In 2015, something cracked open in Celinne Da Costa that she couldn't put back together. What followed was a series of unravelings she hadn't planned for and couldn't control. Underneath all of it was a voice that said this life, the one she'd been conditioned to want, wasn't hers.
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So she left. She packed a bag and started couchsurfing with strangers across 18 countries.
But something happened on those couches, at those dinner tables, in those conversations with people she'd never met before and would likely never see again. She started to see herself through them. To hear herself through them.
What began as a kind of social experiment turned into a soul journey to remember who she is and what is possible when we choose to trust life.
Today, Celinne will not hand you a formula or give you five steps to enlightenment or a tidy before-and-after story with a bow on top — because that's not how transformation actually works.
What she will do is show you and your audience what happens when one woman stops running from her life and turns to face it… all of it. The grief, the patterns, the family wounds, the heartbreak, the moments of sheer terror, and the moments of unbearable beauty that live right next to them.
Celinne didn't write The Burning Ground from the other side of the fire, looking back with all the answers. She wrote it from inside the fire and utilizes story and provoking soul inquiry prompts so somewhere in her story, others will find theirs.
I had a chance to learn more in this interview.
You left behind everything — career, apartment, relationship — and couchsurfed with 70+ strangers across 18 countries. But you've said you weren't running away. What were you actually looking for?
It didn't feel like running away, and it also didn't feel like I was looking for something. The more accurate description is that I felt a calling to remember why I was here.
I didn't have the spiritual language for it back then, or the mental models, or any of the training I have now. But on a visceral, soul level, I knew that the life I was living was not working for me. It was suffocating me, and if I continued to walk down that path, I would die inside — and I wasn't willing to do that.
So I followed a calling, even though everything in my mind was screaming at me. I had a long list of objections as to why it was a bad idea. Many people also telling me it was a bad idea. But I knew in my heart of hearts that if I went down this path, what I would find on the other side would profoundly change me.
And that's exactly what happened.
One of the most striking things in the book is that many of your hosts opened their homes to you because they were vicariously living their own "someday" through you. What did that mirror back to you about what holds people in place?
I stayed in the homes of over 70 people, most of them strangers. What I don't mention in the book is that I also interviewed over 200 people during that time, asking them the same six questions about the human condition. Those conversations gave me a deep window into what is going on inside people's worlds — and why they are the way they are.
Through that depth of connection with so many people across so many countries, it became clear to me that one of the main reasons these hosts opened their homes was because they were inspired by what I was doing. The most common thing I heard was some version of: "I wish I had the courage to do something like this, too."
What I realized is how much each one of us carries a desire in our heart. We all dream of better lives — for ourselves, for our children, for the people we love. We have so much more in common than we think. We all want to feel loved and seen and understood. We want to belong. We want to follow our purpose, to be a contribution, to participate in something bigger than ourselves.
I developed a fundamental belief through this journey: deep down, we all want this for ourselves. And what it mirrored back to me is that when I am following my soul's truth — when I am being authentic to who I am — it creates a permission field for other people to do the same. Many of my hosts messaged me months or even years later to tell me how spending time with me, or simply learning about my journey, had transformed their lives and given them permission to pursue their own dreams.
In that way, we are all walking each other home. Our pursuing our dreams helps others pursue theirs.
You traveled to 18 countries, and you've been honest that the same patterns — with men, with authority, with your own self-worth — kept showing up everywhere. When did you first realize you hadn't outrun anything?
I had this naive belief — which actually had some truth in it — that by escaping my environment, leaving New York, and starting a completely new life with no roots, no identity, no one knowing who I was or where I came from, I would get a fresh start. And in some ways, it was true. I stopped being boxed in by other people's perception of me, which is typically what happens when we inhabit the same environments with the same people and the same circumstances. We start to become stuck in an identity and in how other people view us.
But once the honeymoon period of being free and loose in the world without any expectations was over, patterns started showing up. Around my relationship with the masculine, the trauma I had incurred in the past that hadn't yet been processed, my own relationship to myself. They showed up in very unexpected ways, and that was what signaled to me that I was carrying these things with me.
I think a big illusion for people is that if they just leave the job, the relationship, the country, then things will change. But that's not actually true. The patterns follow you. There's a reason for the quote, "Wherever you go, there you are." I realized I could travel the world and leave all of the things, but I wasn't going to significantly change my life until I reckoned with those patterns.
That's part of what the book documents — me going headfirst into the fears, the old identity, the old belief systems, and reckoning with them in a way that allowed me to bring them to my self-awareness to the point that I couldn't unsee them anymore… And therefore, I could actually do something to heal them.
You write very honestly about your nervous system unraveling on this journey — not a beautiful awakening but something that felt like falling apart. Can you take us into what that actually looked and felt like?
This is something I don't see often talked about when it comes to going on a transformational journey where we are making big changes on an identity level. There is a very real nervous system component that I personally wasn't educated on or had access to education on at the time, until I went out and proactively looked for it.
Once the shiny high of leaving everything behind and doing something crazy wore off, and I was literally on the road, a specific kind of exhaustion kicked in. It wasn't physical at first, although it eventually became that because of how demanding my travels were. It really started as the mental exhaustion of all the stories I was telling myself about why this wouldn't work out, why I was making the wrong choices, all the things that could be going wrong. And beyond that, the emotional exhaustion of disconnecting from a life I had known for so long and feeling afraid and lost.
Unplugging from the matrix is a very scary and exhausting experience. Even when you look at the movie, there is a whole process to actually transition people from being plugged in to being unplugged. I went through that process viscerally and messily, and I had no idea that was what I was going through. I also didn't have guidance or mentorship — it was really me and life figuring this out.
As the book reveals, stumbling upon unresolved traumas and things I had blocked out and didn't want to deal with, choosing this new identity and this new life for myself, forced me to reckon with the old identities, the old belief systems and ego structures that I had no idea I would need to face,so that I could grow into the next version of myself.
Your book deliberately doesn't end with a neat resolution. You refused to tie it up with a bow. Why was that important to you, and what do you want readers to sit with instead?
Halfway through my trip, I was recommended to read Eat, Pray, Love, which I didn't actually read until years later because I wanted to have my own voice and my own story as I was creating it. People would constantly tell me how similar my trip was. When I finally read it, I thought it was a wonderful book and I really admire the author — but I also felt unsatisfied with the "we rode off into the sunset and I married the love of my life" ending, which, as we later found out, wasn't even her true ending at all.
I remember deliberately thinking: first, that was not my experience. And I kept trying to look for a perfect ending to my book. I simply couldn't come up with one without being inauthentic.
I came to realize that it wasn't supposed to have a bow-tie ending. It was supposed to be exactly what the whole journey was — raw, real, and a cycle of life. It was important for me to share the truth of my experience, which is that this journey set me off on a much bigger life journey and quest to better understand myself, reclaim my soul, and ignite my inner fire.
I think it's important to share that message because of the common societal expectation we have, especially when consuming stories, that things should end or should look a certain way. Actually, reality is much more nuanced than that. And that's exactly the lesson I wanted readers to sit with.
If someone listening right now is in the middle of their own burning ground — everything falling apart, no clear path, maybe feeling like they're losing themselves — what do you want them to hear?
The burning ground is not the end. It is a threshold — a liminal space, the in-between where the old identities, thought structures, belief systems, and ego stories are dissolving. This can be a very painful experience, given our human condition and desire to attach to what's comfortable and familiar. But inevitably, like anything in life, to grow we need to stretch beyond our comfort zone and step into a new way of being. We do that by shedding old skins… And before the new one is chosen and grown into, there is an in-between, quiet, fertile space — that moment where the fire burns it all away and you are stripped naked.
The impulse is to reach for clothes. But what becomes possible when you actually drop the story that things are falling apart, that you have no clear path, that you are losing yourself? What happens when you recognize that you are part of a cycle — and that the cycle will inevitably move, the same way that a bud will inevitably turn into a flower when there is water and sunshine and the right conditions?
For me, during my journey, the right conditions were meeting people, traveling, and writing. The transformation presented itself. What creates suffering is the story we tell ourselves about being lost, or taking too long, or needing to be anywhere other than where we are in the present. If we can trust the present moment — if we can trust the fertile ground that lies underneath the burning ground and just keep walking forward — it is inevitable that we will find our way.
About the Author
Celinne Da Costa is an author, speaker, and executive coach who guides visionary leaders to live, lead, and express themselves in full alignment with their soul's truth. Her work has supported Fortune 150 executives, entrepreneurs, and change-makers in over sixty countries, and her insights have been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, and her TEDx talk on the power of human connection. She hosts the podcast It's Not What You Think.
The Burning Ground: One Woman's Journey to Reclaim Her Soul and Ignite Her Inner Fire is published by Sacred Stories Publishing and releases May 26, 2026.
Pre-order: theburningground.com
Website: celinnedacosta.com
Instagram/Substack/Facebook: @celinnedacosta
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