Behind the Wings: The Story of Parashakti Skye

A Life Before the Name

Long before she had a name for it, Parashakti was already dancing with Eagle. As a child, it showed up as fearlessness — leaping from high dive platforms, auditioning for every school play, leading friends into games no one else would try first. She didn't know yet that this restlessness toward expression was a form of medicine. She only knew she couldn't sit still with it.

The Dismantling

A dancer for most of her life, Parashakti's path shifted after a severe injury forced her body — and her identity — to stop. What began as physical setback became what is often called shamanic dismantling: a period of being taken apart before being rebuilt. Her mission changed direction. Healing replaced performance.

Over the following two decades, she trained across continents — studying Integral Yoga, Kundalini Yoga, and Esalen Massage, and working alongside teachers including Swami Satchidananda, Anna Halprin, Dr. Gabriel Cousens, and Lakota Elder Wakia Un Manee. She led workshops and retreats in Los Angeles, New York, Bali, Guatemala, Indonesia, Israel, and Greece — building, over those years, what would become the Seven Foundations and the Dance of Liberation®, a practice now carried by more than 10,000 dancers worldwide.

Meeting Eagle

Parashakti's relationship with Eagle medicine began at the Naraya, a ceremonial dance of healing drawn from Great Basin Native traditions. There she met Nancy Eagle Spirit Woman and Shaman Charles Lawrence — carriers of a lineage she didn't yet know she belonged to. When Eagle spoke to her, she recognized something she had lived her whole life without naming.

Since then, Eagle feathers have been central to her practice — used to clear and cleanse, physical stand-ins for the energy of vision and flight. Every Dance of Liberation® event opens with an invocation passed down to her by Wakia Un Manee. During a fire ceremony at Kripalu, she sang that invocation — and an eagle appeared overhead. The room went silent, then erupted, witnesses to something none of them could fully explain.

A Rite of Passage

Years later, after the end of a long relationship, Parashakti lost her sense of direction. The grief was real, and so was the work of moving through it. When her vision began to return — when she felt, again, like herself — she chose to mark the moment permanently. Her elder, Wakia Un Manee, sketched a pair of eagle wings. Firekeeper and tattoo artist Ash Wood brought the drawing to skin. It remains with her, a symbol that now moves through the world every time she does.

From Ceremony to Object

Winged Ones was born from that same instinct — the need to hold something physical when the internal work runs deep. Each piece is designed not as decoration, but as a companion: something to be worn close during the moments that ask the most of us.

The jewelry itself carries more than one set of hands. Kabartsy crafts with the belief that meaning must precede ornament. Pitango — whose rings blend the alchemy of stone, metal, and ancient symbol — describes his work simply: "I want humans to remember we are Angels." Lisbeth Mego, an artist working across painting, music, and design, brings a different kind of attention — one shaped by flow rather than by rule.

What It Means to Wear One

A Winged Ones piece is not a promise. It doesn't claim to transform the person who wears it. It asks something quieter — recognition, not definition. A reminder of a threshold already crossed, or one still ahead.