My Book

I can’t believe I’m doing this, I’m actually struck with terror as I’ve put this off for MONTHS. But what good is it to be hiding valuable information from those who need it?

My practice has been fundamentally separated from my life for a reason. I’ve liked to maintain some semblance of privacy and anonymity in my work. As most of my clients know, I put 110% of the focus on you.

But tonight, I’m ready to share that I published a short (because it’s concise and dense with information— I’m not one for fluff) book a few months ago for women who are, or wanting to walk into their personal power. You can find it here

It’s a tricky process that’s fraught with many set backs, many moments of realizing what you’re coming up against: yourself, your conditioning, your ancestry, your culture, and patriarchy at large. It can be an infuriating process, a confusing one, a lonely one. Trust me, I’ve felt it all.

But the key is to continue to dismantle the oppressive systems within, and that’s what allows others to do it too. That’s what changes the world.

With love,

M

Clairvoyant vs. Integrative

The most common question I get is from clients choosing between a Clairvoyant session and an Integrative.

The difference to me appears to me like this visual:

The Clairvoyant session is like being at an aquarium, looking through glass at what’s underneath the water

The Integrative is like jumping into the water and feeling what’s there

The integrative I also liken to cleaning house, as in, I’m there to help you clear out everything in your house including all of what’s stored in the closet, that you long forgot about.

In the 10-series, it’s where we’re cleaning out the whole house, then remodeling it

Both are cathartic in their own ways, and both also differ in the information they can offer you. We don’t do as much emotional processing however, in the Clairvoyant session, even though it can lead to emotional releases for some. The Integrative is where you’re taught to drop into your body, discover safety in the body, and come back “home” to you. The Integrative is as its name says, an integration. Integration is what needs to happen before we feel whole. In a traumatized state, “parts” of us are fragmented, rejected or repressed alongside the emotion.

The Clairvoyant session occurs in a different space, the Clairvoyant space. I’m in trance the whole time in a spiritual dimension and reading from your energy. The main reasons we would go into that space is for information and for clarity. It is where we see truth. The Clairvoyant space feels more objective, whereas the Integrative is more subjective and focusing on your experience, how it impacted you and how to process it.

For first timers who want to understand how I work a little better, I tend to recommend the Clairvoyant healing first before jumping into the Integrative. But, if it’s your body that feels like it’s on the verge of a big release and needing help to sort through the unconscious and conscious containers, then the Integrative is a good way to go. Either way, trust your gut. If you need a suggestion you can email me and I’ll know immediately.

Why No Zoom/Skype?

I used to have to explain why I only work remotely until everything became remote. But now, I want to clarify why it is that my sessions are done over the phone/email/energetically.

I know, there is a desire to actually see the other person. So much is communicated in body language, and so much empathy can be felt through seeing someone visually. It dawned on me that the people I know so intimately in my healing practice I may walk down the street and not even recognize because we’ve been working together entirely without seeing one another.

I used to LOVE seeing people in person. It was so rewarding. But the truth of the matter is, I am a super-empath and highly sensitive to stimulus. That’s part of my gift, in that I’m able to detect even the subtlest of energetic shifts and hear/see/feel things imperceivable by the majority of people. When I’m speaking to someone and seeing them whether in person or via zoom/skype, there are multiple streams of stimulus which can prove to be quite challenging and burn me out quicker. Like other intuitives, these sessions require a LOT of energy. I recently found one medium who said that each session is the equivalent of running a 5k. This is true. I can only take a few sessions per week otherwise I will feel like I cannot even move. Think about how “normal” people function- they tune into the visual cues, the auditory cues, etc.. the processing all of this to make meaning and then respond to it- well, imagine you’re doing that AND firing up all your clairs- so on top of the visual cues, you have to be on top of your clairvoyant space as well as be the interpreter for what you’re gathering etc.. It is double, triple, and registering all of this is a complex and taxing process. Not to mention, being the intermediary between the spirit and human world is something to consider as a process, too. Also, I’m an introvert- not exactly energized by interactions.

In order to deal with this I eliminate a few levels of stimulus so I can tap in very directly to your energy. Also, they say that psychics/intuitives can pick up a lot from body language— well, if we eliminate that, then you also know that everything I pick up from you I would have no other way of knowing. I am just feeling it from your energy/body and reading it from your energy. And, sometimes when I’m in clairvoyant space or feeling things through you, my eyes water. Some of my sessions are back to back so I just don’t think it’s a good look to come into the sessions with mascara dripping down my face.

In person takes a real toll on a healer, btw. Some healers can handle it because they may not be as sensitive as me, but the energy exchange was much too steep for me. As an empath sometimes I can be like a sponge, and everything I absorbed from being in person with another person’s energy field took me so long to eliminate. I don’t know where I would be if I continued in person work— that was really hard on my body, mind and soul. There are some sessions that put me in bed for several days. It’s a lot more labor than you would ever imagine it to be.

So that’s why- I sacrifice the connection we can build face to face for a cleaner handle on your energy. I also had this thought, for me, it’s easier to divulge more intimate details to someone over the phone because it feels a little more anonymous. Like, in relationships it’s always been easier for me to discuss harder topics and communicate by phone because it gave me more space for my thought processes. If it isn’t just me, then that’s an added benefit.

Nobody Knows

Is the title of one of my favorite films of all time, which I watched for the first time when I was 15. Also, nobody knows via my healing practice how into films I am. This is 1000% non healing related, I know, that’s new (but it is inner-child related, therefore healing). But I wanted to share this because this film, as brutal as it is to watch, really reminds me of the simple moments in life that brought me so much joy as a little child. Brief spoiler alert: these kids are abandoned by their mom, they have no money and no way of knowing when/if she’ll come back. Yet, they revel in each other’s company and still find ways to experience the world. The film is shot from a child’s perspective- pure and nonjudgmental.

As a child, I never thought about the next thing I had to do, I never had a care in the world except what was immediately experienced- the joy I would have discovering the world for the first time. Every single thing was approached curiously, with wonder.

I think we can all benefit from being reminded of it. As adults our lives become so burdened by responsibility. By “the next thing”. It’s hard for me to be here for this thing. I lost touch with the simple things. But, if we can appreciate the simplicity of life, that’s how we can truly live it.

I had a breakthrough very recently where I felt so in touch with gratitude that I spontaneously started crying. It’s really hard for me to cry. I realized that I can be so focused on finding a miracle when the miracle is that I am alive right now. That I have this body, and this body can make contact with this physical world we live in and discover it all again.

Emergence

Sometimes I channel certain things in sessions that are new to my present consciousness, but yet some part, the deepest part, I’ve known forever. It’s very interesting, this being human, how we have our “firsts” when really they’re not firsts after all, just the first time in this life.

This happened in a remote reiki session 2 days ago. The first word I heard, as if yelled at me, was “emergence”

I’ve never technically heard this word used in relationship to any spiritual concepts, for instance like a word such as karma, or awakening is so tied to spirituality that it holds a certain anchored meaning. I know the word remembrance, I started to remember what that meant in concrete spiritual terms. For those who don’t, it’s the process by which we awaken to our divinity, to the remembering of the vastness of our soul. For me, when I awakened, I had visceral emotional reactions when I saw ancient tapestries and I recognized them. I had nostalgia, a deep, guttural flutter that told me it was not my first time witnessing them. I was there at their time of creation.

It dawned on me to look up this word in terms of spirituality and this is what I found. So yes, it does have meaning, and it blew me away. They indicate that this process should have proper support— it’s interesting to gain context and descriptions for the work that I do without prior knowledge that this is what I was doing— I’ve helped clients integrate, understand, parse out and heal throughout this convoluted, complicated process of spiritual emergence. It is a beautiful, beautiful, challenging and rewarding process. I hope that this post opens doors as opposed to giving any answers, as a new possibility unfolds in my consciousness after understanding what this means in concrete 3D language.

In my understanding and experience, the spiritual awakening is the first step to a spiritual life- it’s when the kundalini energy connects root to crown for the first time and divinity enters. This is the first stage of remembrance, but remembrance is a continual process that spans a lifetime. The deeper you go with your soul, the more you remember of yourself and the world. You remember past lives, then the lives between lives, and you see glimpses of the future lives too.

There is only one major, cataclysmic spiritual awakening, yet it can feel like in the process of emergence that there are multiple small tremors of awakenings. These are usually accompanied by ego deaths in which parts of your ego go into full resistance and have to die In order to allow more of the soul self to emerge. These can feel brutal, but they happen once in a while as new parts are sloughed off and they often come with full surrender into a fearful state, and then a sudden surrender into connectedness and release.

A dark night of the soul happens during the spiritual awakening, in fact it’s a necessary stage. It’s a cumulative process of sometimes years, in which the soul/human journey through extreme darkness until one day a MAJOR part of you “dies” in order to allow the awakening. I do feel that ego deaths are more minor, they happen in conjunction with the dark night of the soul but as “they” are telling me now, the dark night of the soul is a rite of passage. Most of us only have 1, and some of us have 2 at a much later stage of spiritual progress.

Emergence is by far the most difficult thing because unlike the others which have a drastic turnover, emergence is a continual process with no definitive beginning or end. I thought that it did, but “they” are correcting me as I channel them now. We are in a continual stage of emergence.

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.

Testimonial from a lovely client!!

When I read this testimonial I had tears in my eyes. Being a practitioner who’s been able to track where she started vs where she is now is… remarkable. A lot of this work isn’t something where we can measure it on a scale or use a measuring tape— as in to say, not quantifiable, as it transforms the quality of life, so it’s hard for myself to put it into words, but Karla did it so elegantly. If I could describe her progress in 1 sentence, it’s, she’s connected to her soul now, she’s connected to her power, she’s connected to her essence and she’s integrated all of it (that’s a bit of a run-on, I know- how do you describe the quality of relationship to self and its impact on all other relationships?). I think it goes deeper than either of us imagined.

Let me start by saying this: a little over a year ago, BEFORE starting the journey with Maria, I thought I wouldn't make it out alive. Life was bleak, and my mental and physical bodies were responding by shutting down. I barely had energy to do much other than binge eat and wallow in confusion, depression, and an unwavering fogginess. A perpetual dark hole.

Cut to starting sessions with Maria: slowly, with hard and consistent work (including a lot of introspection and putting new habits into practice), I started to feel lighter, more joyful, and magnetic to joyful opportunities in life. I went from complete lethargy, to moving across continents and exploring new cities with confidence, with joy, a taste for adventure, and my old exuberance back. I was strong enough to set boundaries and reclaim my independence in family, work, and social contexts. I reconnected to myself - and learned more about what drove me to the dark place I was in, as well as how to create a new life that was worth living.

This is not easy work. You're going to have to face yourself, your internal demons, and potentially uncover shadows that you didn't know existed or worked very very hard to suppress. However, I couldn't imagine going through it with any other practitioner. Maria's knowledge is so deep, and so genuine. There is no toxic positivity mindset as is pervasive in this commoditized space of spiritualism. She's real. She is careful with the speed and intensity at which you progress in the journey. There are no false grand schemes of "buy my services and you will be happy". Maria never pushed her services on me, which I felt was very important to experience given insecurities around being taken advantage of. She is versatile - in language, in technique, in communication - and it was truly amazing to see just how tailored her care is to each client.

It truly is hard to write out in words the impact Maria's work has had on my life, or the rare beauty of her skillset - a truly truly remarkable one without self-aggrandizing or pushing your limits for results. If you're curious, I encourage you to try a single session to see for yourself (and be prepared to be blown away).

All I can say is this, today I live life with a deep sense of gratitude, an openness and ease of recognizing the beauty of life and all the in-betweens (whether seemingly simple or magical/other worldly in scale), a warmth in my heart and openness to love (my self, family, colleagues, strangers, Earth, etc), new dreams that feel genuine and authentic to me and my younger self, and above all, a will to live. This last part I never thought I'd experience again.

Trust your gut & try a session.

PS worth mentioning, I've complete 2 x 10 series with Maria. The investment was every bit worth it. I've also had reiki sessions (again - not imposed by something I felt called to do).

Perfectionism

I myself am guilty of perfectionism. There is always an unrealistic standard that I’ve set for myself that I somehow fail to meet. In my mind, it’s realistic because I’ve been exposed to this standard before, it’s not born of nowhere.

I won’t go into the mechanics of how perfectionism is created through upbringing, since many of you already know what goes into this and how it’s modeled.

What this creates in someone who lives with this is a deep fear of “not good enough” and secondly, a developing well of self directed frustration as well as feelings of failure that are semi-repressed. It’s semi-repressed as long as there’s some metric of success that you must score high on. Perfectionism is fear based, and for those of us who’ve lived with it, we’ve turned that fear (and anxiety) into something that motivates.

It was always very conscious for me as a teen and young adult that if I let go of this, and just suddenly realized I was “good enough” that I’d stop trying. I felt that the alternative was apathy, which I have experienced before. I didn’t know what to substitute the fear motivation for, or that there was another form of motivation.

As I’ve grown, I’ve come to face that fragile ego that’s underneath all of this. The one that took in the programming of deep unworthiness. I remember being very young and in situations where I felt failure, how much I couldn’t handle it because it brought out deep shame. In classes that I wasn’t the best, the stakes felt so high and so intolerable. I somehow couldn’t take it in stride like all the other people who were not the best, who were not good. People who could fail at something or not be good at something and not have it affect their sense of self seemed to have a healthy self-esteem that made them know that just because they weren’t good at this thing, they could keep trying and get better. They also knew that just because they weren’t good at this one thing, it didn’t mean that they were flawed as a person. These were thought processes that I didn’t have even if I identified them consciously.

As I’ve gotten older and done a lot of healing and integration, I’ve specifically challenged myself to do all the things that I’m not particularly gifted at. Sure, other people might argue that I’m not that bad, in fact, that maybe I am better than I think (because in my mind I think I am just awful which is a particular trait associated with perfectionism as well- that my assessment of myself always tends to be worse than what’s “real”). What this challenge does is it forces me to grow- it forces me to confront those shadow elements and fear. It shows me that there’s nothing to fear, and to be more lighthearted in my approach- that just because I can’t do a particular jump or my brain isn’t as quick with a quippy response in improv doesn’t mean that the world is ending, which it often felt like it was when there is a perfectionism that is expected of you, and performance is everything. Most importantly, it shows me to have fun which is something I had long been lacking in childhood.

I remember when the darkness of perfectionism hit me the worst, it wasn’t that long ago. My ego was still in control then and it needed above all else to bolster itself from its feelings of inferiority and frailty. So, I chose to only do things that I was the shining star in. And then my world became so limited, my ego was satisfied but my soul wanted more.

Overall, we’re here for the experience. That means, the totality of life that we get to experience in this human form, with this human intelligence. It’s not about good or bad, it’s about how we meet those experiences and what we take away from them. In the end, I’m. not going to care that I was the best in this one class or one thing, because I care more about growth and process, truly. Success of course is important, and I plan to succeed at the things that I’ve chosen, but I’m also learning to re-assess the bar that I set for myself. I want to do my best, not be the best.

Unexpected email

I’ve only worked with this client once in an integrative healing session— full disclosure, I had completely forgotten about our session early last year! He sent me this today:

“You helped me so much during the pandemic. I learned a lot, and you were the catalyst for the breakdown of my attachment to my shell formed due to years of trauma. I want to extend my appreciation. Your words were like the unlocking parts of my mind I was not aware I was avoiding and denying. I want to sincerely thank you from the bottom of my heart. I am sending love your way,”

Thank you <3

Testimonial

One of my clients who finished an Integrative Healing 10-series with me recently wrote the below. It was his first time with any healing.

“I gotta say that Maria is an expert in her craft! She took the time to walk me through how the process works and took the time to listen to me to assess where I'm currently at. I would say this is perfect for someone whose looking to change their life for the better. There's a lot of exercises we go through in order to tap within myself where I was able to confront a lot of my previous trauma. The work is ongoing but because of this program, I was successfully able to attract better opportunities in my life (for example: better job opportunities, being in a better state of mind and even experiencing a healthy relationship for the first time). I highly recommend Maria to anyone looking into a spiritual journey and healing. Keep an open mind and Maria will do her magic! You'll be surprised when she's able to pinpoint things about you without even saying a word but I knew from that moment that this is the person to be working with! I was very happy with my progress and look forward to a brighter future. Thank you Maria for everything!” - Damith W.

It’s incredibly inspiring to witness the changes that my clients undergo especially if I have the chance to supervise during a span of time, like the 10-series allows me. I really care about each and every one of my clients and their progress and breakthroughs feel like my own. What a true pleasure as a healer.