A Shift in My Mission
For years, I believed architecture could save the world.
My vision was simple but ambitious: create ecological living spaces that honored the Earth—homes that used less, gave back more, and helped us live in balance with nature. I poured my energy into designs that were naturally beautiful, sustainable, and radically different from the status quo.
During one of my housing competition projects, I drew inspiration from Jacques Tati’s Machine for Living In: the positivist house LA VILLE. In those diagrams, the man’s body was treated as a machine, mirrored by the home as a machine. This mechanical vision fascinated me at the time—I wanted to transform it, to give it life, ecology, and soul. My design imagined housing as a living organism: a skeleton that could grow, with veins and organs that carried energy and water through it, recycling and feeding like a body in balance with nature.
Jacques Tati’s Machine for Living In: the positivist house LA VILLE. A vision of man and house as machines—an inspiration I once reinterpreted in my housing competition, seeking to infuse it with ecology and soul.
But even with all this passion, the world wasn’t ready.
People admired the ideas, even praised them—but few were willing to truly change. I realized something deeper: we can’t build a new world with the same unconscious minds that created the old one.
That’s when I understood—my so-called Plan B was never really Plan B. It was the real work all along.
From walls to awareness
Architecture taught me how to shape walls, but yoga showed me how to dissolve them.
I came to see that my true mission is not to design greener buildings, but to help prepare the human spirit. To awaken consciousness. To guide people back into presence, into connection with nature, with each other, and with the parts of themselves they may have forgotten.
Because without this shift, no amount of green technology or sustainable design will save us from a collective, unconscious self-destruction. It’s not about saving the planet—it’s about remembering we are part of it. The buildings can come later. First, we need to build awareness.
The first house we ever inhabit
Our bodies are the first architecture we live in. They are temples made of breath, bone, and memory. And at the foundation of this living house lies the pelvis—the ground floor of our being.
In a previous blog, I wrote about the pelvis as our root of stability and grounding. Since then, my journey has deepened into another discovery: the psoas muscle, known in Portuguese as o músculo da alma—the muscle of the soul.
O músculo da alma
The psoas is not just a muscle that connects spine to legs. It is a messenger between body and spirit, a bridge linking our survival instincts to our capacity for expansion. It holds our deepest fears, our unprocessed tensions, but also our potential for release, flow, and awakening.
The emotional body tenses the psoas, worsening your mental state. This muscle is a sensitive psychosomatic: it contracts under stress, storing fear, anxiety, and trauma—yet it can also be the key to restoring presence and balance.
Every time I guide a class into awareness of this hidden core, I see something profound unfold. When the psoas softens, people breathe differently. Their faces lighten. They reconnect with a sense of safety and belonging that no building can provide.
This is why I call the psoas the “soul’s muscle”—because when we tend to it, we are not just stretching tissue, we are touching the very architecture of our inner life.
Building from the inside out
If we want to live in harmony with the planet, we must first cultivate harmony within ourselves. Sustainable buildings may one day rise, but they will only thrive if inhabited by conscious souls who are awake to their interconnection with all life.
So my mission has shifted, though in truth, it was never a shift at all—it was a remembering. The outer work of green design and the inner work of yoga were never separate. Both are about building places of balance and beauty. Only now, I begin from the inside out.
The first foundation is the body.
The first walls are breath and presence.
The first home is the soul.
And from there, everything else can grow.
I hope you were among the lucky few who could participate in the session. If you weren’t, there’s always a chance to explore this work in a duo session or a private session. You can also bring this awareness into our group lessons—simply ask, and we’ll make space for it. Everybody, every soul, deserves the chance to reconnect with its own architecture, and I’d love to guide you in that journey.
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