I didn't learn Somatic Design in a classroom. I lived it.

I grew up in Humboldt Park, Chicago — a neighborhood that was rough on the outside and held together by family on the inside. My grandparents were the center of everything. My grandmother's home was the first space I ever felt held by — before I had any language for why.

The language came later, through years of living rather than studying. Raw land on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica taught me what it means to be held by nature. The sacred temples and emerald rice terraces of Bali — my heart home on this planet — gave me the language of beauty as devotion, and became the birthplace of my first brand, built from natural silks and hand-dyed batik. The ashrams of Mysore put Ashtanga into my bones. And Oaxaca gave me my son, born into a world already steeped in color and ceremony.

And woven through all of it — years as a bodyworker, deep in the spa and wellness world, learning in the most direct way possible how profoundly a space shapes the human experience of being alive.

Today I live on a family ranch in the Texas Hill Country with my partner Abel and our son — raising him bilingual, close to the land, surrounded by the same intentional beauty I have spent a lifetime learning to build. Our geodesic dome on the property, the Wild KingDome, is Somatic Design made physical — a space people step into and immediately feel something shift. It is the brand made real.

I am not an interior designer who discovered wellness. I am a wellness practitioner who realized that the body doesn't stop reading its environment when it walks through the front door. Every space is either working with your body's intelligence or quietly working against it. Somatic Design is the practice of building spaces that work for you — spaces your body recognizes as safe before your mind forms an opinion.

I have been living this my whole life. Arizen Interiors is simply where it found its name.

— Ashazel (Asha-zel)