CHAPTER II
THE BECOMING
It wasn’t just the movement, though the movement was alive.
It was the feeling. The way it asked for everything at once: rhythm, awareness, power, grace, timing, humility. The way it demanded presence.
It didn’t care who I was on paper. It asked who I was when things got real. When I missed the beat. When I got hit. When I couldn’t hide.
I trained obsessively not just because I wanted to get better, but because something in me was waking up. I wasn’t chasing aesthetics anymore. I was chasing truth.
In the roda, I was confronted not just by an opponent, but by myself. My fear. My hesitation. My fire. My grace. All of it, visible. All of it, useful.
And when life broke me open in other ways, through heartbreak, through grief, Capoeira was already there, showing me how to stay in rhythm, how to move with it, how to keep dancing, and fighting even when everything inside felt heavy.
So I went deeper.
Not just into movement. Into anatomy. Physiology. Martial arts. Gymnastics. Somatics and more.
Into ritual. Into psychology. Into silence. Into failure, repetition, uncertainty, the raw materials of transformation.
Over time, the focus in the movements stopped being about just the performance of the physical skill. The focus became about how they felt, the qualities. Textures of being.
I started to feel what it meant to glide. To float. To strike. To yield. To express strength without force, and elegance without weakness.
The practice began shaping not just my body but how I carried myself in the world. Capoeira gave me permission to be powerful and beautiful. To be exacting and expressive. To be a man — not in reaction to others, but in harmony with myself.
It became clear: These movements were mirrors. And they were teaching me how to live in alignment with what I found there.