Apollonia’s Story

I have always been interested in what lies beneath the surface of a human life—our patterns, our stories, our longing for meaning, and the deeper inner knowing that can guide us toward who we are becoming.

That search began when I was five years old.

I came to the United States from Argentina as a young immigrant, arriving in New York and encountering what felt like an entirely new world. I was learning a new language, a new culture, and a new way of belonging while still carrying the language and traditions of the old world from which I had come.

For a five-year-old child, bringing those worlds together was not always easy.

I grew up in Spanish Harlem during a period of tremendous social upheaval. The 1960s and 1970s were years of protest, cultural revolution and profound questioning of established ideas about race, women, authority, spirituality and human rights.

I watched a generation begin asking whether the world could become more just.

Those questions became part of me.

I cared deeply about the emerging possibilities for women, Indigenous people, and others whose voices and experiences had too often been pushed to the margins. I became interested not only in how societies change, but in how human beings change.

Education and a Search for Something More

My formal education took me to the prestigious Bronx High School of Science and then to earn my bachelor’s degree.

And a search for a more meaningful education was already beginning.

Sparked by the era of explorations and experiments in radical thinking that were evolving in that time in New York with the feminist women’s movement and human rights studies. As spirit would have it with the depth of shamanic training in childhood I was called to develop the work of the heart with a deep association to the body and its roots. Atlanta and the South would be the fertile soil to cultivate this. 

After moving to Atlanta, I entered more deeply into a spiritual and philosophical journey that would ultimately shape the direction of the rest of my life and what my nature came to offer.

Yoga became part of that exploration. So did Kabbalah, Theosophy, and the teachings associated with Alice Bailey.

I studied with teachers including Richard Moss, whose work explored consciousness, presence and the transformational possibilities within human relationship.

These teachings resonated with experiences I had known since childhood—an intuitive sense that there was something more to human existence than what we could see on the surface.

Creating a Place for Inner Knowing

At 37, I opened the Center for Inner Knowing.

What began as a center for exploration eventually grew into SOHA, a nonprofit organization offering awareness courses devoted to personal and spiritual development, retreats with experiential somatic movements aimed at rising the fire of the heart and living in the full expression of life and its true nature. These courses coupled with holistic detox programs touched thousands of people across the world from families needing resolution to high level entrepreneurs mastering creative expression. Integrating all of the levels of a human being and transforming to open their path of mission.

“Full Expression. The Inner Is The Outer”

For approximately three decades, my life centered around this work.

I trained in listening, Gestalt approaches and the recognition of recurring patterns in human behavior and relationships. Over time, I became increasingly interested in another question:

What is the meaning beneath the pattern?

Individual sessions remained an important part of my work throughout those years. Again and again, I witnessed what can happen when a person has a place to speak honestly, be deeply heard, recognize the patterns shaping their life and begin discovering a different relationship to their own story.

My work became less about giving people answers and more about helping create the conditions in which they could hear something within themselves.

An Ending—and a New Beginning

When COVID arrived, the world changed.

We changed.

This chapter came to an end, the center closed and a new opening arose and is still arising from the mystery.

The mystery has a way of asking new questions.

Who are we when the identity we have carried no longer defines us?

What remains when the familiar structures disappear?

And perhaps most importantly:

What is life asking of us now?

In 2026, my work began to re-emerge in a new form.

I find myself returning to many of the questions that have accompanied me since that five-year-old girl arrived from Argentina:

How do we make meaning from the lives we have lived?

How do we distinguish our authentic selves from the patterns and stories we inherited?

How do we listen to one another across our differences?

How do we transform suffering without denying it?

And how do we become participants in creating a world with greater consciousness, dignity, love and peace?

Today, my work brings together decades of spiritual inquiry, listening, awareness work and lived experience.

I am particularly interested in creating spaces where people can tell their stories—not simply to remember the past, but to understand what the past has placed inside us.

Because our stories are not finished.

We can honor where we came from without being confined by it.

We can understand what shaped us without allowing it to determine everything that comes next.

And at any age, we can ask:

Who am I now?

What has my life been trying to teach me?

And what is the story I am ready to write next?

— Apollonia Fortuna