. Most of these women didn't speak a word of Berber. It didn't matter. The sound went somewhere below language. Straight into the body. Trauma left. Women who came to her with life locked inside their bodies left with it flowing again — brought back by her hands, her sound, her ancient knowing.
She was also El Bekeya — the woman called to funerals to lead the collective grief. She would walk into a room full of strangers and begin her mantras. People who had never met the person who died would start crying. And then — when everything had moved through — they would start laughing. Relieved. Lighter than when they arrived.
I was her translator. I held the jars. I held the hands. I watched bodies release what minds had never been allowed to process.
I didn't have words for what I was witnessing. But I understood something that took me thirty more years to fully live: the body knows before the mind has language. This is not something I learned in a classroom. It is something I inherited. It lives in my lineage.
I was six years old when I came home from school and found my mother. She was convulsing. I knew — the way a child knows things before they have words for them — that she had tried to leave. I could see the powder coming out of her mouth. I stayed. I tried to clean it away, the way you try to undo something with your hands when your hands are the only thing you have.
And my hands were the only thing I knew. For six years I had been walking with my great grandmother, watching her use her hands to bring life back into bodies that had given up. I had seen what hands could do. I believed in them completely.
It felt like forever. When I finally understood that my hands were not enough, I ran to the neighbors to call for help. She survived. But something shifted after that. She became cold. Distant. Unreachable. And somewhere in that six year old body, a decision was made — not with words, not with logic — just a quiet, desperate conclusion:
If my help wasn't enough to bring her back, I needed to become more needed. More useful. More indispensable.
That is where the Type Two took over. Giving everything. Making herself needed. Earning love through usefulness. Not because that was who she was. Because that was the only thing that had ever felt like survival.
I went to every retreat. I did the breathwork — I became a breathwork facilitator. I did the shadow work — I became a shadow work coach. I did the somatic work, the energy work. I meditated. I journaled. I cried in circles with strangers. I crossed oceans — literally — looking for the version of myself that felt whole.
Before any of the retreats. Before the certifications. Before America. In France — already an adult, already someone who had crossed one ocean and thought she had left the old world behind — I started going to exorcisms. I traveled to Morocco for it too. I spent years in it. Not because I was uneducated. Not because I didn't know better. I was scientific. I questioned governments, religions, doctors, entire systems. But there are beliefs that live below thought. Below logic. Below everything you think you know about yourself. They don't ask for your permission. They were placed there before you had language.
During one session, a man put his knee on my chest and pressed the tip of a pen into my skull while reciting Quran. My body convulsed. I trembled and screamed and jumped. They told me the Jin inside me was resisting. I almost didn't survive that moment.
And then something in me shifted. I pushed him. I scratched him. I broke his glasses. And before I could stop myself, I looked up at him and said: "I am so sorry. It was not me. It was the powerful Jin inside of me."
Sarcasm. Pure, desperate, survival sarcasm. I used their own language to get myself out of that room. And the moment those words left my mouth — I knew. Not just that session. All of it was over.
Walking out of that room was the beginning of everything. I rejected it all. And in rejecting it — I started looking for something real. That rejection was the door to my real quest.
I crossed the second ocean. America. And without planning it, without understanding why, I ended up in an IVF operating room — assisting doctors in the creation of life. I didn't choose it. But my great grandmother's lineage recognized it. I was standing inside the same miracle she had spent her whole life calling forward with her hands and her mantras. Two oceans. Two continents. Decades later. The same room. The same hands.
And then one day — already certified, already teaching, already deep in the work — I was in a yoga class. Pigeon pose. A teacher placed her hand on my lower back. That was all. Just a hand. And something in me broke open completely. Not pain. Not grief. Something older than both. A recognition. Like my great grandmother reaching through thirty five years and finding me on that mat. I remembered everything. The jars. The mantras. The women who cried and then laughed and then left lighter. And I understood — not in my mind, but in my body — that nothing had been random. That the IVF room and the yoga mat and the Atlas Mountains and that six year old holding the jars were all the same story, moving in one direction.
She never left me. The great grandmother who put the jars in my hands still walks with me every time I sit down beside another woman's body and listen.
Kabyle Amazigh · Atlas Mountains · The lineage of women who healed with hands, sound, and knowing.
For thirty years I looked for the missing piece everywhere except the one place it lived. Inside the mirror.
In the ancient Sufi poem — the Conference of the Birds — thirty birds cross seven valleys to find the Simorgh. They burn in the Valley of Love. They bow in the Valley of Surrender. They keep flying when every part of them wants to turn back. And when they finally arrive — there is no great king on a golden throne. There is only a mirror. And in the mirror — they see themselves.
Si means thirty. Morgh means birds. The Simorgh was them. All along.
I built Fragment Assembly because I finally understood: the missing piece was never another healing modality. It was a system to receive what I had already found.
You are not broken. You are not lost. You are standing at the mirror. She was always right there.