Human · Photographer · Coach · Creator of the DareMethod
MEET Dasha
I didn't create this method after I figured everything out.
I created it in the middle of not knowing.
In my early thirties, I walked away from a relationship I'd outgrown, work that didn't feel like mine, and an apartment that held a version of me I no longer recognized.
I moved into my sister's house with nothing tangible to show for the years behind me — no savings, no property, no clear path forward.
Just a quiet, destabilizing question:
WHO LIVED MY LIFE YESTERDAY?
What followed looked like rebuilding.
I moved to Manhattan. I devoted myself to creativity —photography, coaching, the work I believed in. And in many ways, I was finding myself.
But underneath the searching, something I couldn't yet name was still running the show.
Survival. Fear.
The need for safety so consuming that I used everything I loved — my creativity, my gifts, my work — as instruments to secure it.
Project after project. Shoot after shoot.
Always afraid that without enough money, enough work, enough security, I couldn't afford to be fully myself.
Then at a meditation retreat I took a photograph of myself.
I saw something in that image I had never seen before — undeniable, unquestionable. My own greatness. Not performed. Not earned. Just there, visible, captured in light.
It should have changed everything in that moment.
But I didn't trust the simplicity of it.
I couldn't believe that an image — something so quiet, so immediate — could actually shift a person's way of being in the world.
So instead of embodying what I'd seen, I ran.
Toward projects, toward strategies, toward anything that might finally create the safety I believed I needed before I could relax into who I already was.
It took years to understand what I was doing.
I made my greatness conditional.
I told myself: first security, then mE.
Fast forward a few years after that retreat: a new relationship, a new city, new instability arriving just when I thought I'd finally exhaled.
And through all of it — the uncertainty, the questioning, the days of feeling lost — one thing kept returning.
The photograph. The practice.
