Interviews with strong, empowered women following their passions.
Episodes
Wednesday Sep 27, 2023
Wednesday Sep 27, 2023
Jen Dallas is the founder of Jen Dallas, Inc. Jen melds sophistication and history in creating the design of each house project. Well versed in many periods and styles, she has a true appreciation for the old meets the new. She strives to add character throughout her well-chosen design details. In addition to site visits and client meetings, her studio has its own line of textiles and matching ceramic tiles. She also recently launched her own collection of lighting and is working on her own line of rugs and furniture debuting in 2024.
Learn more about Jen.
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Tuesday Sep 19, 2023
Tuesday Sep 19, 2023
Lauren Best is a certified hypnotherapist and Provoker of Possibility. She supports Conscious Companies, Creative Leaders and Entrepreneurs, and Curious Individuals to unlock potential, envision new possibilities for their work and life, connect to their intuition, understand their unique abilities, and strengthen their mind-intuition-body connection to take authentic action.
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Tuesday Sep 12, 2023
Tuesday Sep 12, 2023
Melanie Childers is a business master coach for values led coaches, course creators, and CEOs . She helps you grow and scale to multiple six to seven figures with her simple evergreen process. She disrupts internalized patriarchy and hustle culture so you can build a successful business that supports you and your community. Without burning out, so please welcome Melanie Childers.
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Tuesday Sep 05, 2023
Tuesday Sep 05, 2023
Marlene Forte, a Cuban American actress born just outside of Havana, Cuba, and raised in North Jersey. Marlene has shaken the Hollywood stereotypes and broken the glass ceiling many times as a woman, a Latina, a mother and an “older” actress. At sixty-something year old, Forte seems to have defied the rules of aging showing that age is nothing but a number. The mum-of-one proves you can have a hugely successful career, raise a family, and look amazing while doing it!
You've seen her in everything from the Golden Globe Best Picture nominated film, "Knives Out," JJ Abrams' "Star Trek" reboot; "Real Women Have Curves"; "Our Song" opposite Kerry Washington, Marlon Wayans’ “A Haunted House”, and Tyler Perry’s “A Single Mom’s Club” on the big screen, to Netflix’s “Altered Carbon”, TNT “Dallas”, "The Mentalist", "Law & Order", “24”, “Community”, “The Secret Life of The American Teenager”, “The Fosters” and AMC “Fear of The Walking Dead” (among many others) on the little screen. She has experienced motherhood, owned a video store, and lived a full life before moving to Los Angeles and becoming a prolific actress. Her story is truly inspiring.
Learn more about Marlene.
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Tuesday Aug 29, 2023
Tuesday Aug 29, 2023
Michelle Danner is a film and stage director, author, world renowned acting coach and founder of the Creative Center for the Arts. She has taught acting for the last 27 years and has worked with many A-list actors, privately and on set, including Zooey Deschanel, Penelope Cruz, Andy Garcia, Selma Hayek, Michelle Rodriguez, Donald Sutherland, and many others. She was brought in for her expert coaching on the WB Show, "The Starlet," and was featured with Andy Richter on "The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien." Michelle has directed and acted in over 30 plays in musicals in New York and Los Angeles. She is also well established as a successful film director. Her current release "The Runner," is an action thriller and true life coming of age story about a troubled teenager who was forced to go undercover to expose a drug kingpin.
Learn more about Michelle.
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NOTE: This episode was recorded prior to the Writers Guild and Actors Guild Strike
Wednesday Aug 23, 2023
Wednesday Aug 23, 2023
Luz Nazario is the creator and founder of NEDA's Coquito, and a veteran educator with more than 25 years of experience preparing and educating the future game changers. More than five years ago, Luz decided to make some game-changing moves for herself that Christmas as funds ran low. She needed to do something quick to tie the family over until she returned to work, using the ingredients already at home, not ordinary, and not from Abuela. Luz knew how to make Coquito but wanted something different. After playing around with and tweaking the recipe, she arrived at NEDA's Coquito.
Learn more about Luz.
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Tuesday Aug 15, 2023
Tuesday Aug 15, 2023
Lauren Smith is an author, speaker and host of the Date in Peace podcast. She combines her own personal success story with her professional mindfulness training. Lauren empowers singles to ditch the dating struggle and claim the loving relationship they so deeply deserve. She is also the author of "The Mindful Dating Journal: Find a Healthy Love that Lasts" and creator of the Metta Date Journal mobile app. Lauren is a certified mindfulness & meditation teacher with additional certifications in Emotional Intelligence and EFT Tapping.
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Tuesday Aug 08, 2023
Tuesday Aug 08, 2023
Louise Palanker co-hosts “The Media Path Podcast” with legendary Los Angeles weatherman Fritz Coleman. Together, they explore your creative obsessions, from books to movies and everything in between. Louise has a prolific career in the entertainment world herself. She's a co-founder of “Premiere Radio Networks,” which is now a division of iHeartRadio. Her documentary “Family Banned the Cowsills Story” appeared on Showtime for two years and is now available on Amazon Prime. Plus, she writes a weekly advice column for NewsHawk.com and founded the Advice app for teens, “Ask Weezy.” Louise has been podcasting since 2005 and hosted the “Things I Found Online” podcast before setting out to co-host “Media Path” with Fritz.
Learn more about Louise.
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See the show notes for this episode.
Tuesday Aug 01, 2023
Tuesday Aug 01, 2023
Marissa Alma Nick is a choreographer and author who just released her first novel called Rebel in Venus. Although labeled a novel, the book is a semi-autobiographical, powerful, and honest story of redemption and an intimate portrait of friendship, the impact of trauma, the power of first love and loss.
Marissa illuminates queer experiences with an authentic perspective on emerging concerns, including trauma, mental health, sexual assault, abuse, culture, and gaslighting. More than anything, it's a book about empowerment, self-realization, self-acceptance, and self-love.
Find the show notes here.
This episode contains conversations about situations that might trigger PTSD and emotional trauma or cause discomfort to some listeners, please consider your own sensitivity before listening.
Tuesday Jul 25, 2023
Tuesday Jul 25, 2023
Michelle C. Smith is the go-to expert on sets for some of today's leading actors, holding the title of Queen of the Lightsabers, having been featured in Vogue for her work with Grimes on her music video player of games, as well as catching the eye and praise of Daisy Ridley.
Michelle is best known for her viral content on her social media platforms and YouTube channel. Michelle has amassed nearly 3 million followers across all social media and well over a hundred million views on her current content. As both an actress and a stunt performer, Michelle has the rare ability to cut out the middleman while on set saving production's valuable time and money.
She continues to be a strong advocate for highlighting the stunt community in recognition for their dangerous and breathtaking work.
Learn more about Michelle.
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Note: This episode was recorded prior to the Writer's Guild and Screen Actor's Guild strikes.
Tuesday Jun 27, 2023
Tuesday Jun 27, 2023
Holly Berry is the founder of aNatural Design, where she connects people to nature through the language of flowers. She shares the gifts of the Zen feelings that come from a Pacific Northwest hike and walking in an arboretum to help melt away the concern and worry in your day.
Learn more about Holly.
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See the show notes and full transcript.
Tuesday Jun 13, 2023
Tuesday Jun 13, 2023
Dali Rivera is an anti-bullying and diversity educator and the creator of the “Diversity and Anti-Bullying Academy.” Through DABA, she helps parents and educators learn how and what to teach children to prevent bullying and stop bullying through interactive workshops, books, workbooks, webinars, and live online classes.
Learn more about Dali.
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Read the full transcript and show notes.
Tuesday May 30, 2023
Tuesday May 30, 2023
Gwen Manto is the owner of mixallogy, a collection of certified organic, low calorie cocktail mixers. Gwen's business history can best be encapsulated by her favorite drink and one of mixallogy’s premier offerings: the Cosmopolitan. A working woman's cocktail of liberation and independence, always an advocate of great ideas and a great team. Gwen's keen consumer insight and business acumen led her from VP of Macy's department stores to stints as Chief Merchandising Officer for several national chains. In 2017, she launched her passion project, mixallogy. Born of the desire to create all-time favorite cocktails with organic ingredients that taste amazing, are affordable, and easy to prepare, mixallogy proved to be the perfect combination of Gwen's interests and insights.
Learn more about Gwen.
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View the show notes and full transcript.
Tuesday May 16, 2023
Tuesday May 16, 2023
Cathy Gasper is the owner and holistic practitioner at HOPE, an acronym for “Hold On, Pain Ends.” Cathy specializes in pain, trauma and anxiety, utilizing modalities including ear reflexology, auricular chromotherapy, pranic healing and Reiki. She analyzes and addresses patient concerns through active listening and advising on appropriate treatments, and seeks continuous learning in each specialty practice, ensuring accurate diagnosis and treatments. So please welcome Cathy Gasper.
Learn more about Cathy.
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See the show notes and complete transcript.
Tuesday May 02, 2023
Tuesday May 02, 2023
Christina Lopes spent a decade working as a neuropediatric clinician before becoming a life coach, spiritual teacher, author and entrepreneur in 2013. Today, she seamlessly bridges science and spirituality to help others heal from significant trauma, open their hearts, and live fulfilling lives. Christina's unique coaching style includes a focus on the heart as the primary driver of healing and transformation. Instead of mind. She holds a doctorate degree in physical therapy from New York University and a master's degree in public health from John Hopkins University.
Learn more about Christina.
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See complete show notes.
Tuesday Apr 18, 2023
Tuesday Apr 18, 2023
Marion Clignet is a cycling, health, fitness and nutritional coach and public speaker. At the age of 22, Marion discovered that she had epilepsy and would have to take medication for the rest of her life. So she made a promise to herself that she would never let anything get in the way of her achieving what she set her mind to. During her 27 years as a track cyclist, she earned 12 national titles, six World Championship titles, two Olympic silver medals and one world record.
Learn more about Marion.
Learn more about the Passionistas Project.
Find the show notes and transcription here.
Wednesday Apr 05, 2023
Wednesday Apr 05, 2023
In the fall of 2019, Maria Dominique Lopez was in a trance state while meditating and felt strong tingling in her palms. She had no idea what the tingling in her hands meant, or why every time she touched someone in pain, their pain went away. After months of research, she decided to take her first Reiki course and learned that what she was experiencing was Reiki. Now it is her mission to help a new generation come to consciousness and ascend to their own universal calling.
Learn more about Maria Dominique Lopez at AscendingArts.exchange.
Maria’s interview is followed by a story about the Power of Resilience by Elena Christopoulos, the founder of a sustainability management consulting firm, Elena's contributions have helped create over 500,000+ green jobs worldwide with 60% of the positions going to women and BIPOC. As a climate scientist and political advisor, she has actively worked throughout her career to bring more women and BIPOC to the table, in both fields and has successfully managed over 40 political and environmental campaigns worldwide. As a Commissioner for the City of Santa Monica her role is to advise City Council on sustainability issues and policies relevant to women and girls. As a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, She uses her voice to ensure we are represented.
Our episode ends with a guided mediation from Maria Dominique Lopez.
IN THIS EPISODE
[01:03] Maria Dominique Lopez on what she is most passionate about
[01:26] Maria Dominique Lopez on her work
[02:11] Maria Dominique Lopez on her childhood and spiritual beginnings
[04:36] Maria Dominique Lopez on remembering her Reiki awakening
[05:09] Maria Dominique Lopez on the beginning of her meditation journey
[08:40] Maria Dominique Lopez on the origin of Reiki
[11:35] Maria Dominique Lopez on how she began practicing Reiki
[14:11] Maria Dominique Lopez on the benefits of Reiki
[15:45] Maria Dominique Lopez on how often she performs Reiki
[17:47] Maria Dominique Lopez on one’s first experience of Reiki
[18:30] Maria Dominique Lopez on what she has learned from practicing Reiki
[22:53] Maria Dominique Lopez on her background in opera
[27:44] Maria Dominique Lopez on advice to her younger self
[29:02] Maria Dominique Lopez on a trait that has helped her succeed
[33:50] Maria Dominique Lopez on her biggest professional challenge
[34:53] Maria Dominique Lopez on the most rewarding part of her life practice
[35:51] Maria Dominique Lopez on her dream for women
[36:39] Maria Dominique Lopez on her mantra
[36:48] Maria Dominique Lopez on her definition of success
[37:19] Maria Dominique Lopez on her advice to young women
[38:56] Elena Christopoulos on the power of resilience
[46:45] Maria Dominique Lopez leads a guided meditation
TRANSCRIPT
Passionistas: Hi, we're sisters Amy and Nancy Harrington, the founders of The Passionistas Project, where we give women a platform to tell their own unfiltered stories. On every episode, we discuss the unique ways in which each woman is following her passions, talk about how she defines success, and explore her path to breaking down the barriers that women too often face.
Today we'll be talking with Maria Dominique Lopez. In the fall of 2019, Maria was in a trance state while meditating and felt strong tingling in her palms. She had no idea what the tingling in her hands meant, or why every time she touched someone in pain, their pain went away. After months of research, she decided to take her first Reiki course and learned that what she was experiencing was Reiki. Now it is her mission to help a new generation come to consciousness and ascend to their own universal calling. So please welcome Maria Dominique Lopez.
Maria: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.
Passionistas: We’re really excited to hear more about this. What are you most passionate about?
Maria: Healing. I'm most passionate about healing, absolutely a thousand percent. There's so much of my life that has been changed and altered since I started my own healing journey, and now I help people embark on theirs every day, and it's, oh, it's the most amazing work that I've ever done with my life, and I just, I so love it.
Passionistas: What is that work that you do?
Maria: So I work as an energy healer, doing performing Reiki mostly. I also am an intuitive energy reader, so I offer intuitive energy readings as well. I am a certified Reiki master and also a spiritual mentor, which is basically a fancy way of saying life coach without all of the homework or the rah rah shish boomba. We really, we really dive into the shadows of your life and work through the things that really need healing in ways that will promote specifically post-traumatic growth. So, that involves usually a spiritual practice of some kind.
Passionistas: So, let’s take a little step back and tell us a little bit about your childhood, where you were born, if you had even had any consciousness of any of this kind of stuff back then.
Maria: Sure. So I was born in New London, Connecticut. My dad was stationed at the base there, the naval base, and I was born just off base. It was a pretty difficult pregnancy for my mom. There were a lot of health issues. And so I was born in the hospital off base, and then we actually only lived in Connecticut till I was three months old. My dad was medically discharged from the Navy as a hundred percent disabled veteran. And so then we moved to Seattle, Washington, where the majority of their family lived at the time; both of their sets of parents lived there. And so I was kind of raised there. And my dad actually was a professional ice hockey coach, so we ended up moving a lot. We moved from Washington to Mexico City where he built the Olympic hockey program for Mexico. We moved to Phoenix where he coached for the Tucson Road Runners, I think is what they used to be called. I don't know what they are now, but they were an IHL team. Then we moved to Houston, and he coached for the Houston Arrows for a little while. And then, you know, so we moved all over the place basically when I was a kid
Was I conscious of Reiki as a child? The answer is yes, but accidentally. I didn't realize until I became a Reiki master. And I was meditating one day, and this memory came to me of when I was, I think I must have been maybe six or seven years old. And I was with my cousins, Janine and Desiree, and we would go picking blackberries. There were these wild blackberry brambles behind my grandma's house. And so in the summertimes we would go and we would pick all the blackberries we could possibly handle and, like, eat them all before we could even get them home. And we'd just covered in blackberry juice and just a total mess, you know. And so we were headed down the hill, back from the brambles to my grandmother's house, and my cousin Desiree fell. And I don't remember if she hurt her ankle or her knee, but I remember her falling and, like, twisting something and being hurt. And right then, I mean, I was like maybe seven, I think six, I knelt down and I put my hands on her, and I was like, “Okay, if I concentrate hard enough, I can take her pain away.” And of course, we were kids. You know, we laughed, we thought it was fun pretending, blah, blah, blah. Right? But even then, something about me understood that this was possible, and I totally forgot about it until about three years ago when I started practicing Reiki and I was like, “Oh my God, I've always been a Reiki healer, and I didn't even know it.
Passionistas: That's incredible. That is so cool.
Maria: Thank you.
Passionistas: Does she remember that experience?
Maria: She does. And I think at the time we both just laughed it off. You know, we just thought it was make believe and we didn't really, and I know, you know, she and Janine, they don't really ascribe or believe in Reiki now even. And so it's interesting that, like, we both remember that situation, and I became this Reiki healer, but it's still something that we haven't had the chance to try together yet since I've become a Reiki healer. So, hopefully some day.
Passionistas: So, tell us about that journey. So, when did you first get into, I know you do meditation, so when did you first get into that practice and what inspired you to do that?
Maria: Yeah, so, I got into meditation in about 2018, so several years now. And I started meditating because my best friend, one of my oldest friends. I've known him for over half my life. We were freshman undergrad musicians together. He was a professional percussionist and I was an opera singer. His name is Ben Irons, and he just published his first book, actually: “Mindfulness for Musicians.” So, that's kind of cool —a little plug for my best friend there. But he actually taught me how to meditate. He'd been meditating for about 10 years at the time. And I kept saying things, “I need to meditate. I know I'll get around to it. Like, I wanna learn. I know I need to learn, I should learn how to meditate,” all these things, right? And finally one day, he was like, “Maria, why don't you?” And I said, “Well, you know, I gotta be honest, since we've become a little bit more vulnerable in our friendship, and I feel comfortable sharing this with you. I know it's silly, but I just, I'm worried I'm gonna be bad at it.” And he proceeded to laugh in my face, at my perfectionist ass. And he said, “Maria, there is no such thing as being bad at meditation.” He said, “You know, that's why they call it a meditation practice. They don't call it meditation Olympics. There's no gold medal to be won. There's no competition. There's no potential, like, quantifiable measurement of how good you are at it. It's just a practice.” He said, “Some days you'll have efficient days where you'll sit down on the cushion, and you'll tap right in, and you'll have this amazing 45 minute trancey meditation, and you're just gonna, like, fly to the stars. And some days you're gonna have less than efficient days where you're gonna sit down on the cushion, and you're not gonna be able to stop thinking about how your right toe itches, and you're gonna be running through your grocery store list in your head for the whole 30 minutes, and you're just gonna be counting every second wondering when you can get off the cushion.” He said, “On the efficient days, you're gonna learn a lot. On the less than efficient days, you're gonna learn even more. There is no way for you to screw this up.” And I think the perfectionist inside of me just needed someone to give me that permission.
So I started the very next day. And I started with three minutes a day, and it was torture. And then I finally got up to about five minutes a day after a couple weeks, and that was even worse. And finally, after about three months of doing five minutes a day, I went back to him and I was like, “I can't, I can't get past five minutes a day. I don't know what to do.” And he was like, “All right, let me teach you a meditation that changed my meditation practice overnight, and it really, it changed my life.” And I was like, “Okay, yeah, gimme that magic pill. Give it to me.” And so he taught me the Mettā Bhāvanā. The Mettā Bhāvanā is from the Vipassana tradition of meditation, and it translates in Sanskrit to “loving kindness” in English. So, if you've ever done a loving kindness meditation, you've done the Mettā Bhāvanā And there are a million “loving kindness” meditations for free on YouTube. I highly suggest anyone who's listening to this, go check 'em out. They're incredible. But I started doing the Mettā Bhāvanā every day, and I immediately went from five minutes to 30 minutes and then to 45 minutes. In six months time, I was sitting every day for 45 minutes. And not only that, but in six months time, my entire, I was a totally different person, a completely different person. I went from being reactive in a miserable marriage that was failing, that was very verbally abusive from both sides, to becoming this person who was full of love and compassion, who became the healer that I became because of this practice. So it really, it changed the whole landscape of my future. This one thing.
Passionistas: So, explain to people what Reiki is and how you—we told a little bit of your story in the intro—but how you became, how you started practicing it.
Maria: So, Reiki is an indigenous shamanic Japanese Shinto healing practice based in the Shinto religion. It has, however, been whitewashed and colonized by the Western healing world, so much so that it is no longer associated with any of those practices, other than the fact that it is still associated with Japan—because Reiki is a Japanese word, meaning “universal life force.” And what it is, is it's this practice whereby practitioners place their hands onto a receiver, and the receiver has their energy basically balanced.
So, from a scientific standpoint, what that means is, you and me and this computer that I'm talking to right now, and my cat and the moon and oxygen and literally everything in existence is all at the very—we’re talking broad strokes of quantum mechanics now—at the very quantum level, we're all made up of the same matter, quantum matter, right? Just different conglomerations of the same matter. So, it's kind of like how that Aspen Forest in Utah is made up of 50,000 trees, but it's actually one tree. It's one of the largest organisms on earth, and it looks like 50,000 trees cuz they're all united under the ground by the same root system. Our root system—existence is root system, is quantum matter. We are all one giant organism, if you think about it from a quantum level. Mind you, quantum physics has now been as of, I think maybe like five or six years ago, the most proven science on Earth, which means that there have been more experiments done with more conclusive evidence to the same conclusion than chemistry, than biology. So we know for a scientific fact—you know, depending on how much you believe in science; I personally very much believe in science—but we know for a scientific fact that we live in a quantum universe, and that we are, in fact, one quantum organism. So with that understanding ,what Reiki actually is, is quantum healing. I channel quantum matter that is around you and in you, more of that into you. I'm not giving you my energy. I'm like a meat straw through which the energy flows. I'm just like the lido deck director being like, “Here, right this way to your energy,” right? So, in that in that sense, I don't get exhausted when I give Reiki. It doesn't hurt me. It doesn't drain me. It actually makes me feel great, because I'm receiving Reiki as I give you Reiki. And that's really what it is; it’s just a name for quantum healing. Every single indigenous culture in the history of humanity has had some sort of hands-on quantum healing practice. Unfortunately, due to colonization, most of the names of those practices have been lost. So, we're very fortunate that Reiki has survived in the ways that it has survived in order for us to be able to have access to at least one type of healing in that way.
Passionistas: What was the incident that happened that helped you realize as an adult that you had this skill, power, what's the right word to use
Maria: What happened was, I was meditating with Ben, with my meditation instructor, and I started to feel this tingling in my palms. And I had just maybe a couple weeks prior been in a car accident. So I thought, “Oh, maybe there's nerve damage or something happening here.” You know, again, I like science, I like the things that are quantifiably provable, right? So, I started feeling this tingling in my hands. And in fact, when I was meditating, I opened my eyes ‘cause I could feel this tingling, and I was like, “This is so weird.” I had been working with tantric energy and moving energy through the body for a while. I'd been working with meditation and breath. So, I had started feeling tingling in other places. And I had a Reiki master, and I was receiving Reiki from her frequently as well, so I understood the concept, but I also didn't think it could be happening to me. Like, I didn't think that I had the access to that. So, I was meditating, felt this tingling in my hands, opened my eyes, and my hands were, like, glowing, right? With this, like, golden light. And it was almost like an aura, you know? You see an aura, and it goes away in a second. It was like that. So, it went away. The glowing went away immediately, and I was like, “Okay, I'm not on drugs. What is happening here?” But what I figured was that it would just go away. Maybe it was nerve damage or whatever. Well, the tingling didn't stop for three months. I had such a hard time with how much energy was going through me. I couldn't sleep at night. Like, at the time, I was married to my ex-husband, and I would just roll over in bed just to put a hand on him to get rid of some of the energy. ‘Cause I was like, “What is this? Like, go away. I need to sleep,” right? And every time, like I said in my bio, every time I would put my hands on someone who was in pain, their pain went away. It was so weird. And so finally, I asked my Reiki master, and I was like, “I think maybe this is Reiki. I don't really know.” She was like, “It sounds like it to me. Maybe you should take a class.” So I went and got certified, and it turns out that I had just accidentally universally attuned myself to Reiki. Which, now I run my own Reiki certification program, and I actually will not certify my students until they have figured out how to attune themselves to the energy. Because there are a lot of Reiki courses you can take. You can take a weekend course at the Marriott today and get a Reiki certification for $99. The problem is, all you'll be learning to do is write the alphabet, right? Basically, you're learning how to write the Reiki symbols, and then hopefully the energy will come, you know? But that's what I teach. I teach you how to universally attune yourself and access that Reiki, and then I certify my students to legitimize their practices within the Western framework of needing certifications. But you can't get a certification from me until you can actually channel the energy.
Passionistas: So, what are the benefits of Reiki?
Maria: So many scientific benefits of Reiki. There have been tons of studies done. I definitely recommend checking out Reiki.org if you're ever interested in reading the multitude of scientific studies that are out there about it. But generally, we've got lowered cortisol levels—which is the stress hormone, lowered blood pressure, lowered heart rates, so increased circulation of oxygen and blood through the heart, which can improve cardiovascular function. We've got increased myelin development on the nerve endings on the myelin sheath of nerve endings, which can help to rewire the nervous system and remove trauma that is held in our autonomic nervous system. Not only that, but myelin sheath development also coats our brain and our neural pathways, which means that developing that myelin sheath lining in the brain also can help with neuroplasticity, which is basically brain youth. It's how we learn and how we retain information. So, there's a lot of benefit to Reiki just scientifically, but people who've received Reiki also report sleeping better, losing weight or gaining weight if that's what they're looking for, improved metabolism. I've seen Reiki cure cancer, for crying out loud. Like, there are lots of things that it can do. I had a friend with hemorrhoids last week. I went and gave her Reiki, and her hemorrhoids are gone. Like it's just, she was gonna have to have surgery. You know, it's kind of amazing how it works, but scientifically proven, we've got a lot of different real scientific things that it does, which is great.
Passionistas: How often do people come to you for services? Is it like a monthly thing?
Maria: You know, it depends. I like to tell my clients that if a Reiki practitioner says to you, “Okay, you need to see me every week for the health and balance of your system,” they're probably just trying to get your weekly money. I believe strongly that your spirit, your heart, your soul, your body knows what you need to heal. And if you need Reiki, there'll be a random thought that'll pop into your mind and be like, “Man, I could use some Reiki.” And that's when you call me. But I do have programs, both my Reiki master certification program and my trauma healing program, The Phoenix Rising—both of those programs, I require people to get weekly Reiki, and the reason why is very specific. For my trauma healing program, weekly Reiki helps to literally rewire your autonomic nervous system so you can release trauma that's held in the body. But if we aren't doing that, it takes a lot longer. You can rewire your nervous system on your own. You don't need the help of Reiki. It just, it's kind of like training a cat. It takes a lot of patience, and it takes a lot of time, but it is possible, right? That's why most people think that you can't heal or cure trauma. Like, you can never get rid of it; you just get better at coping with it over time. That’s not true. Trauma is held in two places in our bodies: one—our brain, and two—our autonomic nervous system. Your brain can process through trauma in 38 seconds. It's incredible how fast our brain can actually process trauma, but our body holds onto it forever until we figure out how to reprogram and rewire the autonomic nervous system. And there's a very important reason why it does that, right? Its whole job is to make sure we survive. It's an evolutionarily created construct. So, we are literally trying to hack our evolution to release trauma from the body. Reiki helps to speed up that process, but only if you're doing it regularly. And then with my Ascension 101 program, with my Reiki certification program, the reason why I have weekly Reiki for that is because we're opening up your channels to become attuned right to the universe. And the more Reiki you receive, the more quickly you become attuned to that Reiki. That’s all.
Passionistas: So, for someone who's never had Reiki, what do you experience during a Reiki session?
Maria: Well, it differs. It differs based off of the person who's receiving it. I've had clients report that they feel tingling all over their body. They feel heat and warmth. They see flashes of light or colors behind their eyes. I've had clients who have visitations from their ancestors, from, like, their, you know, grandmother who passed away or their father who just passed away, or things like that. It really depends on the person. But one thing that I have noticed happens a lot during Reiki sessions is people fall asleep. A lot of people get so relaxed entering into that data state that they do just fall right asleep.
Passionistas: What have you learned most about yourself from this practice?
Maria: That is such a great question. What haven't I learned about myself from practicing Reiki? You know, becoming a Reiki master and really beginning to offer healing to others really required me to make sure that I was a pure channel, and to make sure that I am energetically, we call it—my mentor and I—we call it “squeaky clean energetic.” Right? So, we like to be the kind of people where, if I'm gonna be messing around in your energy, I can't be bringing my own crap into that, because it's disturbing to the energetic field, right? So, that's been, I think, one of the biggest things that's changed about me, is I've had to really heal a lot of my own crap in order to be able to help others heal. Not because I needed to know what it was like in order to lead them—because we're all just walking each other home. Right? That's what Ramdas said: “We’re all just walking each other home.” But because I couldn’t energetically and ethically stand for being anything less than energetically squeaky clean. When I started helping others heal, I was struggling with an eating disorder, for example. Here I am guiding women to love themselves unconditionally, to open their heart chakras in a way that allows them to see that they are worthy of love and acceptance and a beautiful, joyous life simply because they exist; not because of how they look, not because of what they achieve, not because of what they do. And yet here I was eating one meal a day for the last 10 years, right? So I finally had to face myself and go, “What are you doing? Like, you can't continue to preach this and then practice something totally different. It's going to make sure that, it's going to completely guarantee that the people you are trying to guide won't heal themselves. Because you lead by example now.” And I think that was the biggest thing, really, that's changed about me, is understanding and really stepping into leadership, which was hard for me. I did not wanna do it. I was like, “I just wanna give people Reiki and let them do their thing. Like, I don't wanna have to do any of this.” And a lot of Reiki healers, they'll place their hands on someone, and they won't say a damn word. Which is fine, but I couldn't stop myself. My body became a mirror for my clients. I could feel pains in their body, and I just started channeling things that they needed to hear, and I just became a leader. And I didn't want to, and I had to anyway. I fought against that “life coach” term for forever. I did not wanna do it, because who wants to listen to someone who's so fucked up? Nobody should be listening to me, right? You can bleep that if you need to. Sorry. But you know, nobody's gonna listen to a leader who who hasn't got her shit together. And that's at least what I thought. What I realized is, a leader is someone who's relatable, who's vulnerable, who can walk with someone and say, “Oh yeah, I've been here before. Here's why I realized this was not gonna work for me, and here's why I can tell you honestly that it's not gonna work for you. But also, do I understand your struggle? Hell yes.”
Passionistas: So, how can people work with you?
Maria: I have several ways you can do one-on-one Reiki sessions with me. I sell them in single sessions or sessions of 5 or 10 packs. You can do spiritual mentoring with me, which is basically like therapy, but with more empathy and connection and fewer boundaries of, like, laws and, you know, HIPAA regulations. But everything is confidential, and that's in single sessions as well. 5 packs or 10 packs. I've got “The Phoenix Rising,” which is my one-on-one, three month long trauma healing program designed specifically to help you achieve post-traumatic growth and heal your trauma once and for all. And then I've got a wait list started for working with me to become a Reiki certified Reiki master in my year long certified, uh, excuse me, my year long Reiki master certification program, “Ascension 101.” And then finally, the last way to work with me is, if you are in a couple dynamic, whether that's two sisters or a mother-father, or, you know, father-child, parent-child relationship or romantic relationship. I have sessions called the “We Method.” They are two hour long spiritual mentoring sessions for couples, people who want to improve their bond and their love, whatever that is, whether it's romantic, platonic, or familial. And that is all the ways you can work with me.
Passionistas: We would be remiss if we did not ask you about your past as an opera singer and possibly your present as an opera singer. So tell us about that.
Maria: Yeah, so, I have a bachelor's and master's degree in opera performance from Northern Arizona University, and I studied privately with a teacher from Boston Conservatory Music after that for a couple of years. So I've been singing opera professionally now since 2010. And I have had the great blessing of singing all over the world, of singing with incredible musicians. I made my Kennedy Center debut right before the pandemic hit. I also was blessed to be able to sing in Disney's “Coco.” So, I've had this, like, really, really amazing experience recently of really developing this musical career.
And then the pandemic hit. And when the pandemic hit, of course, singers being super spreaders, we were shut down. Everything was shut down. And it was so interesting just to watch, like, every company claim Force Majeure. No singer got paid even for contracts that were already signed. And I kind of was left adrift, you know? And it was funny because the timing of the universe is so amazing that I had already been, I'd already received my Reiki one certification right before the pandemic hit. And I was weighing the options. I was like, “I love healing. I love Reiki. I love this energy. I'm like really passionate about this, but I've loved music for so long. Like, maybe, but maybe it's time to quit. Maybe I should quit and really start something with this Reiki thing. But I don't know what to do.” And I was like, “Oh, what do I do? What do I do?” And then pandemic, hit, and now no Reiki. I mean, no, no music at all, right? So I was like, “Well, I guess the universe decided for me. We’re gonna create a business doing Reiki now, and we'll see where it goes.”
And now, the interesting thing is, is that, the music industry is hard. You know, it's really hard. It's very toxic, especially the opera industry is very toxic. It's very racist, it's very misogynistic, it's very fatphobic. And these are things that we are working, as younger singers, that we're working on trying to fix about our industry even now as we speak. And hopefully we can do that before the entire industry, you know, implodes on itself because no one wants to work for it anymore. We'll see. But I realized that I had been so burned out on singing because of the minutiae that came with it, and because of, honestly, I was full-time singing when the Pandemic hit. I was one of those people very blessed to support myself entirely on my singing, which is crazy. That doesn't happen. And I was taking every project I could, saying “yes” to everything. Whether or not I wanted to make that art, did not matter. Were they paying me? Great. I was gonna do it. And now that I'm able to not only dive deeply into this thing that I'm so passionate about in healing people and support myself in that way, now I get to turn to music in this way that really allows me to celebrate the art. I get to only take projects I wanna take, whether they're paying me or not. Or I get to only take projects that pay me really well, if that's what I want. But I have the choice now. And because I received that choice back, it was amazing, but my perfectionism died immediately. Almost immediately. I was so scared. You know, in the classical music industry, especially in singing opera, it's all about mimicry. You wanna sound exactly like performance practice has been since 1600 when they wrote that opera. You know, we don't put in our own artistry, we don't put in our own, you know, licks or anything like that, that makes it uniquely ours. You do it the way that the composer wrote it, and you only do it that way. And so if you're not perfect, you're not getting rehired. And that was, that made me into someone who was so tightly wound and so scared and nervous about, like, getting back into it that I would just, oh man, I just, every habit I had with regards to being in the music industry and learning music and performing music was just so devoid of life. And now I get to be here with this music, with this amazing art, and I don't care if I don't get rehired. So I get to be a little bit more artistic. I get to have adventure, and of course I still have respect for the art form and what's required, but all of the fear is gone. And that's yet another unexpected gift that becoming a Reiki practitioner gave me.
Passionistas: Wow. What an amazing story of transformation. I love that. You are, by the way, our second Passionista involved with “Coco.” I know. That's so cool. We have an actress named Selene Luna, who played Tia Rosita.
Maria: Oh, my gosh, wow!
Passionistas: Yeah, that’s funny.
Maria: I only had three seconds of fame in “Coco.” Literally. I'm not exaggerating. Mine is less, but my name's still in the credits, so.
Passionistas: That’s excellent. So, thinking back to your younger self that laid your hands on your cousin to try to take away her pain. What advice would you give to that young girl?
Maria: Believe in magic. Believe in yourself. You know? I think that is the thing that happens to our children so, so quickly when they're raised, is they, they start believing in magic. They start believing in themselves. They start believing anything is possible, and they begin with really understanding and expressing their most authentic selves. And then we let our societal ego mind get in the way of that. We teach them shame. We teach them how to be smaller to fit in. We teach them how to homogenize themselves, their dreams, their educations, their art, their magic. We teach them how to strip themselves of everything that makes them unique in order to fit in. And that is, it has devastating consequences. And if I had had a parent that was able to tell me that as a young child, I think perhaps I would've found Reiki a lot sooner. And I think also, I would've definitely experienced far less trauma than I did throughout my life.
Passionistas: Is there a particular trait that you have that you think has helped you succeed in your life?
Maria: Resilience, I think, you know? Post-traumatic growth is definitely something that has been my constant companion in this life. And just to—for our listeners who don't know what post-traumatic growth is—post-traumatic growth is a psychological term that was first coined by scientists in the mid 90s, early to mid 90s. But it's actually a psychological phenomenon that has existed since the beginning of humanity. And every sacred text talks about it. The Bible talks about it, the Quran, you know, Buddhism has talks about this. And this is the idea that suffering births transformation. Post-traumatic growth specifically is identified as a psychological phenomenon whereby we are better, happier, more well adjusted, more authentically ourselves, more joyous because of our trauma, not in spite of it. That our trauma makes us better. And there are only about 10% of people who suffer from trauma that ever actually get to achieve post-traumatic growth. All the studies that they've done on it have shown three main indicating markers of what will help you to develop post-traumatic growth: number one is a community of support, number two is resilience, and number three is a spiritual or faith practice. The numbers are exceedingly high for people who have those three pillars in place to achieve post-traumatic growth.
I did not grow up with a spiritual or faith practice. My parents raised me to be agnostic, bordering on atheistic, but they did raise me to believe that if you're a good person, no matter what you believe, if you treat other people with love and humanity and brotherhood, then you're gonna be fine at the end of this life, no matter what happens to you. And I think the biggest thing, though, that my parents taught me that I had growing up, that has allowed me to achieve post-traumatic growth, was resilience. Resilience is this idea that we can bounce back. It's the idea that allows us to accept that failure is positive, not negative. Which, you would think that for a perfectionist like me, wouldn't be the case. And that perfectionism was definitely developed in college as I became a classical musician, but I wasn't always that way. And I think, truly, truly, I believe that resilience was what made me more capable of being successful and more capable of being the healer that I am today. Have you heard of that marshmallow spaghetti experiment?
Passioniastas: No. Tell us more.
Maria: I cannot remember the name of the sociologist who created this experiment. But it's been going on now for about 30 years, I think. And basically what they do, and they've gone all over the world and they've done this for groups of people. They go to boardrooms, they go to classrooms, they go to colleges, all sorts of places. It's considered a team building exercise. And what they do is they break people out into small groups of like five or six, and they give them: a very large marshmallow, like one of the extra jumbo sized ones, like, I don't know, 15 pieces or something of raw spaghetti, and then, like, three feet of clear tape. Everybody gets the same thing and then they say, “Okay, you have 20 minutes to build the tallest, freestanding structure that you can. But the only caveat is the marshmallow must be at the very top. Ready, set, go.” Guess who are the group of people who, time and time again, have been proven to be the worst at this? MBAs. Yep. People with Masters of Business Administration. The people who are the best at it? Kindergartners. Kid you not, kindergartners. They’ve, like, by far and away have made so much higher free-standing structures. And the reason why is because adults, especially those of us who've been taught there's a specific way to do things, right? Like an MBA. This is how you build a business. Step one, step two, step three, right? That what we'll do is we break into groups, and the first thing we do is, we jockey for power. Who's gonna be the leader of the group? Who’s going to make the decisions of everyone's ideas? Then everyone has to take time to present their ideas to the leader of the group. And then we all discuss, like, “Okay, well, this is what might happen, and this is what might not happen. Oh, this probably won't work, and here's why.” Right? And then by the time we finally come up with an idea that might be executable, we've got three minutes left to build our structure. And of course, if it fails, we have no time to fix it. Whereas kindergartners don't understand the concept of failure equating to shame. That was something that our societal ego mind gave them later, right? So they go, “Alright, well, let's just see.” They don't pick a leader. They don't care who leads. They're just like, “Okay, well, let's try this.” And then they put it together, and they go, “Okay, well that didn't work. Alright. Try this now. Okay. Ooh, what if we do this? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And then finally, by the end, they had this enormous freestanding structure, and they did it in five minutes. Right? So, this teaches us that failure is the way to succeed. If we are willing to be brave enough to fail, we will eventually get to success. That is what resilience teaches us, and that’s why I think I've been able to get where I am.
Passionistas: What’s been your biggest professional challenge and how did you overcome it?
Maria: I think my biggest professional challenge has been that I don't know the first thing about owning a business. I was a music major. And you would think that because performance musicians, like, people with performance degrees become their own businesses, they become individual entities, right? You would think that they would've taught us something in college about business, but they taught us nothing. Not one thing about running our own businesses, not tax, literally nothing. So, that's been my biggest challenge in becoming a business owner, was learning how to actually business. I'm very, very blessed that I found a business coach early on who is amazing, who knows just how to speak to me. She's become a mentee of mine as well. And so, we've had this really beautiful symbiotic relationship, and she's really helped me build my business from the ground up. But that was my biggest challenge by far.
Passionistas: Yeah. That’s, I think, a common thing for most people who all of a sudden become entrepreneurs. What's been the most rewarding part of becoming a Reiki master?
Maria: Definitely the ripple effect. That, and the ripple effect is also my, it's my business mission. You know, it's the whole part of my—I call it my life practice, is what I call my business, ‘cause it's so much more than that. And everything in my life has been leading up to this, you know. But I think it's the ripple effect. I've watched the people that I work with heal themselves. And then I watch them heal their families. I watch them heal their relationship with their children. I watch them lead by example to their friends and family, and that to me is…ugh, I get teary just thinking about it, because it's so exciting to me. My whole goal in life is to heal as many people as humanly possible before breath leaves my lungs. And in watching people execute that ripple effect of healing in their own lives and in their own families, it's working. It's really working.
Passionistas: What’s your dream for women?
Maria: My dream for women? Oh, I have so many. My dream for women is that we be able to really, consciously, compassionately, and lovingly see our way through and past and away from the patriarchy. Away from our dominator colonizing culture. And that is going to require us to teach—as mothers and sisters and lovers and friends—to teach every man in our lives to do the same. That is, that is my deep dream for women and for all humanity, is an end to the patriarchy.
Passionistas: Do you have a mantra that you live by?
Maria: The heart cannot be broken. Only the walls that I have built around my heart can be broken.
Passionistas: What's your definition of success?
Maria: It's changed a lot over the years, you know? I think colonization taught me one way of viewing success, and decolonizing my mind has taught me quite another. And I think, honestly, to me, success is what we talked about earlier, and that squeaky clean energetics. If I can look in the mirror at the end of every day and be really satisfied with who I'm looking at, that's success.
Passionistas: What advice would you give to a young woman that wants to follow her passions?
Maria: I would tell her that the most important key to following her passions is believing that she's worthy of following them, believing that she's worthy of achieving them. That's what I would tell her. It's not even about just go and do it, because you can go and try and dive into the deep end, but if there's something inside of you that believes that you're not capable or worthy of achieving it, you never will. Because you will hold yourself back. We do it all the time, subconsciously—unintentionally—but subconsciously, we self-sabotage all the time from success because we don't believe we're worthy of it. So, that's what I would tell her. I would say believe. Believe in yourself.
Passionistas: Thanks for listening to our interview with Maria Dominique Lopez. We wanted to give you a special treat this week. Each year we host the power of Passionistas Women's Equality Summit, and we ask women, many of them from marginalized communities to share stories on topics that are most important to them.
One of our speakers was Elena Christopoulos, the founder of a sustainability management consulting firm. Elena's contributions have helped create over 500,000 green jobs worldwide with 60% of the positions going to women and people from the BIPOC community. As a climate scientist and political advisor, Elena has actively worked throughout her career to bring women and BIPOC people to the table in both fields, and has successfully managed over 40 political and environmental campaigns worldwide.
Here's Elena's story on the power of resilience.
Elena: Hi, my name is Elena Christopoulos. I'm a climate scientist, political consultant based in Santa Monica, California and Toronto, Ontario, Canada. And this is my story of equality. How one wind turbine created 500,000 green jobs worldwide with 60% going to women and BIPOC.
I grew up in Europe and traveled quite a bit when I was young. It really allowed me to think outside the box. As a child, I had a huge appreciation for the food we ate, the water we drank, the air we breathed. I knew where everything came from. It was just the way I grew up. And it caused me to have a huge passion for Mother Nature, for all its glory, and I had that early on in life.
Fast forward to starting university. I went to Queens University in Canada and, using other influences in my life, plus my upbringing, I had this vision to implement a wind turbine in downtown Toronto. Now, many people thought my vision was unusual, shall we say. I didn't have a track record of this. It was an idea. Nonetheless, I went to try to recruit folks who thought this idea and helped me with this. Interesting enough, men stepped up and women did not. I really had to recruit the women and I would get, the usual response would be, “Elena, I'm not qualified enough. Elena, I don't have the confidence, Elena, I don't think I can do it.” And I didn't hear that response from one man. I didn't hear it at all from one man. And this is an undergrad in university. So I took pause. And none of the men told me that they felt unqualified for the job, not one.
So, you know, I started to think, “Where are the women in STEM?” I mean, I got into science because I didn't see any women in my classrooms. I didn't see any women in public school in elementary school. So, where are the women in STEM? And here I am implementing an idea, and again, where are the women? So the job got completed. I recruited enough women, and happy to say that it was 60% women and BIPOC and LGBTQIA+, and that was no easy feat. I really had to recruit women. And because of that I got a beautiful project. We worked wonderfully together, and it was the beginning of my career, which I didn’t know. The turbine took 256 homes off the grid, and it's really because of the women, I have to say.
So the project finished, it wrapped, and I was approached by a person running for mayor of a very large city, and the mayor said to me, you know, “Are you interested in running my campaign?” Now, my first response was, “I don't have a political science degree. I've never worked in politics.” And he stopped me cold my tracks and said, “Elena, are you trying to tell me you're not qualified enough? ‘Cause I'm actually coming to you for the request.” So, it looked like the same exact thing that happened when I was trying to recruit women in STEM for a wind turbine project now was at my door. So I took this opportunity to my three mentors who I've had early, quite early on in my life. And they said to me, “So, Elena, what do you think? Do you actually like the platform? Do you agree with what's going on?” And I just, before I started to say the, “I don't think I can do this, I don't think, I’m not qualified,” my mentor stopped me cold in my tracks again and said, “Elena, he's chosen you. It's really up to you if you wanna go forward in this. He already thinks you're qualified.” and you know, most women feel that they have to be, have 100% of the qualifications for any job they go after. Where men, it's about 60%. And that's still true today, actually. So, what happened? I realized, looking around, where are the women in science? Where are the women in politics? I created my own consulting firm. And I also, hearing that response to me, hearing doubt to my younger self—well, I'm gonna be kind to myself, but it's difficult to hear me say those things.
So, I created a consulting firm because of the STEM gender gap. You know, as a climate scientist and political consultant, I realized early on that there was this gender gap, and I wanted to do something concrete. I wanted to create a pathway for women into science and politics, if they chose it. So to date, that one wind turbine in downtown Toronto, which took 256 homes off the grid, was the first urban sighted wind turbine, the first micro feed-in-tariff program. It's created 500,000 jobs. And we are just getting started, I'm really happy to say. It's my lifetime goal to increase the percentage of environmental scientists from 28% to 50%. I'm getting closer with my consulting firm and with mentoring women.
So, was creating a firm daunting? Of course it was, but I wouldn't change a thing. It's important to use your voice, and I decided to use it by helping women, BIPOC, LGBTQIA, in representation. Representation matters. It's really important. Because it's important for younger generations to see themselves in boardrooms, in science labs, on campaigns, on the campaign trail. Mentoring is also important, and I highly recommend that you find a mentor as soon as you can. I don't care if you're just beginning your career or at sunset of your career. Mentors give you perspective that you can't otherwise find other, in any other way. Now, I urge you all to do something and try something out of your comfort zone, taking risk, because you know what? The rewards are so wonderful. And of course, you’re most likely to fail a few times. I did. But that's where the learning is, you see? Failing forward and moving forward, because I know you can do it. I know it won't be easy, but do believe in yourself, and hey, give it a try. I recently heard this mantra from, I will say a Peloton instructor. Her name's Christine. I am, I can, I will, I do. I am, I can, I will, I do. I am, I can, I will, I do. Powerful words, powerful mantra, and really apply to anything in your life. And, by the way, if you're ever interested in implementing a wind turbine, getting into STEM or STEAM, or entering politics, or interested in running a campaign, well, my zoom is always open to you. I'll always be cheering you on, always. And remember: I am, I can, I will, I do. Thank you.
Passionistas: We wanted to share one more thing with you this week. After our interview with Maria Dominique Lopez ended, she very generously offered to record a guided meditation for all of the Passionistas in our community. What follows here is that very beautiful gift from Maria. So please, find a quiet space free from distractions. Get comfortable and let Maria help you transform your day.
Maria: Welcome. Welcome to this space. Take a moment now to ground yourself and just be, with your breath. You can have your eyes open or closed. You can be sitting, standing, laying, even walking, whatever is most comfortable for you.
Take a deep breath in now. Let the oxygen fill every corner of your lungs. And then slowly exhale, making sure that your exhale is longer than your inhale. Nice and slow. Good. You may find that there are some places—in your lungs, maybe a space in between one of your ribs, maybe a spot in the back of your spine—where the oxygen just simply doesn't wanna go. It's a little tense or a little tight. That's okay. This is just your beautiful body holding space for whatever worries or tension, whatever fears or heaviness is sitting with you. Your body is doing you the beautiful favor of holding that space. But that's no longer needed now. So, as you take this next deep breath in, invite whatever tension is in your body to go. Thank it for its effort and release. Good.
On this next breath in, I want you to notice that instead of your lungs filling with oxygen, it actually feels like it's your heart that's expanding with every breath in. Your heart muscle gets wider and wider as you breathe in, and as you breathe out, it releases a little bit of tension. Whatever tightness is being held there. Breathing in love, expanding in that feeling. Breathing out toxicity, anxiety and fear. Good. Breathing in love, feeling that heart grow bigger and bigger. Breathing out toxicity, anxiety, and fear. So relaxing.
As you continue this breathing into your heart, you're going to notice that your heart begins to feel warm, nice and warm. A spark has been lit inside your heart, and it heats you from the inside. Moving outward in radiating waves of heat that fill your entire body with every breath. The spark grows bigger into flame, the heat grows warmer, and the waves of heat radiate outward even farther than your body. Outward, further and further into the room. All of this love heating up the entire room around you. As it does, you begin to feel these amazing feelings of love, joy, ecstasy, happiness, tranquility, adventure, excitement, peace, devotion. Beautiful, expanding feelings in your heart that just build and build with every breath, the heat growing, the love growing until it feels like it's going to peak, so much so that it will just burst right out of you.
With one final breath, you exhale out all of that love out into the world. Beyond the room, beyond your home, beyond your town, beyond your state, out into the entire world. Your heart beating for you, and beating for all. Doesn't that feel amazing, to love everything?
Allowing yourself a gentle smile, you can welcome yourself back to the space.
Passionistas: Thanks for listening to this week's installment of The Passionistas Project. To learn more about Maria Dominique Lopez's work as a Reiki master, visit AscendingArts.exchange. Follow Elena Christopoulos on Instagram @BeingElenaLA.
And be sure to visit ThePassionistasProject.com to sign up for our mailing list, find all the ways you can follow us on social media, and join our worldwide community of women working together to level the playing field for us all. We'll be back next week with another Passionista who is defining success on her own terms and breaking down the barriers for herself and women everywhere. Until then, stay well and stay passionate.
Tuesday Mar 21, 2023
Tuesday Mar 21, 2023
Jessie Young is an Aussie in New York who is leading new business lines at Uber, currently focusing on grocery and retail delivery. While Jessie solves difficult puzzles in a pioneering environment, she is also a yoga teacher and amateur surfer. And on the side, she runs her own e-commerce business, “halo” — a held space for women that matches females for mentoring and sells halo headbands.
Learn more about Jessie.
Learn more about The Passionistas Project.
IN THIS EPISODE
Jessie Young on what she’s most passionate about
Jessie Young on her childhood in Australia and moving to New York
Jessie Young on her work at Uber
Jessie Young on her eCommerce business Hao
Jessie Young on the Halo mentor program
Jessie Young on why it’s important to empower people through her work
Jessie Young on the biggest risk she’s taken personally and professionally
Jessie Young on the most rewarding part of her career so far
Jessie Young on her dream for herself and her dream for women
Jessie Young on the mantra that she lives by
Jessie Young on her secret to a rewarding life
Jessie Young on her definition of success
Jessie Young on her proudest achievements
Jessie Young on her advice for women who want to follow their passions
Tuesday Feb 21, 2023
Tuesday Feb 21, 2023
Lora DeVore is the author of Darkness Was My Candle. This profound and compelling memoir traces her life as a survivor of child abuse, sex trafficking, illegal pharmacological drug research, and institutional abuse.
Now she devotes herself to spreading the word on these atrocities with this personal documentation of her story. With an advanced degree in clinical psychology and recognized as a national expert and catalyst for change, she has witnessed how stories shift consciousness around the world. Her wisdom comes from the field of psychology, transpersonal development, and spiritual psychology.
Lora’s story is ultimately one of hope and healing, that we believe you will find as powerful and inspiring as we do. However, we do want to let you know that portions of the content of today’s show may be emotionally challenging for some of our listeners. Please be aware that this episode contains discussions about sexual assault, abuse, self-harm and suicide at times during the conversation. We just want to empower you, our audience, with the knowledge you need to decide how and if you would like to listen to this podcast content.
Learn more about Lora.
Learn more about The Passionistas Project.
In This Episode:
[01:37] Lora DeVore on what she is most passionate about
[02:30] Lora DeVore on her early childhood
[15:34] Lora DeVore on her college experience and Elgin State Hospital
[24:25] Lora DeVore on her time after Elgin State Hospital
[25:15] Lora DeVore on how she became a therapist
[27:38] Lora DeVore on her book’s inspiration and process
[31:47] Lora DeVore on her book’s message to survivors
[35:00] Lora DeVore on her advice to her younger self
[35:27] Lora DeVore on her dream for women
[36:22] Lora DeVore on her secret to a rewarding life
[39:57] Lora DeVore on her mantra
[42:58] Lora DeVore on how it feels to be an angel for others
[43:25] Lora DeVore on the story behind her book title
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Passionistas: Hi, we’re sisters, Amy and Nancy Harrington, the founders of The Passionista Project Podcast, where we give women a platform to tell their own unfiltered stories.
On every episode, we discuss the unique ways in which each woman is following her passions, talk about how she defines success and explore her path to breaking down the barriers that women too often face.
Today, we'll be talking with Lora DeVore, the author of “Darkness Was My Candle.” This profound and compelling memoir traces her life as a survivor of child abuse, sex trafficking, illegal pharmacological drug research, and institutional abuse.
Now she devotes herself to spreading the word on these atrocities with this personal documentation of her story. With an advanced degree in clinical psychology and recognized as a national expert and catalyst for change, she has witnessed how stories shift consciousness around the world.
Her wisdom comes from the field of psychology, transpersonal development, and spiritual psychology.
Lora’s story is ultimately one of hope and healing, that we believe you will find as powerful and inspiring as we do. However, we do want to let you know that portions of the content of today’s show may be emotionally challenging for some of our listeners. Please be aware that this episode contains discussions about sexual assault, abuse, self-harm and suicide at times during the conversation. We just want to empower you, our audience, with the knowledge you need to decide how and if you would like to listen to this podcast content.
So please welcome, Lora DeVore.
Lora, what's the one thing you're most passionate about?
Lora: I am passionate about love. I think that's the only thing that's going to save the planet and save us as human beings. And I, I've been passionate about love and trying to learn everything I could about it since I was 9 years old when a neighbor named Dale was the first person who ever said they loved me. And it literally came alive in my body and I had this profound aha and thought that's why I was born, to learn how to experience and take in and feel this thing called love and more importantly, learn how to give it, and it really, really changed the course of my life. I think I was on a trajectory where I would've ended up dead because my life was so miserable prior to that, that interaction.
Passionistas: Can you talk a little bit about your life leading up to that and how that moment happened?
Lora: Sure. I was born from an unwed mother. There's a good possibility that my uncle was my father and we actually lived with him. And I called him daddy when I was 3. And he shot, he had come back from World War II very wounded, and he shot himself one day in front of my mother and I, and my mother went berserk and blamed me for some reason, or at least that's my, what I took in my memory of it and then threw me upstairs—I was still in a crib at the time, but the side rail was down—and left the house. This was in northern Wisconsin and I had a profound experience during the days that I was alone. I got out of the bed at one point because I was so hungry and I went looking for food and luckily I found a loaf of bread on the table. And my uncle's body had been removed. My aunt had come over to give them a piece of my piece of her mind because we hadn't shown up for dinner, and there was a storm that had started up and she saw the dead body, called the sheriff, went halfway up the stairs, but didn't go all the way up, just went halfway up, calling for my mother and assumed that Clinton and my mother had had a fight, my mother had left with me. And it wasn't till 3 days later that my mother staggered in drunk to the memorial service and they then rushed back to the house because my mother had no idea where she'd left me. And what happened is I tried to open the door and a drift of snow came in. I remember sitting on the floor just sobbing and sucking my thumb. And the wind is blowing in because now it's blizzard weather we're, it's, we are literally having a blizzard. So this huge drift of snow blew in. And I could neither close the door nor could I fully open it. And had I been able to fully open it, I'm sure I would've died. I would've frozen to death, but I couldn't get out. And as I'm sitting there, an ethereal present appeared to me that I've never forgotten. And she was very specific. She told me to go back upstairs on my bottom, sitting backwards so I wouldn't fall and get back into my bed and cover up. And that became the foundation of my life and it opened something in me that has stayed open my entire life.
But life was very hard. My mother disappeared out of my life for a couple years after that, and I lived with an aunt and my grandmother. And then my mother eventually came back and said she was moving me to St. Louis, had a horrible fight with my aunt and said she was taking me to my real daddy.
And so she married a man named Bud, and I doubt if he was my real father. But they were seldom together. There was a lot of domestic violence. There was a lot of drug use. She would prostitute and then he'd get mad at her and beat her up. And so there was a lot of violence. And when I was 9, she sold me for the first time to a man. At that point, Bud was out of our lives and that's what she was doing is primarily prostitution and primarily at Army and Navy bases nearby.
And, you know, before I go on, I just want to say my mother had a horrible traumatic history that I won't go into, but I do cover in the book. So I have tremendous compassion for my mother. And when she died, I felt grief for a woman who'd never had a life, who'd never really lived a life. But by age 9, I'd had my first suicide attempt shortly after she sold me to this man. And I couldn't figure out why anybody would possibly want to be here. I didn't know any adults that liked children or that were really nice to children. My guess is my aunt was nice to me, but I, you know, had pretty much forgotten that, it was so eclipsed by the day in day out trauma. And my mother truly, at that point in my life, hated me and was resentful, and frequently told me to get out of her sight. She couldn't stand looking at me, and so I pretty much raised myself and ran wild.
One of the things that was lifesaving is one day I heard church music coming out of the local Catholic church, and I wandered into the church, and the choir was rehearsing up in the balcony, and I just had this need to get as close to the music as I could. So I went and sat in the stairwell, and I felt like God was raining down on my head. And after that, I went to all three churches in town. So I knew when the Methodist had choir rehearsal, and I knew when the Catholics did, and when the Lutherans did, and there was something related to transcendence and being able to get out of that psychological space I lived in. It took me to another place that I think helped keep me going.
And then at age 9 I, as I said, I had my first suicide attempt. And an upstairs neighbor who'd only lived there briefly, and after an accident one day when I'd fallen through the window when some kids were teasing me, her husband had gone to the hardware store and put in a new window while she cleaned everything up. And they knew that I'd been taken to the emergency room, which was only a block away because they saw the trail of blood up there. And when I got home, her husband had finished putting in a new window and said I should go upstairs, that his wife Dale was waiting for me and had made lunch and made chocolate chip cookies. And she was the first nice adult I ever knew. And she was only there for about another month, maybe at the most, but she'd come looking for me if I was alone and I was, by then, I was frequently left alone and frequently left alone without food. And she was kind to me repeatedly. I still have the key that she gave me, that she called the ‘just in case’ key, in case I got scared and wanted to come up and sleep on their couch. And I never did because I was afraid my mother would beat me if I did. But the day she was moving away, I fell apart and begged her not to leave. And she pulled me into her arms and kept rubbing my back and saying I was a good girl and that she loved me. And she made me sit up and look her in the eyes, and traumatized kids have trouble looking people directly in the eyes. But she made me look and she said she had something really important to say. And she said, “I love you, and I would take you with me if you were mine, but you're not.” And she told me that I needed to learn to take better care of myself because my mother was too sick and couldn't care for me, which gave me a huge message. And then she made me promise that I'd reach out to others. And love came alive and a mission. So I started carrying groceries home for people without money and started raking leaves and shoveling snow, and just trying to be kind at that age, which created a whole other parallel universe than the universe I was living in. So that's how that happened.
I was eventually taken away from my mother at age 13 after another very violent suicide attempt. We had been court ordered by then to see a psychiatrist who was moonlighting. He worked at a, he was from a local naval base and he essentially became my mom's pimp and was a child molester and pornographer. And that totally broke my spirit in unspeakable ways. And that's what led to the huge suicide attempt.
So after that suicide attempt, I probably would have attempted again, if not for a very kind nun at the, I was in a Catholic hospital named Sister Sebastian. And the story of my life, it, it's, yes, it's of darkness and horror, but it's as much about light. It’s about the right people coming into my life at exactly the right time. Like Sister Sebastian, who had been in the military, she had been a WAAC in women's armed forces in World War II, and I was a candy striper at that hospital, so she'd gotten to know me pretty well. But she actually told me that she had been raped in the military and that I could survive this and that I would find a new way of living. Which I thought was tremendously courageous of her and so authentic to try to give me hope. And she told me there'd been a time when she was without hope.
And then it was at that point that I was taken away from my mother. And then I lived in a number of placements. This was pre Child Protection years. And I was a really good kid. I had poor self-concept, but I was like a chameleon. I would do anything to get people to like me. And so that they'd keep me. And so there was a failure, not because I was doing anything wrong, but from one situation after another. So there were many placements. And then my senior year in high school, I ended up having a lot of problems again, and I ended up having a suicide attempt after prom after I was raped at prom. A prom I didn't want to go to, but the foster parents made me go with a friend of their son. Now I, you know, and I knew pretty quickly why no one had wanted to go with him and was too afraid to tell them, and so my old default was, I can just kill myself. So I ended up in the county hospital. And the court worker decided she was going to send me back to my mother and nothing had changed. So she sold me to some guy the first night I was there, and I learned that I was capable of murder. And it's amazing that I did not kill her and him that night. He was passed out drunk, but there was a billy club, which is a metal object that's wrapped with leather around it. And I don't know why. I don't know if he was a bouncer in a bar or who he was. I'd seen them before, and they were pretty popular back then. Policeman used him as well. I don't think he was a policeman. And after he'd raped me, I got out of the bed and I picked it up, and my mother had lived in a kitchen at apartment and was sitting at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette and drinking beer and had watched it, and I was going to bash him in the head. And I knew if I started, I'd kill my mother. So I threw it down and grabbed my clothes and got dressed in the hallway and walked around town all night, and then had a very serious suicide attempt and woke up, I don’t know, a week or more later in the county hospital again. And the court worker again came in and she said, “You're not going to manipulate me, young lady. You're going back to your mother's whether you like it or not.” And the medical director of the county hospital came into my room one day, and I had pulled out all the IV tubing and tried to strangle myself after the court worker had left. And he said, “I want to get you outta this bed, but you have to promise you won't run away. And I've come up with a little plan. My nurses tell me you're a bright girl and are supposed to graduate, you know, couple scholarships to college, but I'm afraid that's not going to happen if we don't get you out of here.” So I agreed and he told me his nurse Connie was going to be joining me or joining us, and so he got me out of the bed and we walked up and down the halls a little bit, and then he told me his plan. And it was, if I could pull myself together and bring in my graduation certificate, he would hire me as a nursing assistant. That summer there were cottages out in back of the county hospital. It had once been a TB sanitarium. He said I could live rent free that summer out there. And that's what kept me going.
So the day I got out of the hospital and the court worker took me back to my mother's, she just dumped me outside in front of her apartment building. So I grabbed the bag of stuff I had and put it in a locker at the bus station and then was homeless for a month. And what kept me going is that promise. And the day that I graduated and took my graduation certificate to the hospital—I still tear up when I recall this—I walked into the nurse's station and there were banners and balloons and a graduation cake, a small present from the nursing staff as well as Dr. Callaghan. So it was another one of those angels who'd come into my life at exactly the right moment.
Passionistas: So, you did start college, right?
Lora: Because I'd been homeless and wasn't living anywhere. I never got any mail. And because, you know, I was moving between foster care, foster homes before that, I didn't know I was supposed to sign up for a dorm, and I got to college and there were no dorms. But the Dean of girls was standing nearby when they told me that, that there were no dorms. And I just stepped outta the line and said, I guess I'll try to come back next year. And she came and got me and took me to the guidance counselor, and they were able to find me a temporary place to live with a widow in the neighborhood. And I ended up having to move three times that year. You know, the widow decided she didn't really want a student, and then I lived with a kid who lived in an apartment, but she was on so much LSD and drugs and it was so triggering, and then eventually I moved to another place, but I was working on the weekends at a small hospital as a nursing assistant. They taught me to be a nursing assistant at the county hospital, which was wonderful. And I started getting stalked by the respiratory therapist, a man in his 50s. And he started pulling me into the room closet many times and all kinds of stuff, and then showing up in the halls at school. And one night he showed up at the bottom of my L stop. This was Chicago. And had it not been for a businessman who was coming down the steps, I don't know what would've happened. He tried to pull me into his car, and so I quit my job. And because of exams and stuff, I hadn't even been keeping track of things on the bulletin board and announcements. And then I realized that, and I really went into a funk and felt unsafe. And I had the belief that I was a grownup, so I shouldn't need any help from anyone. And I found that that's true with most kids who've been in the foster care system. With most kids, unless they've come up and have parents who can really guide them. And I realized that they were going to be closing the dorm, and I had no money and nowhere to go.
And I tried looking, you know, in the papers for jobs. I couldn’t find anything. And I was terrified. So again, my old default was, I can just kill myself. So I did something crazy, like just took a, I don't know, a bottle of aspirin or something—I wouldn't have had anything else. And then after immediately I thought, well, that's stupid. I don't want to die. And so I made myself throw up, and then I went to look for the dorm mother. I told her what I'd done, and told her I made myself throw up, and I said, “I really need a grownup’s help.” And she said she was really glad that I came to her and that she could think of a number of places that were looking for students like me for jobs over the summer. But she was going to put me in a taxi and send me across town to get checked out medically. And then I'd come back and we'd sort this out.
I was fine medically, but the next thing you know, they're sending me to another hospital. They said just to, you know, have a few days of rest. And I didn't know it at the time, but that hospital wouldn't let me out because they were doing drug research and they had sent out a flyer to all the local hospitals looking for certain research subjects. And every floor did different kinds of research. And I was put on the floor with young adults who had no family support, which meant I had no one who had my back or could look out for me. And I wouldn't take the drugs. I kept spitting 'em out. I had no idea how they figured that out. Then they started giving me shots and liquid Thorazine and eventually I ran away. They got me back, and then they had me committed to the worst state hospital in the system. This was the summer after my freshman year in college. And there was the day that I came back from the court commitment, I…I can't even tell you what that was like, because in those days they committed you for life. And I could hardly think. My mind was like in shock, and I went back to my room, and I just sat. And I couldn't eat. I couldn't move. I can't remember thinking about much of anything. I felt like I was in a fog. And there was a nurse who came in and out all evening to check on me. And around 10:00 or so, she came in and she said, “I'm concerned about you, and my shift ends at 11:00, and I'm going to come and sit till dawn if that's what it takes to get you to have some feelings, because you're not going to survive where they're sending you, unless you do.” And so she did. She was there till dawn. Her name was Sydney Krampitz. And she was getting her master's in nursing at that point and only worked there three days a week on evenings, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. And she told me before I was put on the bus that took me to Elgin, that I hadn't done anything wrong. That she felt what they were doing was illegal, and she was going to do everything in her power to get me out. But there was no way that I could trust that that could happen. How could this nurse override a judge's order?
So I was admitted to the worst state hospital in the Illinois system. And I've been told by people who worked there then and a man named Bill Whitaker—who wrote a book called “Madden America” and did a lot of research about state hospitals and the drug Thorazine—that it's a miracle that I'm alive. And I believe that too. And because at that point in history, or not in history, in that point in life in the Illinois area, there weren't as many freeways as there are now. Now you could get out to Elgin in probably an hour and a half, and Sydney lived back then, about 3 hours from there. So every, and she only had Sundays off, and she had three small children and was the Lutheran minister's wife. And every morning she, on Sunday, she'd think, “I really have to go see her.” And then she kept saying to herself, “She was a bright college student. I can't believe she'd still be in there.” And so then she wouldn't go. And so it was about nine months before she came, and it was almost too late. And she said she felt haunted by me. And so she finally decided to call, just assuming that I would've been released and was shocked that I wasn't. And then she came for the first time and then continued to come and really fight them and threaten them with a lawsuit, which she said she never could have done because she didn't have the money to have a lawsuit. But she threatened them enough and became enough of a pest that eventually she helped get me out after I'd been there for 15 months.
And then many years later, Sydney and I reconnected, and we went back there and we did archival research at the state, in the state capital, and found out that they were actually doing, during the time I was there, the legislature had created a committee to find out why they were having so untimely, many untimely, unexpected deaths at Elgin State Hospital. And one of the reasons was they were always short on staff. The wards were all run by AIDS and orderlies who had never been trained in medication management. And they had one physician, many of which were not licensed at all, or could practice medicine. But they were called physicians, and one of them per anywhere from 500 to 1,000 patients at any given time, and the same with nurses. And so the orderlies were, and the ward I was on was primarily orderlies. And not only were they afraid of the patients, they would over drug us all. And Thorazine is one of the primary medications, and what the report revealed is that because of the overuse of Thorazine, which causes horrendous constipation, and many people had bowel obstructions, had sepsis and died from sepsis. It was just, it’s a horrendous document about this thick, and I still to this day haven't been able to read it all the way through.
Passionistas: So once you got out, where did you go from there?
Lora: I had to be released to a legal relative. And a cousin of mine who was only seven years older than me, who was brand new, married, and had a baby, she was willing to take me for a few months, and then I was able to go back to college. But eventually, I left the Chicago area.
Passionistas: We’re Amy and Nancy Harrington and you’re listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Lora DeVore.
To learn more about her work and get a copy of her book “Darkness Was My Candle,” visit LoraDeVore.com.
Now here’s more of our interview with Lora.
Passionistas: I don't know how you survived all this trauma. You are an amazing human being. Did all of this trauma, is that what inspired you to make the decision to become a therapist?
Lora: No. Not directly. It might have on someone conscious level, but it didn't directly. I was a teacher first, and I was working with deaf blind children in a program in South Dakota with visually handicapped and deaf blind children. And we were off during the summer, and I had a boss, an incredible boss, who gave out weekly awards called the the Annie Sullivan Award. So if we'd have a breakthrough, major breakthrough with a child. And I got a lot of those Annie Sullivan Awards, and I was just really good with the most disturbed kids. And she bet me that, she said, “You've gotta go back to school and get a master's degree.” And I said, “I'm not smart enough.” I still carried the, you know, this old internal message.
I didn't learn to read till the end of third grade. I wouldn't have even read at all had it not been for a substitute teacher who was the first to ask me why I thought I was having trouble. And one thing was they were always put in the back room and I couldn't see, I needed glasses and then I just fell into what's called learned helpless. You know, you try so many times and have trouble with it that I just couldn't get it, I gave up. And so during a very brief time, I think she was there a week, she got me to read, and I became an avid reader. So Marge really pushed me. And so I took a couple of graduate school classes that summer and I found 'em so valuable and that I loved learning and had more confidence in myself than I'd had even when I went to undergraduate school. And so I stayed in. And I think I thought what had happened to me was an anomaly, and so I was in, and I was interested in helping people and interested in understanding people, and particularly interested in understanding families and children. So I think that's what at least consciously motivated me. But it wasn't till many, many, many, many years later that I really began—when I was writing the book—that I really began to learn about the dark history of psychiatry. And the book that I wrote is not the book I set out writing.
Passionistas: Tell us about that. So, so what finally inspired you to write a book and what was that transformation throughout the process?
Lora: You know, I was good at writing. Actually, two of the scholarships I won were because of writing an essay when I was in high school. And I was writing a very different book. I was writing a spiritual autobiography. And I had found a mentor, a woman named Dina Metzger, who's written probably 30 books herself, and she had agreed to be my mentor, and she was having me do some extraordinary practices to get ready for that, which I learned a lot about myself. She had me go back through all my old journals in my memory bank and look at, she was trying to find where the story really was and what contributed to the story. And she believes that spirit talks to each of us in different ways, and then that there are patterns. And so she was having me look through my memory bank and my journals, as I said, and notice any times in which I had gone into joy or bliss because of something that had occurred, or any time there was synchronicity or any important dreams that I had. And because I'd kept a journal since junior high, that wasn't so hard to do. And then she began to help me to see the pattern in my life.
And then one summer, we'd been working probably for a year, year and a half, and she always takes a sabbatical in the summer to write her own book. She writes a book every year. And she said, “What are you doing for the summer?” We were having our last session online. And I said, “I don't know. I have all this paid time off. I'm thinking about a road trip.” She said, “Where to?” And I said, “I don't know.” And she said, “What do you think about a road trip out to see me?” I said, “That sounds like fun.” She lives in California, in Topanga. And I said, “What do you have in mind?” And she said, “I want to interview elders on the Yakima Reservation in Washington state, and if we can get in, usually it takes a couple years to get a reservation. I want a go to Hanford nuclear site, and I'm looking for a driver and a scribe.” And so I agreed. So I drove out to the East coast. I love long distance drives, and I was working at her house for about three days before we were to leave on the trip. She had asked me to do some research for her related to some research that was done on native Americans at the Yakima Reservation and also any research that came up related to Hanford nuclear site or research related to that. And as I was doing the research one day, all of a sudden on the screen, Elgin State Hospital came up. I was in shock. I had not thought about it or talked about it. I mean, I talked about it in therapy years before, but not since then. And later that day, Dina asked me how the research was going, and I said, “It's okay.” And she said, “What's going on with you?” She said, “Is it too hard?” I said, “Well, it's pretty dark research, but I saw something in my history come up in it.” She said, “What part?” And I said, “When I was committed to a state hospital the summer after my freshman year in college.” And she looked at me with her eagle eyes and she said, “And why did I never hear you were in a state hospital?” And that became a defining moment. And I realized all those years later—this was like seven years ago—I still held shame about that. And by the end of our trip together, it became clear, there was this sense of feeling compelled to write about that history and explore and do research and understand it as well as I could. And it almost felt like a spiritual mandate. So the book then became a very different book than it had started off, or I thought it was going to be, although a lot of that early material is in the last part of the book, the transformation part of it. That’s how it changed.
Passionistas: What do you hope that survivors who read your book take away from it? What's the biggest message?
Lora: The biggest message is hope. And that no matter what kind of trauma you've experienced, you can fully recover. So that's one of the biggest messages. And, you know, the other big message is around love and kind. You know, I think we're in a period of history in which everything which has been hidden is coming up to be looked at. And I think unless we look at and examine history, we make the same mistakes going into the future. So I see that as a very good thing. And I think this time that we're in, you know, still with COVID, off and on, et cetera, has caused many people to go into self-reflection and to change patterns, et cetera. And I would invite people to really pay attention to self-love and how important kindness is, to be kind to themselves as well as to others. And so often with trauma, trauma kind of takes over the brain and that's all we can see. And there's a lot of beliefs that get formed around trauma. Like my belief was, “I must have done something wrong,” and “Why do these things keep happening to me? Must be something bad about me.” And I think most trauma survivors part of that have things like that. I've worked with rape survivors and trafficked women, and often the belief is, “I shouldn't have been dressed in that or if I hadn't been walking down that street or if I hadn't looked that way.” Because we hate feeling powerless, so we try to make up a story about how it was our fault. So if we can figure out what I did wrong, then maybe I can keep it from happening in the future. But one of the things that a Native American elder who was a spiritual teacher of mine many years ago suggested I do is, she said I needed to go back through my memory banks and find all the joy markers and literally do a graph of that. And I was on a women's retreat on her land for a month when she suggests that I do that, and I started to remember all the angels that came into my life with human skin wearing the face of compassion. And it begins to change the trauma narrative. So I strongly suggest anyone that's been traumatized do that. Because our life isn't just one thing. It’s a rich tapestry of so much more. But it took that exercise for me to begin to focus on that so much more, and it blew me away. And since then, if I work with trauma survivors, I ask them to do the same thing, and always, it's an astounding exercise.
Passionistas: If you could go back to those early days, what advice would you give your younger self?
Lora: I think at this point, because I've really, really been practicing self-love, unconditional self-love, I think I would say to her, she is just fine, just the way she is. And that she's smart and funny and creative. And that what's happening isn't her fault, and that she's going to grow strong and resilient and learn and grow through it.
Passionistas: What’s your dream for women?
Lora: My dream is that they find out, they really step into loving themselves unconditionally and knowing how beautiful and bright they are, and creative. And I think women intuitively are nurturers, even women who don't have children. There's something about feminine energy that's rising up like never before now. And I hope women can all tap into their own brilliance and step into who they're meant to be, to help begin to make the shifts that need to happen happen on the planet. And I think it's going to take—I hate to say the word army, because I don't like war—it’s going to take a collection of many, many women who do that.
Passionistas: What’s your secret to a rewarding life?
Lora: For me, it's gratitude. I practice gratitude every morning. It’s also, you know, I thank the trees when I go outside in the morning and the sun coming up and the grass growing and the sound of the birds, which sort of sets my day. And at the end of the day, I usually go through a gratitude list, as well. So I think gratitude, for one. The other thing that I have discovered, and it was a hard course to get there—I had COVID a year ago and nearly died. Had two near death experiences, was in the hospital for a month and then came home on oxygen and told I'd never, I'd probably never get off of it and couldn't walk. And I think since I was a kid, there's this determination, if somebody tells me I can't do something, I say, “Watch me.” And so here I am walking and talking and not on any oxygen, and my lungs have been healed, and all the rest of it. And then on top of that, I was just getting better and recovered from the COVID, or mostly recovered. I was diagnosed with breast cancer. But each of those experiences, what they did is they reopened a vulnerability that I'd had as a kid that I had never totally worked through and didn't even know that I'd worked through it in therapy, but, but I hadn't cried as much as I needed to. And I have an amazing coach that helped me through that time, continues to work with me. And I made a commitment that, no matter what, to be vulnerable and to be transparent, and I realized that that's my superpower. And my life has shifted because of that. And that very vulnerability—was sort of like ripping off the band aids that were still covering old scars—has dramatically shifted my life. And I would like all women to know that our transparency and vulnerability really can be our superpower. And I've just been blown away, absolutely blown away by people's response to that vulnerability. I also, when the book was first coming out, I had a, oh, I don't know, a week or two of freak out. It was like, “Oh my God, this book is raw. I mean, I tell it all.” And I kept scaring myself, and then I caught myself one day. I was saying to myself, “I'm going to feel so exposed.” And one day I sat down, I looked at the word exposed and I thought, “I need a different word.” And the word that came to me was ‘revealed.’ And then the sentence that came to me is, “I choose to reveal myself as loving presence in every moment, in every situation.” And that shifted everything.
And so now interviews, no matter who they're with or what they are, feel pretty effortless. But I had to stop scaring myself. So I think the other thing I want women and others to know is it's really important to pay attention to how we talk to ourselves. You know, we can really defeat ourselves in so many ways, and language is really important, and our nervous system takes it.
Passionistas: Do you have a mantra that you live by?
Lora: Every year I set a goal and I've had the same one for the last two years. And that's luminous presence. I want to be a luminous presence on the planet, and I want to be an inspiration and guide to others. And there's a quote that's a favorite of mine as well, and that's, “There is someone somewhere who has a wound that is the exact size of your words.” That's by a man named Sean Thomas Doherty. “There is someone somewhere who has a wound that's the exact size of your words.” And when you really let that sink in, I think it automatically brings up kindness.
An amazing experience at Starbucks not long ago, there was this young woman who was falling apart, and you could tell it was her first job on the day on the job, and she was just a mess. She kept making mistakes and they were really busy, and there wasn't anyone right behind me. And I looked at her and I said, “Do you know you have the most beautiful eyes? Has anyone ever told you that?” And she said, “No.” And I said, “Well, you do.” and then she teared up, and I said, “Is this your first day working?” And she said, “Yeah, can you tell?” I said, “Yeah, but everybody has a first day. You're doing fine. Just take a few deep breaths. You're going to be okay. I would be crazy if I was behind that booth. You know, you're multitasking constantly, so just be kind to yourself.” She said, “Can I touch you?” And I said, “Sure.” She reached over and held my hand, gave my hand a squeeze, and now when I go through that drive-through, she always thanks me. And in the same Starbucks, one of the guys there named Joe, he said to me one day, he says, “You know, you are always so kind to the people who work behind this window, and I just want to thank you, because it really sets their day. Some of these young people, they just get so, you know, depressed and feeling like they can't do it, et cetera.” And he said, “And you've also made a difference in my life. I said, “Really?” And he said, “Yeah, I'll tell you sometime.” And then one day I went through, he says, “We've gotta talk.” And I said, “Okay.” And I said, “How do we do that?” And so we set up a time, and it turns out that he was a sexual abuse survivor himself, and he had bought my book. And so he wanted to tell me that and tell me how my book had impacted him. I mean, we just never know. We just never know.
Passionistas: How does it feel for you now to be that angel that were these people that peppered through your life, that helped you get through these moments? What does it mean now for you to be that person for so many other people?
Lora: It’s a very humbling experience. I feel like the most fortunate woman on the planet. It feels like it was my destiny. And I didn't know that at the time. I became aware that writing “Darkness Was My Candle” was an act of love, but I don't know that I knew the full scope of it until the book came out, the interviews started, et cetera.
Passionistas: Where did the title come from?
Lora: I just woke up one morning and I tend to trust my intuition and there it was. But I think primarily through the years of transformation work and spiritual work, I've learned that oftentimes we go into, you know, John of the Cross used to call it the dark night of the soul, or this, you know, other, other spiritual teachers might talk about it as like the void. And what I began to appreciate is that that period of growth is much like spring before it blossoms. At least in the Midwest, I don't know if you have dramatic springs on the West coast like we have out here, but it's like everything is pregnant, and there's this sort of, it's a fertile void. You know, there's never a time in which there's a winter that's too dark, that doesn't hold spring’s promise. You know, you just have to wait till all those little buds begin to push themselves up, whether it's the tulips or other blossoms. And it feels like times of darkness in our life are exactly that. And I've also come to realize in my own life, and I believe many trauma survivors, is that trauma can become a portal into a very different kind of life of if you have the right kind of support and really do the work that's required. It's not just that another, some other shitty thing happened to you. It literally can open you to a much more magnificent life. And I think it's through the dark in which we ask the big questions like, “Why did this happen to me?” You know, “Will I ever feel different?” We ask the existential crisis, the existential questions, which are both psychological questions and spiritual questions. So another part of the book is, I'm on a mission to not just disclose the dark history of psychiatry to psychiatrists and anyone in the mental health field—and I feel excited about the way that's happening—but also we have got to bring together a world of psychotherapy in which we merge and bring together spiritual psychology and transpersonal development as well. I think it's essential. Because especially with trauma survivors, you can't fully recover unless some of those deeper questions that are in your soul, they tend to be soul questions. You know, “Does life have any meaning?” They can't be answered psychologically. They're spiritual questions. And we leave out a huge equation of what it means to be a person if we don't bring the notion of spirituality. And I'm not talking about religion, religion's how people can choose to practice their spirituality or learn in community and celebrate in community. But we all have a spiritual essence, and that's fed in different ways. For some people, it's a walk in the woods. For some people it's in community. For some people it's in deep meditation, and there are hundreds of meditative techniques. It's different for all of us, but we all have that. And that's who we really are. This is who we live. This is what we are and who we live in. But our spiritual essence is magnificent. And I think we're in a time where more people are finding a longing for that as well as a longing to change the way they’re, that we’re all living our lives.
Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Lora DeVore.
To learn more about her work and get a copy of her book “Darkness Was My Candle,” visit LoraDeVore.com.
If you or someone you know needs help, dial 988 or call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which offers free and confidential emotional support around the clock to those experiencing a suicidal crisis.
You can also get support via text by visiting suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat. Outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of resources.
According to the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, RAINN, "Every 68 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted. And every 9 minutes, that victim is a child." If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, help is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Please call the free and confidential National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 or visit rainn.org.
And be sure to visit ThePassionistasProject.com to sign up for our mailing list, find all the ways you can follow us on social media and join our worldwide community of women working together to level the playing field for us all.
We'll be back next week with more Passionistas who are defining success on their own terms and breaking down the barriers for themselves and women everywhere.
Until then. Stay well and stay passionate.
Tuesday Feb 07, 2023
Tuesday Feb 07, 2023
Sabine Josephs is the founder of All of Us Crayons. Her beeswax crayons are inspired by a world where all children embrace their skin color, and others, with kindness, acceptance and unity. All of Us crayons are hand-poured in Sabine’s Brooklyn workshop using sustainable beeswax, sustainable palm wax and natural earth pigments. The All of Us team pride themselves on their commitment to our planet and to humanity.
Learn more about Sabine.
Learn more about The Passionistas Project.
Full Transcript:
Passionistas: Hi, we're sisters, Amy and Nancy Harrington, the founders of The Passionistas Project Podcast, where we give women a platform to tell their own unfiltered stories.
On every episode we discuss the unique ways in which each woman is following her passions, talk about how she defines success and explore her path to breaking down the barriers that women too often face.
Today we'll be talking with Sabine Josephs, the founder of All of Us Crayons. Sabine’s beeswax crayons are inspired by a world where all children embrace their skin color, and others, with kindness, acceptance and unity. All of Us crayons are hand-poured in Sabine’s Brooklyn workshop using sustainable beeswax, sustainable palm wax and natural earth pigments. The All of Us team pride themselves on their commitment to our planet and to humanity.
So please welcome, Sabine Josephs.
Sabine: Hi. What a beautiful intro. Thank you. I'm honored and grateful to be here.
Passionistas: Well, you have a beautiful product and a beautiful mission, and we are thrilled to have you with us. What's the one thing that you are most passionate about?
Sabine: I am most passionate about removing the barriers that prevent us from seeing how wonderful we are because I think when we pull back to our conditioning or, or our criticism and we really step into who we are and step into our gifts, we can change the world. There’s so much to unlock and the whole world benefits from that. So that's, that's my passion.
Passionistas: And how does that translate into the company that you've created?
Sabine: It translates directly into All of Us crayons in removing that barrier of skin tone, shades to be available to all. I realized through our customer base and working closely with families that so much of what a child experiences is not spoken about and is not said.
So, we really wouldn't even understand that they might have had these limiting beliefs about who they are. And so being able to present them with skin tone crayons to just allow them to see that everyone is special and everyone's perfect, and we have created a company to make sure you know that is okay is exactly how that translates to All of Us crayons.
Passionistas: Let's take a step back. Tell us where you grew up, what your childhood was like, and what your beliefs were as a kid.
Sabine: I grew up in New York City and I grew up in a predominantly white school in a predominantly white neighborhood. And being a black child, I knew that my skin tone was different from my peers around me, but I didn't know if that was important, if that mattered or, or what. And then I remember being introduced to “The Snowy Day” by Jack Keats, and that really blew me away because I was able to identify with that child in that book being a child of color. And then, growing up, really understanding how I then sought to look for books that children were represented that looked like me and how realizing how impactful that was in solidifying my worth and my importance in the world around me.
Passionistas: Where did you go from there? Did you go to college? And if you did, what did you study?
Sabine: Yes, I did. I went to college and studied economics with a concentration in business. And right after college, I went right into corporate America working as a financial analyst in the advertising agencies around New York City. So, I did that for 10 years and then was privileged with the opportunity to be a stay-at-home mom and got to really see my child grow and be right there with her. And this is where we discovered the crayons when she asked to draw Grandma and we couldn't flip the skin tone crayons that we had. And so that was really a catalyst to what we've created.
Passionistas: Tell us that story. How did you start the company?
Sabine: We took out our well beeswax crayons and then my little Olivia asked to draw Grandma, and we didn't have that brown shade that Grandma was. And so, I quickly looked online and I didn't find anything. And I immediately just started taking a step back for a minute. I knew that was super important for us to have that. And so that's why it prompted me immediately to look for a company that did that, and I didn't find any.
So, the next route was to see if I can find a crayon recipe online for our home. And I did that and thought that this would be really great for other people to have. And so, on my Instagram account, I posted it and asked if anyone would want these because I would like to give five sets away.
And they were hundreds of comments that said, “I want these, please sell them to me. Don't give them. I will pay you.” And so, as a stay-at-home mom, I had no intention of creating a crayon brand. So, I ignored all of those comments and weeks went by. And then, people were private messaging me saying,” I didn't forget about those crayons. Can I have them please?”
And I quickly put one up on Etsy at like, it was like 11:00 PM at night. I told no one about it and someone bought it like immediately after. And she happened to have like 30,000 followers on Instagram and she loved it and posted about it. And so, I posted that I launched about 45 as a pre-order and that sold out in half an hour.
And then I did a next, like 125. And that sold out in like 45 minutes. And so, I thought, okay, we're making crayons. And so, I knew I had something that was so impactful to people. And although I never intend intended on starting a crayon company. I don't think I wouldn't trade it for the world because of the impact that it had on families and in children's lives to be able to draw themselves and to be able to draw their family and their neighbors just as they are. It is an honor for me to do this work.
Passionistas: What was that early trepidation? Why didn't you want to sell them at first and why didn't you tell anybody that you were putting them up?
Sabine: I think it was fear. I don't know what it would take to start a crayon company. I came from finance. I don't know how to scale a crayon business and I wasn't sure how to begin. And so really like, kind of putting my toe in the water and seeing what happened allowed me to kind of see the importance of it and see the impact of it in out in the world, and that really was a catalyst to really getting it going.
Passionistas: Tell us about that process of growing it from these initial pre-orders to the company that you have today.
Sabine: Gosh, a lot of Googling. A lot of figuring out. I remember the early days just working on my stove top and melting wax and kind of just getting orders out. I remember like really working until like 2:00 AM trying to just get it when I like finished putting my daughter to bed and having my nighttime of work figuring out the exact ratio of all the waxes and pigments to make sure we get like richly colored pigments in each crayon and really being mindful of representing as wide range as we can in in eight crayons.
I think that was really important too. And also, the packaging. The packaging, how that looked, that was really important to me. And also, being sustainable. That was a big piece. So, I took a lot of work in sourcing wax and making sure that they were sourced from apiaries that cared about the importance of bees and their pollinators around our world and making sure that that was a real big part of how we grew our company. And didn't want to skimp there at all.
And so, a lot of trial and error growing. And now we have a team in our open warehouse, and we made Oprah's Favorite Things last holiday season, which was incredible. And so, seeing where I've started in my kitchen to now then be able to meet the demand of being on Oprah's Favorite Things list and really executing that to scale has been quite incredible.
Passionistas: Your daughter was the inspiration for this. What's been her reaction to seeing you grow this company and what it's become?
Sabine: She has no idea what's happening. She is four now and just sees that mama has crayons everywhere. But I think that is the really special thing about it. So, having skin tone, crayons is a normal part of her life now. So, when she goes to a friend's house that doesn't have crayons like this, she is then the one to say, “Hey, you're missing the skin tone, crayons.” And so I think that's the most beautiful thing to see is, is her non-reaction because it's so normal and she knows how important it is to always have this available to her. So, I think that that has really been really special for me to see.
Passionistas: And what's the reaction and the feedback from the people who are buying your crayons?
Sabine: Gosh, I remember quite vividly an email that I received from a mom and she said that she had just finished crying and wiping her tears because her child just put a photo in front of her and said, “Look, Mama, I can draw me.” And she had no idea that her child had that urge to draw themselves or cared. And so she then realized, wow, like this is being a be for my child to be able to identify with themselves around this world is so important. And so that really unlocked something within her. And so she's been a lot more conscious about presenting a diverse community of diverse representation for her child. And that's been so amazing to see stories like that come across, across my world.
Passionistas: We’re Amy and Nancy Harrington and you’re listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Sabine Josephs.
To learn more about her skin tone beeswax crayons visit All of Us Crayons dot com.
Now here’s more of our interview with Sabine Josephs.
Do you have a plan to expand the colors in any way? What's the future of the company?
Sabine: So, I would love to be able to expand in different art mediums, so different art products such as watercolor and oil pastels. That's where we see the company growing in the future.
Passionistas: We heard about you because we saw you on Amazon's promotional campaign for Women's History Month, where Diane von Furstenberg, the famous designer, chose you to sit with her and our own Passionista founder of Tea Drops, Sashee Chandran. So, tell us what it meant to be included in that and what that experience was like.
Sabine: Oh gosh, that was so incredible. To be able to sit with such an iconic woman who really paved a way for other women, it was really, really incredible. And what a gift it was to gain her wisdom to talk to her about her, the women that she looked up to and really see the impact that we can bring to the world by just being ourselves and just really hone into our passions and how inspiring that is for other women to see. So it was, it was such an incredible experience.
Passionistas: How important is it for you to have other female founders to connect with?
Sabine: I feel like it's been my saving grace on really hard days to be able to have a female founder to just text and say, “Hey, what's happening with you this month and what are your challenges and how can I help you? And how can we leverage each other's strengths to make the journey a little easier?”
And even the connections, the being able to pick somebody's brain that has like no bias and could tell you things, how it is without like that deep emotion that founders usually have on their brand. And to be able to share experiences, I think that is the biggest impact that I've gained to find a community and not feel alone has been really, really impactful.
Passionistas: What advice would you give to your younger self?
Sabine: You are perfect. You are perfect as you are. And there is so much conditioning happening in the world around us that makes us believe that we're not. But we are perfect, and our flaws are our gifts. And if we lean into that, we can create magic.
Passionistas: Is there a particular trait you have that you think has helped you with your success?
Sabine: I would have to say that I have a kind of an engineering architectural mindset. So, I'm very easily able to see the big picture and connect each and every step that we need to get to that big picture and all, and outline all the obstacles and the challenges and really iron that out to get to that big picture has been, I think, my biggest strength in this endeavor. Because as a founder, there are so many challenges that come into our world that we can't plan for. And to be able to keep an eye on that big picture and say, “Okay, this isn't the plan, but let's see how we can keep on going” has been a great influencer on how successful the company has been.
I think also for me, really keeping a close eye on why I started the brand that has been really important for me because as we grow and we scale, it's so easy for sales numbers and revenue numbers and forecasts to really be the driver on a lot of the decisions. But keeping a close reminder, if you are doing this as a passion and really knowing how you want to change the world, people see that, and they gravitate towards that.
And sometimes when you don't have to do much work, and it happens that way. And so yes, the sales and revenue and forecasting numbers are very important, but also really coming back to and having that also be a really big important factor in where we go in the future has been a really big mover for me to keep on going.
Passionistas: What's been your biggest professional challenge and how did you overcome it?
Sabine: Knowing when to scale, I think that is the biggest challenge. And then trusting my gut, that is also a biggest challenge. Because I remember after we were announced as one of Oprah's Favorite Things kind of behind the scenes, I had a decision of whether to get a bigger production space and so much fear set in. Do we need a bigger space? Can we afford a bigger production space? And so, my gut kept on saying, “Yes, you do. Just do it.” And so, I remember just doing it and just getting a bigger space. And now looking back at it, I don't think we would've executed that as flawlessly as we did without that bigger production space.
So, giving my gut a voice and really allowing the fear of scaling to subside and really trusting myself and trusting the process and just trusting. I think that that is the biggest challenge.
Passionistas: What's the biggest sacrifice you've had to make?
Sabine: Time, time is the biggest sacrifice. Time away from my daughter has been the biggest one. Really kind of juggling of growing the business, but also wanting to spend time with her and enjoy making dinner and making cupcakes together and really doing it in a conscious way. And so really sitting with her and being present instead of thinking about what I'm going to do tomorrow on my to-do list tomorrow. And so, really being present and allocating my time has been, I think, yeah, the biggest challenge.
Passionistas: When you were a girl, what lessons did your mother teach you about women's roles in society and what are you passing on to your daughter?
Sabine: So my mom is from Haiti. And in Haiti, I think a lot of cultural norm is kind of the woman should do a lot of the household work and to kind of navigate her life around marriage and raising children. And I hope to pass along that yes, we can do those things, but we can also run businesses and really step into our own passions while having that balance of doing what I guess is the cultural norms of a woman's role. I think if we choose to do that, we can. If we choose not to do that, that is okay too.
And I think that is what I'm passing on, the flexibility to do what you wish to do in your life and having a support system around that to be able to really navigate your life to your own desires and wishes.
Passionistas: What's your dream for your daughter, Olivia?
Sabine: My dream is for her to really be unafraid to step into who she is and to be unafraid to take risks. To step into challenges and to understand or try to understand if it's fear or am I just faced with a challenge that might be hard, but I want to tackle it. And I think with those tools, it opens up a world of possibilities to what she wants to achieve in her life. And so, if she wants to go to college, sure. She doesn't, sure. Let's see where you can lead your life in the happiest way that you thrive as an individual.
Passionistas: What's your dream for women in general?
Sabine: To know how powerful they are, to know how important they are in our world and to really understand so much of our world has conditioned us to think a certain way and to look a certain way and to act a certain way and really see how incredible we are. And we don't need all of that conditioning. We just need to be, and that truly is enough. And with just being, I think so much is unlocked. There are so many things that you might not have seen comes into focus, and then the courage of stepping into that, I think it unlocks so much courage, so much power, and we, we can change the world. We truly can.
Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project and our interview with Sabine Josephs.
To learn more about her skin tone beeswax crayons visit All of Us Crayons dot com.
And be sure to visit ThePassionistasProject.com to sign up for our mailing list, find all the ways you can follow us on social media and join our worldwide community of women working together to level the playing field for us all.
We'll be back next week with another Passionista who is defining success on her own terms and breaking down the barriers for herself and women everywhere.
Until then. Stay well and stay passionate.