10-Series Testimonial

Working with Gigi and to watch her bloom into her next phase in life, a phase of life marked by independence and spiritual sovereignty is so wonderful. Our “meeting” was marked by tons of synchronicity and resonant symbols. It’s very common for the highly gifted- spiritually speaking, to be born into systems that don’t support us, and part of our spiritual journey comes from liberating ourselves from the past so we can move forward in all ways as a pure being, unrestrained by the energy and the conditioning of our systems past.

Sometimes we are told certain things about ourselves and we learn to believe them to play our “part” in the dysfunction of those around us. It can impinge on our own belief about ourselves and our capabilities, when in reality it is not true- it is just a learned behavior to stay “in-group”. Of course these parts are not always easiest to recognize, nor are they to heal and release. That’s where I come in.

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“It feels like an impossible task to even begin to put into words the kind of experience or impact this 10 series had on me/my life...so impossible it's funny.

I have been in and out of therapy for a decade, I've read almost every lauded self-help and spirituality book that exists, but it wasn't until the sessions Maria helped facilitate did I start to feel like I could actually see myself for the first time....ever! in my whole life.

i feel changed. i feel like a me that finally is on her way to a life i knew i always felt could be mine but i felt soooo far away from. and didn't understand why. and didn't know how to get closer. maria helps you bridge those gaps.

there was and continues to be SO MUCH about myself i didn't know. it isn't a cure all, this work is continuous and life long. but i feel like the forest has cleared a bit and i can see a path AND i'm excited to walk it and even tho i am alone, i feel for the first time, capable, unafraid, and excited.

i don't know. if you're feeling called to this work and you're looking for assurance that this will mean something or make an impact...i don't know if i or anyone can really give you that but it meant a lot to me. it made a huge impact on me. i feel closest to myself than i have ever been and this work + therapy has been doing wonders for my ability to show up for myself and create a life i love and don't want to escape from,”

My Healing Journey

I’m writing this because I noticed that in the last testimonial I posted, there was a mention that there is no self-aggrandizement in my work. I really felt particularly grateful that this was noticed because I think this in itself takes a lot, a lot of refinement, understanding and measured work. Today it feels necessary to explain what this all means, and the healer’s healing journey because without previous experience, this one insight may elude you as it did, me.

My first few healers were very much all about, ‘your process began when you met ME” or all the descriptions about why someone was super powerful or all knowing or superior to me in some way. In fact, one of my healers said to me, verbatim, “I’m strong and they’re weak, because they’re my patients” at the time I was in my mid twenties, new to all of this, I didn’t understand mysticism or metaphysics then, and so I believed.

I also believed in the savior/rescued dynamic that keeps us all trapped in pitfalls of misery as humans. I thought that these people fixed me, saved me, I completely wrote myself out of the equation. I gave my power away.

Because of these early exposures, I do in fact make sure that everyone in my practice is reminded of their own power. That I’m not saving, fixing or rescuing. I find these steps to be fundamental to healing, because how else can we rise in our own power and sovereignty if we do not first believe ourselves to be capable and independent? It is the very FOUNDATION. If someone takes that foundation away from the first moment you start building a foundation for yourself, which has happened to me in my childhood and in my healing journey, then it is very bad news.

I look at and read over old testimonials that I wrote where I’m delighted by my practitioners (and granted, a few of them, very few, were very good healers) who I believed were beyond my power, or attribute things to them that they “fixed” that were wrong with me. And I shudder. These beliefs didn’t come from me, they came from people telling me, themselves.

I spent years in some turmoil about this, on one hand I do feel that there were particular people who were very helpful in my healing course, but I reflect back as a healer myself, and think about the things they said to me and am just.. devastated. I have compassion, because I know that the true healers that are born of this world with our gifts and mission are put through the ringer in early childhood, in ways that can damage someone’s self-esteem for life. A grandiosity is definitely an offshoot of that, and especially in something that later garners a lot of acclaim for that person in particular can trigger this grandiosity that’s just an offshoot of the abuse we endured as children. A lot of us come from narcissistic and sociopathic caregivers where grandiosity is currency.

However, the ones that truly accelerated my path were those that recognized beyond ego. They were the ones who were humble and showed me the way, and showed me that the way was mine.

Someone’s spiritual process, their awakening, does not begin when you meet someone else. It’s already happening, and the timing of meeting can often come down to spiritual contracts or guides who help guide us to others to help us. Someone can surely trigger spiritual growth in someone else, but no one is solely responsible for someone else’s soul timing. Some healers have very keen awareness for when someone is in process, and others, like myself, make myself available to those who seek my help because I trust that souls know their own timing and what it is they need. My soul, my guides, have always led the way for me, and I just want to remind others that just because someone makes the focus of your healing that it is because of their power does not make it so. Did we not learn anything from Cruella (which is an amazing movie by the way!), those who have power don’t talk about it.

Dynamics

In recent years I did a family constellation and we left at a very confusing point. My practitioner asked me if I was “the big one or the small one” in relationship to my mom, and my unconscious had a really hard time answering that. I said, “I’m the big one” my mother felt so small to me in that moment.

But there was clearly some confusion and my practitioner said it was time for us to stop, but that it was worthwhile to investigate this. I put it away for a few years because I always felt in some ways older than my own mom, but it made no sense to me consciously.

It clicked today that a crucial element of our dynamic when I left home to go to college was my mom constantly texting me to ask me advice on how to parent my younger siblings. And of course I would always give it to her because in some senses, I recognized that I knew better and she did too. That was normal to me, I never realized how strange it was until just now as I’m healing through deeper layers of my family dynamics.

The thought, my parent asked me for advice on how to parent. That sits awkwardly. How could a parent ask their child how to parent after having been their parent? Isn’t this hard evidence for the fact that she didn’t know how, didn’t learn from parenting me, and was never willing to learn? Isn’t this evidence for the fact that she didn’t parent me? These realizations cut through me in such painful ways because I was gaslit all my life to believe that I was wrong, that they knew better, that every time I called them out on how they were abusing me that it wasn’t actually happening and I was just oversensitive and crazy and that it was all my problem.

It makes me see that I was always supposed to be the little one, and it wasn’t a failure on my part that that dynamic between a child and her mother was never developed for me. When I try to readjust my size, visually, I feel like I don’t trust her. I don’t feel safe as her child. I’d rather be the big one- my parents’ parent.

I think it can be such a strange wakeup call for those of us who were put in the position of caring for the people who were supposed to care for us because it shifts our relationship to the world. I remember that for the longest time I always attracted these people who were supposed to care for me- whether they were mentors, teachers, or therapists or the like, who actually ended up needing my care. I didn’t understand why I was caring for people I was paying to help me, how come no one would help me? These imbalanced and strange relationships made me cringe, yet they were so much of my reality that for a period of years I realized I was better alone and not seeking help. Help came with too many strings and too much of an outpour from me.

It wasn’t until a point in my life when it started to clear, and I found myself seeking help from people who could actually help me and didn’t break boundaries or didn’t insert themselves into my healing. I found that I experienced a lot of distrust because of past experiences, and operated from a place of defense which gradually dropped over a long period of time. There was usually a phase of resistance at the beginning when in my mind I tried to convince myself they couldn’t help me, but I usually stuck through it and gave them more chances. This to me was fear, because they were unfamiliar to me (and for those like me, unfamiliar is usually the safer option) and not intuition. This was another moment in which I needed to learn to distill the two, because there is sometimes intuition in fear too. I notice that pure fear comes from my mind, where as instinctual fear comes from my gut.

These people were safe because they didn’t tell me how to be, didn’t tell me what to do, and didn’t get caught in self indulgent and self absorbed emotional dumps that had nothing to do with me. They actually listened to me and wanted to know what was going on, and paid attention, they responded. This at the outset felt so scary to me because I’d never experienced it before. In these experiences no one is the big one and no one is the small one, they’re meeting me on equal footing and they’re here to guide and support, not be my authority.

That of course shaped a lot of the way that I practice too in my integrative sessions. There’s an interesting dynamic that forms that’s so particular, because I can sense when the inner child needs a gentle authority and is at the forefront of the healing. Sometimes the child needs to be seen, heard, and encouraged, sometimes they need to be attuned to in ways that were needed but never given. This is often before the adult and the child have established a healthy connection. Then at other points in time, I’m relating to the adult, and the adult can then liaise with their own inner child. Some clients need a parental energy at the start, and some others need a fierce advocate where they’ve never had one before to initiate and reinforce their developing security.

For those of you who are unaware, I studied power and gender dynamics extensively for many many years. What’s most interesting is in our imbalanced society we think that power is something that is taken, because so many of us actually feel powerless internally as the world is ruled by narcissists and sociopaths. If someone had an internal sense of power, they’d realize they didn’t need to take it from a source outside of themselves, but that’s just the codependent framework of the world at large. Oppression, suppression, taking.

What I came to realize was that power is something that’s received, if it’s given. Everyone has their own sense of power, and if they surrender it freely then that’s when it can be received. I notice these points when people try to do it in my healing practice, and I gently say no. I remind them of what they’re doing and that they have power, and I ask them to take it back.

I think that practitioners are in positions that can be very influential. That’s why I’m so careful about who I work with, especially energetically. Even if I’m not declaring my power, it’s a soft power. That’s what hypnosis and all of these modalities are- they’re exerting influence for change. No one ever saw a healer because they wanted to stay the same. I think it can be dangerous when someone’s ego gets involved or they’re not sensitive enough to the power dynamics at play because they can convince you to do things for self-serving reasons and not reasons for your, or for the, highest good. It’s something that’s always in the back of my mind for me, and for people that I personally hire.

In relating to myself, I’m the big one and the small one simultaneously. As I grow, I learn more about how to parent, and thus parent myself. There are some tangible things that can’t be changed, like how I grew up, but there are elements that can be healed continuously and presently. The dynamic between ourselves is always changing and always has room to grow. That’s where I’m coming to in recent times, is that my relationship to me is the most important relationship I’ll ever have. I may not be able to change what was the dynamic between my mom and me, but my relationship to me is in my full control and I can be hyper aware of the dynamics that I co-create, now.

The Nature of Desire and Power

Sometimes someone comes into our lives and we can’t get enough of that person. We might know why consciously, and many times we don’t because the desire is unconscious. There’s something that perhaps we want from them, or feel as though they provide for us whether it’s something we didn’t get in our childhoods, or that we feel like we’re missing.

A lot of time this happens in romantic relationships- there’s a desire to be filled by the other person.

The issue here is, the moment you think that someone else can give you something that you can’t give yourself, you give up some of your power.

Read that again.

So it’s important to get clear when you feel that spark with someone, or that longing. It’s natural to desire someone without any other motives, of course, but I’m talking about a deeper longing that makes us chase after the person, or feel like we might not be okay without them. Getting clear on this is crucial. What is it that you think they can offer you, and why is it you can’t give it to yourself?

Support and need are very different. People can support each other, but the longing, the pull of needing someone to be okay is something else. This usually leads to a toxic foundation for a relationship.

The hack here is- figure out how you can give it to yourself. If it’s not something you can give to yourself, why? Of course there are things like physical contact or presence or conversation, that we all need another person for, but try to distill those too. When we miss someone’s presence, sometimes that can indicate we’re not fully present with ourselves, or it could indicate trouble perhaps, being alone (and this one is always rife to unpack).

The aim of this exercise isn’t so that you don’t ever need someone else and you can self-quarantine forever, it’s to get to the bottom of what needs you can fill yourself, so that someone else’s presence isn’t something you depend on, more something additive to your life which feels a lot more freeing and healthy.

Lastly, it’s never a good idea to surrender any of your power in a relationship. Of course, power can sometimes be a nebulous topic in any given relationship, but there should be an equal balance, exchange, unless the structure agreed upon differs. But giving up your power to exist in a relationship isn’t wise- compromising isn’t giving up power. Giving up your power does NOT equal love.

Why I say this is because I recently came to realize with the help of a shaman, that in my family, I was taught that to give up your power meant that you loved someone. My parents demanded obedience from me, and didn’t know how to show love. It’s cultural, but also due to their unique backgrounds where they were never taught, and they never felt the need to change or heal. So love didn’t mean anything else except to give myself up. I know it’s not just me. There’s a tendency for women to be conditioned this way- that submission is required in a relationship which might be old fashioned, but also it exists even in modern relationships, even if it’s subtle or nuanced.

Your personal power is yours to give, or hold onto. And this is just one way where you can create a mental check point and keep your power.

Stepping Into Power

The process of stepping into ones' own power means owning oneself fully and truly. It means facing every part of you, especially the parts of you that you hide to be socially accepted. Shadow work is essential in this process, as most of us discard and disown elements of ourselves that we cover in shame and self-rejection. That means feeling the depth of negative emotions, "abnormal" (I say this in quotes because what I mean is, anything outside of what society defines as normal which is a rather limited box) needs and basically, anything about ourselves that we'd cringe at if someone else found out about.

For me, that was feelings of neediness, loneliness, sadness, a fear of rejection and vulnerability. If we all came out and said what it was that we hid away, we'd probably come to find that we all hide the same things.

On the spiritual path, if you're like me and have had a share of traumatic events, you'll likely dissociate or want to escape from the heavier feelings and move towards the lighter ones. As a shaman identified for me, this is a form of spiritual bypassing. Although it feels like we are on the path towards enlightenment, we do need to face the discomfort to be able to drop into our bodies because the truth is, our power is in our bodies. If our spirits journey out, our bodies are left defenseless and our visions lose their grounding. Often times in these moments we'll hit a "Detour" or what appears/feels to be like one. It will often feel like a trauma itself, but what it's doing is dislodging our deeper traumas in our unconscious that are matching this circumstance. These detours are what allow us to step into our power.

Throughout the process, it can be grueling, but keep in mind that we are only given that which we can handle. If you are a person like me, a very old soul, a healer, an empath, then you already know that you've signed up for a hell of a lot of challenges in this lifetime to refine you, to make you stronger and suited for the large undertakings ahead. We can only heal people as much as we heal ourselves, after all. Before my "detour", I was taking on the energies of other people, their pain, their wounds and not realizing that those were only being absorbed because they matched something in my past that I'd buried in my subconscious. On the other side of this detour, I realize how much faster I can go down my path now after clearing out all of the darker, residual aspects.

We are human- and as human beings we are wired to judge. And that judgment is information not for the other person, but for ourselves- it brings up our belief systems and what we fear within ourselves. We can use this as useful information in our transformation process as it makes us more powerful.

Remember that power is not what we are conditioned to believe it is: it is not masculine, domineering, aggressive. That is overcompensation. That is purely gender based conditioning. Real power is integration. Real power is feminine and masculine. Real Power is ownership of the self, ugliness and all.