Know Thyself - E53 - Hitomi Mochizuki: Embracing Your Path To Wholeness, Spirituality & Inner Beauty

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

Hitomi Mochizuki shares her journey of overcoming anxiety and suicidal thoughts - to finding true meaning in life. She reveals the spiritual practices and mindset shifts that helped her (and continue to help her) to find peace and wholeness within.  Hitomi shares the beauty of romanticizing your life and find joy in the simple moments, explaining why this is an essential tool for her wellbeing. She explains the power of vulnerability in relationships and on social media, and why it is essential for true connection. Giving advice for conscious creators looking to share more on social media. Hitomi also dives deep into her experiences with plant medicine, sacred sexuality, and reveals the greatest investment she's ever made.  ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro 2:45 Hitomi’s Current Life Transitions 5:38 From Artificial Glamour to Authentic Beauty 11:22 Overcoming Suicidal thoughts and Finding Meaning in Life 25:18 Using Spiritual Practices to Navigate Anxiety 32:34 Developing Clarity of Mind, Grounding, and Integration 39:02 Romanticizing Your Life to the Fullest 46:00 Ayahuasca and Soul Liberation 55:39 Creating a Space for Authenticity and Connection 59:54 Embracing the Light Years 1:06:05 The Value of Cultivating Soul Family 1:10:30 Sacred Sexuality  1:20:04 Hitomi's Advice for Conscious Creators 1:27:22 Understanding Ancestral Roots 1:29:20 The Greatest Investment I’ve Ever Made 1:33:29 All Of You Is Welcome Here 1:34:09 Conclusion ___________ Hitomi Mochizuki is a content creator who uses her platform as a safe space for healing, wholesome energy, meditation and yummy vegan recipes.  Her Youtube Channel, which has over 1 million subscribers, is a snippet of her life and the sacred energy she yearns to bring to all things. Where you can find vlogs, deep dives into emotional intelligence, the occasional sustainable fashion video, and pretty much just raw truth. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HitomiMochizuki222 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yaknowme_hitomi/ ___________ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/

To welcome the full spectrum of experience is to be human and to honor the humanness in one another. It makes you feel less alone. When I moved out to L.A. at 17, I was underage lying about my age and putting myself in dangerous situations. I felt absolutely nothing. The world is cruel. My heart hardened in that moment. And I had like five suicide attempts that week. And that was my rock bottom. I realized that I needed to stop lying about how I was feeling.

Yoga completely changed my life. It helped me to respond to my feelings of anxiety and depression in a way that took me out of fight or flight. I like this idea of romanticizing my life, welcoming it all and still feeling like this is a beautiful moment that I get to exist. In every single moment, you can return home and empower yourself in some way. There's space and you have time and you are infinitely redeemable. Hello, beautiful beings. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast for every single week. We get the honor and privilege to go on this journey and me do my favorite thing, which is to get to sit down with sometimes dear friends, sometimes new friends, to learn more about the true nature of self at deeper and deeper levels. My guest today is what I would describe as a spiritual content creator. She's been sharing her journey online for many years now and has impacted millions and millions of lives, authentically, vulnerably sharing her life past.

and her journey inwards and discovering authentic beauty and sacred sexuality and yoga and meditation and the full spectrum wide range of what it means to be human and and so part of being a host on this podcast like one of my favorite things of doing this since I started a little under a year ago is just all the incredible souls I get to meet and have an excuse to sit down and drop in with so I'm so looking forward to dropping in and with a new friend today Hitomi Machizuki. Yay. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for that intro. And I'm just so grateful to talk soul to soul right now.

I feel like everyone on their path has so many kindred lines that weave together. And it's so expansive to share. Yeah. So good. There's going to be so many beautiful threads that I think have been parallels for both of our journeys to get to where we're at now. And my intention with the show today is to be able to just vulnerably share both of our past and journeys and dive deep into the heart and mind of you to to this is your first ever podcast. It is. This is amazing. My knees are quaking a little bit. It feels so good. It's good. You're going to speak into it. Yeah. But it's so good. I got to catch you in a little

transitory moment here. The forest nymph is leaving the forest or the island, I guess. Yes. I'm about to head on a world tour to find my next forest you reside in. And Andre is catching me in a huge moment of transition, a whole new season I'm entering into of no nomad lifestyle, not having a home and just anchoring in all the lessons I've learned pretty much finding new community and learning new practices and just being a student of life. I never went to college. So I feel like this year is kind of a walkabout year for me where I'm saying yes to anything that people drop into my field that feels aligned and just learning, doing yoga. and sewing and cooking classes, just all of it.

So it's like the entrance of the great void or something like that. Yeah. Terrence McKenna has a quote that I love of, you know, jumping into the abyss and realizing it's a feather bed. And it's just our journey consists of so many series of those moments. And so I'm glad that today this can be like a little time capsule for you, all of them all of us to just check in and see where you're at. And it's always fun to reflect back on, you know, old videos and old podcasts. and it's like a little moment in history

gets to be captured. Absolutely. Maybe we can do a follow-up one in like two years from now. Yeah, yeah. So good. Well, where I want to actually start today is first off just acknowledging you

because there is, I think, what you represent and who you are as a pillar and the way that you share in the world is so needed on the planet right now. Who you are and how you embody yourself and carry your energy and the example and the permissions that you give to the feminine,

we have this cultural understanding as a women that to be beauty you need to be focused on your appearance and how you look and there's a lot of that conditioning and I think what you do is you are a role model you are an example for so many women and men too but women in the feminine in particular that your beauty can come from within there's these inner qualities of self-acceptance and being patient with yourself and seeing what's alive within you and that can be that radiance can then magnetize what's really meant for you in life. And so I just want to acknowledge you for doing the work first and foremost, but then being the example and sharing your story so authentically over the years because it's desperately needed on the planet. And I just, I know you've helped so many countless

people on their journey. Oh, thank you so deeply. As you're saying all of that, all I can feel in my heart and body is that I felt like I had no other choice to live from the most unmasked place because everything else kept getting me stuck. So I'm just like celebrating and championing. everyone to live with their hearts wide open and to live from that deep down place rather than what's living on the exterior. Yeah. So that journey from kind of overly focused on appearance and artificial glamour almost to then just discovering the authentic beauty that is within you, I want you to touch on that a little bit here to open up and what your journey has been. I mean, there's going to be so many points within your story. I'm sure we'll be able to open up.

But specifically discovering beauty that comes from within versus that's proceed from the outside. I'd love for you to share what that journey has been like for you. Wow. I am just immediately like going back to my middle school self when I first started to feel noticed for my beauty externally. And for most of my childhood, I felt like I was ugly because I was in a very small town where people looked one type of way, which was just mostly white and straight and not a lot of diversity. And also in my family, I have four siblings and we all have different dads. So we all look and act completely different. And I was the only one who looked Asian. And my sister was super outgoing, like curly hair and just had her complete own, I don't know,

form of beauty. And she was super popular. And I always looked to her and thought, oh, that, that's my standard of beauty is to be more like that and be more outgoing, where I was. was really shy and had really pale skin. She was really tan. And I just kind of defined myself as being ugly or like, okay, I'm going to put energy into other aspects of my being because I'm not conventionally attractive. And that was the story I lived with until about middle school when I started to go through puberty and get boobs and everyone or like a lot of boys started paying attention to me. And I leaned into that so deeply. And I completely. sexualized myself because it was the first time I felt validated and I felt all these warm

feelings. And also growing up in a chaotic or abusive household, it felt like this is one area of my life where I feel warm, where I feel like I'm worthy in some capacity. And so I really went down a path of being sort of used by guys or just honestly allowing myself to be objectified because at the time I thought that was what love was and what worth felt like. And eventually I was really slut-shamed in my school. And I just felt like I couldn't keep sharing myself in that way. And I started to want to hide my body and hide myself away. And I at a certain point realized how much I was performing and had a lot of

internalized misogyny, like how much of the way I'm getting dressed, the way I'm putting on makeup, the way that I'm even presenting myself on camera when I would first start filming wasn't actually me. And it was all looking through the lens of what a male might find attractive. And I went celibate for a year after feeling like I hit a rock bottom in the sense of like my relations with men. And I finally started to use my sacred no. And I had so many friends hitting me up all the time, but when I went celibate, they all disappeared. And I was completely okay with that. I was like, oh my God, this is so good to know that you just wanted this sexual connection that is completely not serving me. So thank you. I know the power of my spoken word now

and I will continue using it. And that's when I really started to have this shift and realize how much I just loved being with people, how much I loved feeling deeply with others and how transformative and important that was to me and how even like sharing sexual energy with someone without the context of safety and comfort is so drastically different from having that as a baseline foundation already there how much deeper you can go and I started to just change the way that I showed up as just being the authentic version of myself. That's what beauty is. being really deeply honest with myself is beauty. And I recognize that as beauty in everyone, people who can set their own beauty standards by simply accepting themselves. Like, oh, I have

under eyebags or wrinkles or acne or cellulite. That is my standard of beauty. And I match that every single day. And so I think that is my definition of beauty as being authentically yourself. And it's something that I'm still learning since I make YouTube videos and I do feel like, there's an aspect of glamorizing your life a little bit or at least making the aesthetic nice so people can hear the real messages. But overall, I think that sharing honestly in an unmask way is enough to show people that, yeah, beauty is really lovely and there's nothing wrong with it. But the real form of it, the most potent form comes from just the energy of all of our hearts. Yeah. Beautiful. So good. I agree. I think.

The most attractive person is somebody who's really in their heart. And like somebody can actually look different when they're in their heart and they want to be of service and they're just authentic to themselves. So many of us in different parts of our lives move in the world with so much pretense. We have all these stories and conditions and dogmas and beliefs that aren't ours, but we got picked them up along the way. Because at one point in our life, they made us feel safe. To be able to cope and deal with whatever we couldn't fully pretext. process and integrate in the moment it happened. And for individuals that are listening to this, that want to continue to deepen the sense of knowing themselves to be able to raise their

vibration, they kind of come to this realization that it's a lot less just trying to go higher in your energies, but actually go down deep into the old stories and purging what doesn't serve you anymore and going through those growing pains. It's like a real thing, you know? So for people that want to go on the spiritual process or, you know, to bring forth that their own awakening in that way, there's going to be a lot of really difficult, challenging moments, of course, along the journey. And I know there's been many times for you. And so I would love for you to share on the process of you, you know, going through middle school and then coming out to being a teenager and then in your early 20s and you're still, we're still young. We're 25, right? Yeah, yeah. So I know there's been a

couple like pivotal moments. When you look back at your life, what is one or two that sticks out as one of the most defining in terms of you really breaking down who you thought you were. So the new version of you could come online. Thank you so much. I just appreciate your mind and your heart and all these questions for giving me this opportunity to like witness all that and affirm all the lessons. I just want to speak to the fact that a lot of times when you start your journey, it can flood you with a lot of this like beautiful spiritual energy, feeling oneness, feeling connection. And initially for me, I thought it was about just being in bliss all the time, but it actually is about deconstructing any walls, any barriers that you have against the heaviness, the muckiness,

and that helps to empower you to feel the divine, feel all those good feelings through whatever changes in your life. And I was performing sort of like spiritual bypassing all of my feelings. And so the first pivotal moment for me was when I started my journey, I learned about the law of attraction. I read the book The Secret and that completely changed my world. I realized all the time I spent like judging other people was really just me feeding myself that own frequency. And I started to feel like, oh, I just want to think positive thoughts all the time. And I was just really struggling a lot with my mental health in ways that I did. I didn't realize, like, I would be cutting myself and having anxiety attacks and skipping class.

And then I would be meditating at night and putting things on my vision board and feeling like, I just need to keep being positive. I need to keep praying my way out of this and not indulge those heavy thoughts as much. And I did that all throughout high school. And it was so hard for me to reckon with, it felt like night and day, my internal experience. of believing so deeply in spirit in God and trust in my path, but then also hating myself so much. And I went to a mental hospital when I was in senior year of high school because I finally was a little bit transparent with a therapist of mine about what I was doing. And when I was there, I felt actually the happiest and most stable that I ever have because

I was surrounded by other people's suffering and I felt like I could help them. and I was sharing meditation practices with these girls in the hospital. And I guided everyone through yoga even though I wasn't certified. And I felt like I had purpose in that week that I was there. But I lied a lot about what I was feeling because I knew if I was honest, I would have spent like a year in treatment and not be able to leave the hospital. And so I was like, oh, I feel fine now. And I did actually feel really good in that place of being of service to others.

And then when I left the hospital, all those like feelings came back to me. But that was sort of a pivotal moment in realizing and getting a glimmer of maybe what I'm meant to do here on earth, which is just selfless service. And all throughout my deep depression, I was like, I wish that I could get paid to just be kind to people. Like I would just open doors for people or carry their groceries home. Like I wish that was just a job that I could do. But that was just sort of a revealing moment and how most of my spiritual journey started out was like intense, deep belief and trust and good feelings flooding my body like thick manifestation journals, but also self-harm and self-destructive habits. And my most pivotal moment was when I moved out to L.A. at 17. I didn't know anybody or anything about this place. but it was actually Santa Barbara.

I moved from the East Coast where I was born and raised to the West Coast, and I was struggling to pay rent, struggling to pay for school things. I took out a loan, which I didn't feel good about. And so I started to become a sugar baby, which is something I never talked about, really. And I carried a lot of shame about it, but I don't anymore because I was doing what I had to do to look out for myself and keep myself. at that time. That's just what I thought I had to do or felt like was my only option. And so that quickly led me down a really dark path. Even just within a few months, nothing really

out of the ordinary happened in that circumstance. But I was underage lying about my age and putting myself in dangerous situations. And it only happened one time that I was actually intimate with someone. But I felt this whole time like I was waiting for this deep. shame, regret, embarrassment, guilt to flood me. And it just didn't happen. Instead, I felt absolutely nothing. It was like, the world is cruel. My heart hardened in that moment. And I had, like, I think five suicide attempts that week. And that was my rock bottom. And I realized that I needed to stop lying about how I was feeling, that that wasn't brave, that that wasn't courageous for me to just put a smile on my face and put myself together every morning. I realized that I needed to

actually break down. And my whole experience after moving out was that I just wanted to be held. I was like, I just want to actually really be taken care of right now. And I'm being pushed into adulthood when I feel like I've never gotten to be a child. And, I realized that it was okay to want that. I realized that I have been so independent for so much of my life because of my upbringing and to be pushed into adulthood and all these responsibilities, I felt so stunted and like, wait, this is all too much, all too soon. And so I finally started being honest with my state of being. And I am so grateful for how everything happened because of that. And I took out my loan. I dropped out of college after like two weeks of going to classes. And I just worked a minimum wage job, which I'm so grateful for, that I could just coast and at least get by and fully focus on my mental health. That was the point where I realized that my mental health is a priority. And that cannot be the last thing on my list every single day when I wake up. And so I moved to New York City. And I,

I spent like two or three years just working random minimum wage jobs. I started filming YouTube videos and being so brutally honest about my experience. And I started filming my deep sad thoughts, like how I felt underwater, how I would feel anxious, how I was self-harming, and kind of unpacking my childhood trauma. I think for a lot of us, we don't realize how brutal our circumstances can be. or how many walls we have up until we start to feel them affecting our day-to-day behaviors in terms of social anxiety, panic attacks in general, PTSD, or just low self-worth in general. It's like, oh, wait, why is that there?

Was there something that happened? And then you're like, oh, wait, all of these things happened to me to explain all these little fragments in my heart. And that's what I started to do. I never thought that, like, being abused, seeing abuse, like being touched in ways I didn't want to affected my behaviors. And so within three months of actually being honest with a therapist, because I pretty much lied to all of my other ones, I just wanted to perform being happy and good. I felt like I released so much. I forgave my family. I forgave my past self

in a lot of ways. And I started to feel like, okay, things can get better as long as I'm just being real with myself and making some sort of spiritual effort every single day. and that's what I started to do. And I feel like my journey has started from that point of like that third month in therapy being like, okay, I actually think that I can do this. I think I can be alive and exist. And I had tons of, I don't want to call them regressions, but moments where I did go back to self-harm or suicidal ideation. But I was getting more and more connected to the part of me that trusted and knew that it was going to be okay. And I felt proud of myself every single day for at least feeling and being honest about it. And that was kind of like my goal.

As long as I can be real with myself, I can be close to God because that's me being in the present moment, even though it's mucky and heavy, like, okay, I'm walking with God as long as I'm being real with what is rising and falling all around me. So that is kind of the synopsis of like, how it started where it's going. And I have to say I in the past two years have had no suicidal thoughts, which is really amazing. And I'm really proud of myself for that. But I feel like I'm finally at a place where I'm not afraid of that coming back. I'm not afraid of heaviness or sadness because I know exactly how to respond to it. And that means so much to me. Like I know how to treat myself. I know how to care for myself. And I have so many stable forms of love in my life

that I source from myself and my community and the earth that I'm like, wow, feeling really situated and who I am and where I'm going. And I bow down to the journey. Even all those like regressive states, I'm like, that was building the resilience and all of the habits that I have today that I don't even think about. Like, I really pay homage to my past self for going through all that because my immediate responses to when I have a moment of anxiety or when I feel sadness are all from that experiential learning. And now I'm not afraid to sit in those places with other people as well. Like talking about depression and sadness is maybe a heavier topic, but it doesn't feel heavy to me. It feels like something that I've navigated very well or just I'm really familiar with

it. And I feel relieved talking about it. I feel relieved being in a safe space. sitting in meditation and witnessing what is rising and falling without any aversion, without any fear, just being like, ooh, that's there. And there's this breath too. So, yeah. That was so beautiful. I'm going to get you a tissue. Thank you. Yes. I wasn't expecting all that to come out. Thank you. Blame it on the cacao. Yeah. Seriously. Oh, no, so, so beautiful. Thank you just for being willing to go there. And I know, I think, such a large reason why people connect with you in your path is just your willingness to be fully whatever is your experience.

Like, to be able to share it unbashedly, share your experience in the journey that you've been going through in the really difficult moments and the taboo topics. But speak about it as if it's just a normal part of the human experience because it's, it is, but so much of us have this resistance to these darker parts of us. So I just want to say that it's so beautiful to see and hear and feel you share about your path because like I spoke to earlier, you're such a permission slip for people to just be authentic to whatever their experiences in life and that there are going to be a lot of highs and a lot of lows. And the way that you're speaking to on it now, to where, you know, the suicidal ideation and those tough moments, or you were self-harming and things that really feel like shit in the moment.

Now you can look back and see how defining and how you took so much value in so many lessons and it's informed so much of who you are today and how you get to show up. And also your ability to connect and relate with people because if you want to support and heal the planet but you haven't gone to the depths of your own being, if you haven't gone to the pits of hell, how can you go to the heights of heaven? You know, it's like you have to be able to, if you really want to authentically connect with people in a way that's meaningful in a way that can really transform them. It just helps so much to be able to have gone through that and have that firsthand life experience.

Absolutely. Because that comes up for all of us and to welcome the full spectrum of experience is to be human and to honor the humanness in one another. And it makes you feel less alone to know. Someone's also been there at the bottom of the well. Yeah. Yeah. It's been really cool. to be able to see and diving deeper into your videos and your story about how your spiritual practices and certain things that have been really pillars for you in your life to go on this natural trajectory of healing, of wholeness, of integration. And so I'd love for you to share a little bit more about what supported you in those moments. And over the past years, when you look back, what really moved the needle for you in terms of your experience of moving through those?

I'm sure there were big moments, but then also the things that we do in our daily life. I know you have such a beautiful connection with yoga and meditation. You're about to go to India right now to do your third yoga teacher training. So yeah, I'd love for you to open up about that. Yoga completely changed my life. That's another defining moment I forgot to mention. But I really tried to navigate my mental health the traditional way. I did try medication.

I did do psychotherapy, which I highly recommend immensely impacted and supported me. But when I went to my first yoga teacher training in Bali, I was able to gain tools and practices to change my physiology. And that was invaluable. It helped me to respond to my feelings of anxiety and depression in a way that took me out of fight or flight. And then I didn't have to make such intense choices like self-harming, which was what I would do when I had anxiety.

because it was such an intense feeling. I then learned how to use my breath. I learned that having a daily practice is essential for me to connect to the realest part of myself, the part of myself that welcomes it all while knowing I'm beyond it. That is essentially what my daily practice does. It allows me to rest in the unchanging part of myself. And so I did a 200-hour yoga teacher training and I started practicing. singing Hatha yoga every single day, which I love because it's the sun and the moon. My teacher's

philosophy is that you have to study the moon before the sun can rise. And he was basically speaking to the fact that you need to be able to move slowly to witness your internal state and all the fire that's already within you before you then add even more fiery practices and blast yourself out of your brain with pranayama. And that's exactly what I needed because there is just so much anxiety is like the same as excitement physiologically and there's so much heat and fire and so to be able to move so slowly in my practice to be able to watch my shaking hands and feel like my core on fire and just stay in a downward dog for like five minutes or a twist and watch the heat rise and breathe beyond it. That was a practice for life because then when I had anxiety I could watch it and take another deep breath and another deep breath until it started to ease.

and that's when I really started using spiritual practice to create spaciousness. And I would start every morning by doing a yoga practice, pranayama, and meditation. And over time, that's actually what ended my anxiety. And I just want to share this really simple breathwork practice of extending your exhale. That will activate your parasympathetic nervous system and begin to calm you down if you are having anxiety. and I would just inhale for four counts and exhale for eight counts and within minutes be able to release my panic attack. And that felt like the start of the rest of my life, learning that the length of your breath

is the length of your life. And for me, it felt like my breath was just my anchor into the present moment, into my connection to spirit, into what was real. And over time, my practice has evolved. I did a second yoga teacher training doing Ashtanga yoga, which also felt like medicine to me because it is that fire that I like. And after I did feel a bit more stable, I really invited feeling like I could be in my power. For me, that's how Ashtanga felt is like being really strong in my power, warrior like. And it's a series that you do every single day and you can refine how well you do each posture.

and I did that for many years after just every single day, Sadhana spiritual practice wake up. I felt like I had to be so connected to my daily practice and I almost attached to it in a way because I was like, this is my medicine. If I don't do this, I will have way more anxiety today. And I'm really proud of myself for doing that and being slightly dogmatic for myself. In fact, when I went to the mental hospital in high school,

that's the one takeaway I got was to have coping methods at the end of the week. They didn't put me on any more medication because I really didn't want to be, but they gave me a paper. And they just asked me to write down what my coping methods were. And I wrote what I thought were them at the time. And I've integrated that from my spiritual practice of like if I have anxiety, I do breathwork. If I feel sad, I do a tapas, like fiery asana practice. And so I had these sort of like practices that I could use to facilitate this. ongoing outpatient treatment of my sadness and was a little bit dogmatic about it, but it served me up into a point. And this past two years, I feel like my practice has expanded into anything that brings me back to that deep sense of knowing, anything that connects me to that unchanging place. And so it could be an hour of yoga or it could be an hour of breathwork or chanting or painting or lovemaking, just any doorway that brings me back to the part of me that knows. And I really like where I'm at now with my practice because it feels so much more easeful and natural. And I'm also not punishing myself if I don't do it. Like I would feel bad about myself if I didn't do my daily

practice back in the day. And what I realized is that a lot of the second part of my healing outside of like hospital and medicine was about somatic feelings in my bodies, bringing joy, bringing safety, bringing ease as an experience in my body. And now that I've gone past the point of having anxiety attacks, I feel like my practice can be flexible. I'm just inviting joy and ease and play. And that is like a holy sacred thing to do. And that's enough. So good. I mean, it's so much of what you're saying resonates with me in my own personal path and personal journey. And having those practices that can be the foundation for your energetic being to rest upon and to, you know, you can explore and have different breathwork experiences or non-ordinary states of consciousness.

And that can be all great. But who you are energetically every single day is going to be made up basically off of what you put in your body, what you put on your body, what you do with your time, what practices you take. So yoga, meditation, pranayama, like they're all amazing tools to be able to just anchor into your own being. and have just a sense of balance and stability within your system. I think we're used to the typical narrative of somebody that reacts instead of responds that is compulsive instead of chooses with their life. And going on the spiritual path, you become a director of your own life.

You become able and capable to really choose what direction you want to go in your life because you develop clarity of mind, purity of spirit. And so I think I would love to hear just a little bit more about your personal path of developing clarity of mind, these practices that have been really useful for you. And what that looks like day to day now. And it's beautiful to hear how that's evolved and how it can really be infused into so much of what you do, you know, just your connection to nature, to breath, to how you move in the world, and your Hatha practice in the morning. So anything else you want to touch on there before we dive into some other different modalities that have really

supported you to develop clarity in your life. Absolutely. So I love Hatha Yoga. I feel like that's my life practice. And I formulate my practices based on what I need. And I like to do a lot of forward folds and twist because that activates a panavayu, which is an energy that rests in your lower abdomen. And it's the energy of release. And twists activate Samana Valu, which is in your middle abdomen, which activates the energy of just integration. It's twisting. It's the outflow. and downflow of energy. And so both of those things help me to ground and integrate. And if you were looking to ground from your day, just do a forward fold, do a downward dog, do a twist. Those are things that I try to do every single morning in my practice, as well as holding each asana for one to five minutes. That is kind of the moon energy of Hatha allowing me to witness and create space and really take inventory of what's going on in my internal landscape, in my body, and even just 15 minutes of three asana poses can completely transform your energetic state. And in fact,

the original yogis would just choose sometimes even one pose and do it for an hour or do maybe just that pose for a month and really refine their awareness. And I realize that it's mostly about refining your awareness and using the body to access the breath to then access the mind. And I highly recommend doing practices that help you to sit in meditation for longer. And for me, that is usually a breath-focused practice. I really like doing pranayama after doing asana because I do think that asana is meant to open up our bodies to sit for longer and to feel our breath deeper in different parts of our tummy ribs and chest. So I love three-part breathing. The diaphragm is a great place to bring your

breath. And as women, we're really conditioned to kind of suck in our stomachs and even for men to like puff up their chest. But when you breathe into the stomach, you actually help your digestion. You help to release tension in your organs, in your sexual organs as well. And I will even just do three-part breathing and witness my breath into my tongue. And I will even just do three-part breathing and witness my breath into my tummy ribs and chest and exhaling slowly the same way feeling my navel push back to my spine. My ribs come together and my chest lower and then just sit in meditation. And all of that I think used to take me like three hours in the morning, but now it's like an hour or less and I can bring that awareness with me everywhere. And I've always heard that

your practice can take place all the time. Like you're never actually off the yoga mat. And I didn't integrate that or realize what that felt like until I did start to deepen my breath in hard conversations or take a moment of pause before I ate my food. And there's so many little ways that you can practice your pause throughout your day. So you do feel like you're always connected. You're never not being present with yourself and your internal being. And I think that's a gift that you can give to yourself. A lot of people are struggling for time to do a daily practice. But if you do it like a moment before you eat, take five deep breaths. That alone is enough to fill you with deep presents that you can take with you throughout your day and also

you're eating three times a day. So that's a good place to start. And there are little ways that you can integrate a moment of presence. And I think that's sort of been most authentic to me lately is bringing my practice into all the little moments. And it's really beautiful because when you deepen your breath and when you take a moment of pause, everyone around you also remembers, oh yeah, let me take inventory really quick. And this is a beautiful. And this is a beautiful. And this is a beautiful moment where I can witness my life happening to. It's beautiful. That transition from, you know, meditation and yoga being something that you do to something that you are. It's your presence. It's infuse into everything that you do because

it's, you've imbibed that energy. And that comes byproduct of being devotion, having devotion to a saturnat, to a practice that can really cultivate that energy within you over a sustained period of time, you know. And so having that committed practice that you've been doing for so long, It makes sense that you're at where you're at now energetically and you're able to get to those states quicker. And I think as for the listeners, it's a really beautiful take home to find a lineage, find somewhere where you can immerse yourself into really the study and the understanding of these tools because then you'll have them with you for the rest of your life. Wherever you go, there you are. And so if you want to have a beautiful experience of life, learn how to cultivate a beautiful presence with you. and that's going to come through these practices that they can really catalyze that within you.

And then you can start to just spontaneously have those moments where you experience and you perceive the beauty more readily available around you and you can slow down and you carry that slowness of breath and patience of mind into everything that you do. And then you become a more capable steward of whatever reality you want to create. and we live in such an achievement-focused society nowadays. And it's like you can still go after all of your dreams. You can still achieve whatever you want in life. And all these practices are just going to make you more capable of doing that

and actually not so attached to them needing to happen how you think they will. And to be actually surprised by the universe of bringing them in a way that you never would have expected. So I'd love for you to share a little bit more about how you romanticize your life a little bit and how you infuse slowing down in these practices into your way of being with all things that you do. Absolutely. That was so beautifully spoken. I feel like when you're present, you're showing the universe that you trust. It's walking with trust. And I like this idea of romanticizing my life because it's really just bringing awareness to all the sensory experiences that are taking place. When we think of romance, we often think about love and affection and togetherness. But I feel like I'm in a romance with all of life and with the earth like the earth is my greatest lover and I think that romanticizing the moment

means dropping into the sensory experiences like this velvet on my fingertips or the sound of the birds outside or all the beautiful colors that we're taking in and it allows you to feel like every single moment is so grand and so pure and just really romantic like what a treat and delight that we get to be here and listen to these sounds. everything is such a miracle when you're seeking to see the love in every happening. And romanticizing the moment to me also means feeling deeply, which is another way I sort of describe my practice, is allowing myself to feel all that's rising within me, the sadness, the excitement, the despair, and making poetry out of it, making art out of it, because why not just embrace all

of this human experience. And like I said, it really, when you're not repressing anything, it softens the experience. Something that I learned along my journey is that my aversion was just as detrimental as my attachment. My aversion to sadness was just as harmful as my attachment to joy. They're kind of the same thing. And so romanticizing the moment also means like welcoming it all and still feeling like this is a beautiful moment that I get to exist. And I do this by typing on my typewriter and going outside and drinking some tea and creating a moment for myself to have a little revelation in a moment to feel deeply, a moment to feel like, what a rapturous thing to exist. And it's really just intention. It's kind of like this, I don't know,

modern day form of practice for me. I've really expanded my practice into all these different ways, but it definitely just feels like I'm going to make this moment really cute and I'm going to dress up for myself and I'm going to do this because I am a human getting to have this experience and why not make it as lovely and charming as possible. And to me, feeling deeply feels like integration from the world. It's listening to the information and it's actually really important to do that. I think that our feelings can guide our experience and where we're meant to go or what we're meant to do. And so I actually take that seriously where I, instead of bypassing my feelings,

I feel all of them so deeply to the point where I don't even need to attach them. I don't need to wallow in them. I get right to the root. And I act upon whatever my sadness or my joy is telling me, meaning like maybe I will book a yoga teacher training again or maybe I won't spend time with that person who made me feel really heavy after, things like that. And it almost feels like this pragmatic way that I go about healing is knowing what I need to do in response to every thing that comes up for me. And romanticizing is like a really sensual somatic way of practicing that. And I really love somatic practices now. That's kind of like my new thing where I just want to feel really good in my body and inviting that with other people as well. I have this really sweet

group of friends. And they really taught me this because every time we would hang out, they would put a pot of tea to boil on the stove and would play this amazing piano playlist. And we'd be like, and let's talk about the happenings of our world. And it really felt like we were just these elders coming together, pretending to be young girls talking about what was happening. Like, none of this is actually serious, but let's entertain it for now. So it's a really sweet practice. I highly recommend. Do you feel like you embody that in any way? Yeah, I think the more that you are able to cultivate your own sensitivity to life, first, the less you need to feel fulfilled, you can just be a

walking bag of fulfillment. A bag. A bag. Probably could come up with a sexier term for that. A vessel, perhaps. Yeah. But most people are looking and searching for fulfillment externally, right? But when you become sensitive to life, you can realize that you actually have everything within you in this moment. And then you can start to appreciate and you can become fulfilled and filled with joy by the simplest things. And to realize that our life is just really filled with a series of mundane moments, you know, sprinkled in with these high energy moments, you know, where you have a peak experience or you're, you know,

you're at a big gathering or you have a cool life moment. Like those are far and few in between, but really what it's filled your life is filled with is your morning and your afternoon and your evening with yourself oftentimes and how you cook meals and how you make tea and how you have a conversation with a friend and all those little moments and the more that you can become sensitive to those to those moments the more that you can actually be attuned to what's alive in the moment and you can experience the joy of the moment and so yeah I don't know if I would necessarily say romanticize but I would say for me it's been a It's been a journey of deepening my appreciation for the moment and seeing what's alive in that space.

And that's a really beautiful place just to move from and to experience life. Yeah, I was reflecting on it and thinking how it was almost a means of survival for me to romanticize the moments where I didn't want to be alive. And I wasn't comfortable in my living circumstance or was struggling, but still found joy and beauty in the smallest, most mundane things. and how at the end of the day, my dream in life is to feel ease and connection to myself and this earth and the people around me. And I can integrate that into every single moment of my day and feel like, oh, I'm actually living my dream reality if I can be present with what's here and now and realize that there is so much love taking place all around me, even if it's not just for me or romantic. Like every single moment is my dream reality kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah.

I want to keep diving to some threads here, but just because we're kind of talking about the practices and tools that have supported us, has plant medicine played a big part in your path or how is that woven into your self-realization actualization journey? Oh my goodness. I know this is probably a big rep. That could be a whole other podcast, but I will be brief about it and say that for most of my journey, I never thought that I would do plant medicine. I was very much about the breath, about only using what I had access to all the time because I didn't want to rely on anything external.

And it wasn't until I moved into a place where I was surrounded by nature every single day and more and more people were using plant medicine consciously. I always had this opinion of it as some escape because maybe that's what I saw on Tumblr was like, you just go to a music festival and do something like that. But the women around me were using it to heal their childhood wounds and their thoughts about their body. And so I started to microdose about two years ago just once every few months. And I would take these field notes and journal every time after. And I would always set a really beautiful container with myself to just be alone in nature. And it did help me to feel an experience of unconditional love for myself that I never felt before and to really see everything

around me as a frequency and vibration that I could connect with and dance with. Even in nature, like all the trees had faces and personalities and energies and I felt more connected to my truth than I thought was possible because it felt visceral. It was like this experiential, of like interacting with earth and the energy exchange that's always happening when we put certain foods into our body or listen to things on social media and that started to really shift things and then I sat with ayahuasca and I feel like that completely changed my life. And once again, was not what I expected because I would watch YouTube videos on people's experiences and I just couldn't get a feel for what the medit, was it psychedelic?

Was it like they're singing? there's music, there's colors that you see. I'm just like, what actually is this? And I decided I felt ready. I only wanted to sit with plant medicine when I felt stable and resourced enough in my breath so that wherever it went, I felt like I could be equanimist during it. And then a week after I set the intention to sit with medicine, I was told that a Shepievo shaman was coming into town and I sat with him for three nights.

And it, I mean, I don't think I should dive into it. exactly what happened, but that was a pivotal moment on my journey and helped me to reveal a purpose of mine to just help spread indigenous stories and wisdom and to connect to my own native roots, which is part of why I'm going on this whole trip and journey to South America, which is where my lineage is from and connecting even more deeply to the earth and the practices that and the rituals that my ancestors used and also to advocate for the earth and help to protect it. So when I think of ayahuasca, I just think of being on this canoe with the rest of humanity and like we actually all really need each other and should be supporting each

other. And it's an interesting experience because you're sitting really close to people who are purging their deepest demons. And that feels like the purest form of unconditional love. is to be surrounded by people doing soul liberation and holding one another in that. And initially, I felt a little bit scared and just nervous because people were puking. People were cursing out loud in mind. One guy was getting acupuncture while on the medicine. And so he was really going through it. And I started to realize, like, this is actually really beautiful every time I hear someone

puke or curse or moan or burp because they're releasing something. And so every time I would hear like some intense noise or a curse, I would just be like, thank you for doing this work. Just energetically, I felt so grateful and proud of them for purging their demons. And I just think that that's what we can all do here on earth is to help liberate each other's souls and help each other return home. And being in an ayahuasca ceremony like that is that, that tend to unfolds in one tiny little container. And it's really special. I think that it helps you to witness anything that's underlying and bring it fully to the surface as a felt experience as maybe you know, a conversation that you're having with the medicine. So you can clear it so much

quicker. It's like feeling deeply times a thousand and interacting with your feelings, interacting with moments of the past and being able to rewrite them and reclaim them back into love, hopefully. but yeah I have so much reverence for that medicine I just bow down to anyone who has done that and I really realized my misconception that it was just some party thing and it actually is medicine and you're so brave if you can sit in a ceremony and witness yourself that authentically so yeah I know this is a rabbit hole we can spend so we can spend the rest of the podcast diving into and I'll probably link some videos below where you dive into more of your own personal experience for people that are curious I think so much of our life is

this balance between awareness and integration. Awareness and integration. There's so many different avenues and tools to support us gaining awareness. We spoke to many of them earlier that aren't plant medicine related. Plant medicine can be at times for people, depending on where you're at and how much you feel called, a catalyst to give you a big dose of awareness and bring things from the unconscious to the conscious. What I do feel like is that most people actually aren't lacking awareness in their life. Like most people know the habits they want to take in their life, the changes that they want to make. I'm sure there's many periods for people where they don't feel like they have that. But a lot of people, it's more the lack of integration.

It's actually doing and moving in the way and closing that gap from knowing what you should do to actually doing it. And so for me, I think we also share a similar path with really the devotional practices of yoga and meditation, being the path to both gain awareness, but then also integrate it into your own way of being. and then those tools, and to really use them as tools and not to abuse them with plant medicine can be a beautiful catalyst for moments in your life to really take up those chunks of unconscious material, bring them into the light, and then it's upon you outside of the medicine to really integrate them. And through that whole process, I think we really discover that our awakening is much more

of a letting go process than it is an attaining process. It's like really just discovering what already is in this moment. And that's a beautiful thing to see and to feel and to realize because who we are, I feel, in our essence, is totally joyful, blissful, connected to all of life. And what's the barrier, the proverbial condom in a sense is between us and life is those stories, those dogmas, those beliefs, those conclusions that we've picked up that are often unconsciously, somatically held in the body that we can move through after we gain awareness to then integrate and let go of. I think that's such a beautiful path. And realization that if you want to experience a more beautiful life, it's just removing what's in the way of you already experiencing that. And I think for you, plant medicine and for many people, especially that I know.

For me, it hasn't been as big of a calling. I've explored in different parts of my life. But there's just so many modalities in which to gain both awareness and integration. And so it's a beautiful invitation for those that are listening that want to explore more. And yeah, it was great. Yeah, there's so many tools. and I'm still a believer that it is not essential for everyone on their spiritual path to do that, but it does feel like a way to access some of that somatic release. And I think it is important to

do the psychotherapy, talk through the story, but also release the story from your body. And then also invite joy. It really is what you said of just letting go of all these stories we have attachment to or paradigms that aren't actually serving us and just surrendering to the moment surrendering to what's actually occurring all around us. And that is, I think, how we access our natural state of meditation and of connection to all things. But it's true. There's a lot of layers that sometimes we got to get rid of. And I think that meditation allows us to see through those layers, even if like throughout the day some of them come back or our programmed habits come back, taking moments of pause to clear all that, to polish the zone of awareness and doing that

repeatedly over a period of time will make it easier to access and will make it more of your resting point, even like seeing all the layers, seeing all the stories and paradigms that you're still acting upon, but knowing those aren't actually you and that you have the intention of releasing them is a great place to start too. I just want to share that you're never too far gone on your path. You're never, you know, too deep and you're forgetting because the moment that you remember to show up or remember who you want to be is a moment where all of that potential returns back to you. And I think that we always have access to all the potential in the world, the moment that we return back. And yeah. Beautiful. There's so much there.

Yeah. Continue pulling on these threads here. As you start to go on that process of continuing to let go of what you're not and what doesn't serve you anymore, we discover, I find, like a newfound level of creativity. We are creative beings. And so, maybe new desires for how we want to share ourselves or weave in the world comes online and that comes into our awareness. And I think it's so cool. And I really just admire individuals that are able to stay true to themselves on the path of self-actualization and success and impact and, you know, growing your YouTube channel or whatever people's art form or medium is to really connect with people. To be able to continue to stay true to yourself on that path, regardless of what the positive

feedback loop is or what people want, but to stay true to what you really want to share with people is so good. And so how do you and why do you feel like you've been able to connect with people so so fast online and like how does your vulnerability and authenticity play such a big role in your ability to connect with people and why people feel like they can really relate to you and kind of have this like soul sister online that is just sharing their journey with. And, you know, obviously I have my own thoughts, but I want to hear why you think it's, why you think it's been so successful really sharing yourself in that way. Well, I want to start off by saying, that when I first started my journey, I thought that spirituality did look a certain way with

mollabedes and like little white scarves. And I thought that I associated it with some aesthetic and then I really started practicing it and it became a lived experience. And I realized that I didn't have to shy away from any part of myself to live a spiritual life that I could be fully embodied and dress up in my secondhand clothes and wear makeup or not wear makeup. And it didn't have to look any type of way. Having a liberated soul can take so many different forms and that energetic vibration is just really attractive. I think just being authentic in whatever is your realest, truest experience without performing. And I have been able to clock really easily when I am performing, mostly because of my unpacking of internalized misogyny. I can tell when something

is actually me or it's what I think people want to see. And I've really tried to. shy away from that and I love speaking so honestly about all of my experiences and I think especially in regards to mental health I don't hold back in how heavy it feels or how much better it can get and that was something that a lot of people felt in their hearts and I think is the main thing that sort of built the community that I have is knowing that it's safe to expose all parts of ourselves and still be so worthy of love. And I would share myself ranting at like 2 a.m. about how I didn't like myself or wanted to die and realize that so many other people felt the same way. Or I would share my childhood stories of what happened in my household. And so many

people were like, oh yeah, that happened to me too. And it's just an understanding that all of us can be here and exist together. And I don't need to hide myself. And I think in so many areas of life, we feel like even our feelings are shameful and to find one place, even if it's on the internet, where all of us can take root and be seen and loved is really special. So I think that has something to do with it. And every time I meet people who watch my videos, it's like so almost emotional. It's a coming together of like sisters and friends that I, I know we've had such similar lives and still believed in the light and had so much fear around us and was love, had so much darkness and chose the light. And I think that's a big part of it is just living

without performance and not being afraid to expose all of it and hold it in neutrality at the end of the day. It gives people permission to do the same in their own lives and realize that just because you've been through heavy or hard things doesn't make you a heavy, bad or dark person by any means. Yeah. That commitment to yourself to first do the work, but then also commit to sharing with others and cultivating your service and desire for service for others is really beautiful to be able to share that. And I'm just curious, do you feel like you have a responsibility with your platform, with how you show up in the world? Do you feel like you have a responsibility to continue to share your healing journey and how you, and I'm curious to see how you maybe see yourself shifting and serving

the world in your own creative ways? I feel like a lot of my videos, the ones that mean the most me, especially the ones relating to my mental health, have been a deep calling and almost just channeled within me to share because I know that it'll help one person feel less alone. And I've shared a lot of my spiritual journey. And I know when it's taking away from me to share something that I've just gone through or share something that was a recent revelation that I still need to integrate. I can feel how it's too raw to share. And I have been sometimes giving a little bit too much of that away without just letting it be my own and sitting with it myself. I think I've become way more discerning and I actually have been keeping a lot of my

parts of my journey to myself recently and something that I really like to do is share the integrated stages of something that I learned or revelation that I had or even like tantric or sexual practices I'm doing. I like to really let them sit and integrate and become embodied before I share them because then it just feels like it's not, it's not real. And I think moving forward, I will continue to do that just really wait till something is fully integrated and embodied and also feel like it's okay to just share the light years. That's what I feel like I'm moving into is my light years. And pretty much most of my life until I turned until I hit my rock bottom felt like the dark

years. And I've shared a lot of that. And in a weird way, I think people connected with that more than me being happy. Like when I started sharing how happy and grateful I was, I was just beaming because I felt like light filled all the cracks of my heart where heaviness was. And I would always share how like when your heart is cracked open and you hit so many rock bottoms or your heartbroken, when you're happy, the depth of your joy can reach all those deep down parts. And I was so joyful that people thought I was on drugs when I was completely sober. I was just beaming. And they were almost like, you're not actually that happy.

But I was so content. And people related to that less because maybe they were on different parts of their journey and things like that. But I am just so excited to keep sharing my light ears and that it does get better. And it's okay to just feel in your ease, in your body, in your just mundane parts of your life and feel completely content. and there doesn't always need to be something to unpack. That's kind of where I'm at right now. I sure will process some little things, but I am not getting lost in the processing. I've talked through so many of my childhood traumas through what we shared today about doing

sex work. And I don't feel like there's anything left for me to draw from that. So I'm not like really needing to revisit those stories. I just see them as a happening. And I'm at the point where I am content just right. here and I don't really need to go through any intense spiritual yoking that I need to share. It'll probably happen as life does unfold. But for now, I just feel so grateful to share.

It's okay to literally be content with life, not need to go down wormholes of healing and to allow yourself to just know that you're on your path and to show up every day without any intense high or low without battling darkness or like surrounding yourself with the highest light. It's like just being steady and maybe being boring is okay. That's kind of how I feel lately is I'm just kind of boring because I'm stable now. It's a good place to be. But yeah, I think I am really excited to share actual yoga practices and meditation practices. So people can follow along with me there and not just hear and see this story, but just be able to drop into the things that actually helped me. And that's how I want to keep my responsibility and my community

feeling held, even if they are in their dark night of the soul. Yeah. Yeah. So good. I think for so many parts of our lives, going into doing that shadow work and shadow material is super necessary. And there's points where in different cycles of your life, compulsively or habitually going back to that place, you feel like it's the thing to do is actually probably what's not going to serve you the most. To continue to feed into the narrative that there's something wrong with you that you need to fix continues that cycle of you needing to be fixed and feeling like you're broken. And so it's this balance. It's this dance between actually going in this path of self-discovery and integrating your shadow material,

but then also coming for error and realizing that you don't need to continue trying to self-improve, but you can actually accept yourself and that you'll find more wholeness through that avenue too. So it's good that you're just being real to whatever your experience is. And I think that's what's going to continue to reflect, you know, connection with the audience. And yeah. Absolutely. And I think that a rule of them is that if the stories of your past are not showing up for you in the present in some way, like maybe having anxiety or some belief system that you're trying to release, then you don't have to go back to all of the stories of your childhood if they're not impacting the way you're showing up in the present moment. And that's, you don't have to go back to all the stories of your childhood. And that's, you're not impacting the way you're showing up in the present moment. And that. And that's, That's my rule of thumb. I only go back there if I need to neutralize something or I see a deeply rooted thought pattern that I want to release. I see where I learned it and I forgive the people involved and I set a new precedent for myself. But other than that, I feel like you can just let it be a happening and not keep pulling on those strings of the past. Fully resonate. How much has your like community and

and cultivating your friendship and choosing who you surround yourself with, how important has that been on your path? I think finding really close sisters, friends who see me fully, who love me unconditionally, was the first time I felt actually at home, this feeling of safety, reliability, accountability. I had such a tumultuous time in my upbringing, not feeling like I knew where my safe place was. And when I moved into this house with like five other women who were so sweet and so safe, initially I felt like I didn't want to go upstairs or spend time with anyone if I felt stressed or anxious or sad. And the moments that I finally did start to reveal myself and hang out and participate in what was happening while not feeling 100% myself and still being received with love changed my life.

I was like, oh, all of me can be here right now. And that has created a new baseline for me. And I feel like I know what family is because of my female friendships. And even just having one example of someone who sees you accurately and treats you the way that you want to be treated is enough to have faith in the world and have faith in humans. They're all really at the end of the day mirrors, right? We're all mirrors Ram Dass said. We're always walking each other home. Yeah.

It's the greatest gift to be surrounded by individuals that can see you to be in. safe spaces where your acceptance is inherent and you don't have to question or try to prove yourself or any of it. That sense of family, of chosen family, I think is so needed for people to experience. And I have so much compassion for people that don't have that. And I definitely did it in periods of my life. I know you did it as well. And so just know that it can come. And as you continue to do the work and you start to meet people and explore other people that are also on the path, you get to cultivate a lifestyle that is filled with people that really excite you and that can see and that can celebrate you and that aren't in competition with you all the time.

And that is such a rewarding feeling. And life just gets so fun and juicy when you're surrounded by individuals where you're all supporting each other. You really want to give towards one another. And I think that's an important distinction and energy is just to go into connection with other individuals asking what can I give, not what can I get. And that can just allow you to authentically connect with people. And it's important to also go into that saying, what can I give?

not because that's a thing I'm supposed to do, but genuinely because I want to give, not so I can one day get. That has strings attached to it, you know? No, I love that. It's like, what can I offer your life? How can I help and assist your evolution? How can we do that for each other? I really love asking my friends any way that I can support them in that specific season of their life

or how can I be a benefit to you? How can you use me? Because I like this idea of being fully used in life for all of your little gifts and miracles. I'm really good at listening. I'm always here to listen for you or I can bake you little things to support your busy work schedule. Like even little things like that, I really appreciate always bringing sort of an offering into the spaces that you enter, including relationships and having this awareness that whether they last a heartbeat or a lifetime, we have the potential to positively impact one another. If you are meeting a new friend, bringing some

form of intentional practice, offering a breath together, offering to make food as a little ritual, praying into your food. There are ways that you can anchor deep presence and intention with so many people. And it doesn't have to look a certain way, but finding the authentic way to bring medicine into your connection simply by, you know, an invitation of cacao or breath or meditation, I think everyone is deeply spiritual in their own way. Everyone is a spiritual being having this human experience. And there is a way to kind of draw out presence in any relation that you're in. So how do you recommend just being the person who invites that? I love that. Beautiful reminder. What's been your journey with, you know, there's many different

layers to discovering freedom within. You know, there's mental freedom. There's mental freedom. There's physical freedom in your body. There's financial freedom. There's sexual freedom. There's so many different ways in which we have to kind of go past these old condition narratives that have been passed down that are keeping us in a limited version of ourselves that don't feel free, that don't feel liberated. So I'm curious for you sexually, what has been your exploration?

What has been your liberation through that path? Because I think it's cool how you've had this full circle kind of moment in healing those traumas that you kind of, you know, accumulated earlier on in your journey. And then, you know, you also make videos and share about your process and path with that. And I think we definitely need more voices that are honest, real examples of that part of us that is so shamed, typically, because it's a part, it's why we're all here, quite literally. And it's yet something that we all have so much, oftentimes deep conditioning around. So I'm just curious about your process of releasing that conditioning and also sharing that with other people, how that's been for you. Yeah, absolutely.

I see in the world a lack of resources around sexual education, especially with my own experience. I started exploring my body at a really young age, and I started learning about sex the traditional way at this point, like so many other people do through porn. And I would be watching such intense content at the age of 12 years old that was sometimes violent or abusive or just really intense versions of sexuality, mostly through the male gaze. And that added to my performance of sexuality. But when I was alone in my room with my body, it felt so pure. It just felt like me excited about exploring myself, excited about pleasure. And throughout time, I feel like I lost connection to my own pure desire to explore myself because of the performative aspect.

And as I started to reclaim that, by going celibate and practicing my sacred, authentic yeses, and knows, I was able to give my pleasure back to myself, my orgasm back to myself, orgasm in ways that my body kind of forgot to over time. and I started to feel like, oh, my pleasure and sexuality in general is something that is for both people involved, not just one person, and started to feel like I was reclaiming my desires, my sexual purity, and I just instantly felt called to share that because I was really excited about sex again, which for a while felt like this sort of obligational thing that I had been doing or something that was just troubling me a lot transformed back into something that I could use for manifestation that I could use to heal my past stories and bring me in closer connection

with myself. So I started to do a lot of yoni egg work and yoni mapping, which is to bring awareness to different parts of the yoni and help to just be present with whatever stories may still linger there. I personally feel like every lover I've ever had in some way was still inside of me until I did practices to cut cords and release them. And I felt like a lot of my Yoni was numb also from trauma that I experienced. And I, through my own self-pleasure and massage was able to release those and sort of awaken my Yoni again and reclaim it as my holy, sacred body and it really is a place of transformation and I felt like anyone who enters is also getting blessed as I am getting blessed from them and it's such a deep intimate form of energy

exchange and I started to really take that seriously but also wanted to share that that is another way that sex can be not this intense obligational shameful thing and I remember the first orgasm that I had without feeling. heaviness after it. I set the intention to remember my sacred sexuality and my sexual purity and to feel joy and to allow all these good feelings to flood every cell of my body and know that it's bringing me closer to myself. And I felt like I couldn't stop laughing after that love-making experience. And from there, I just always set intentions before I would orgasm. And it actually really shaped my experience of lovemaking and helped me to use it as the sacred practice that it is.

And I, just like how I shared with my suicidal thoughts and just all of my mental health feel like it's such an opportunity to give people a resource, a safe space to be human and discover more about themselves. And so I have shared a lot on actual sex positions you can do or ways that you can touch yourself or pleasure your partner. And I love sharing those videos because it's one less person on a website that has exploitation or sexual violence on it. So it just felt really natural for me to share and talk that talk and bring sacred intention into it and just keep it fun and light with boundaries and with consent and with awareness. I think that sometimes thinking about spirituality and intention setting feels so serious and boring.

But when it comes to pleasure, it actually invites even deeper connection and deeper pleasure when you can communicate what feels good, what's a genuine no in your body and getting really acclimated with what a no and yes feels like in your body. That will change your experience of lovemaking because you can fully be there during that experience. So that was just a really big, a lot of little big moments of transformation for me in sharing my body. body was realizing that I can co-create this experience and be fully here for it. And I don't have to numb myself or not use my voice throughout any of this process. And I think that talking about sex in general is really healing because we all have stories around it. And especially talking about sex with the person that you're making love with, which is something that doesn't always happen where you talk about what happened afterwards. Did you like that? Did that feel good? Was anything coming up for

you and an invitation to even cry and really express during lovemaking. I really like the idea of having like a sexual manifesto almost with your partner and sharing what your intentions are in sharing your bodies, things that you want to release, maybe conditioning that you have and helping each other to deconstruct those together. It's a really beautiful practice. And yeah, there are just so many, I think new resources that are coming out on how to have lovemaking that feels like it's meant to, which is just holy and something that brings you back into oneness and union. I think it's so beautiful to come in contact with people who have been through that whole process, whether it's, like I spoke to earlier, it's many different levels

in our life from financial to mental to physical to sexual freedom. And to be in the clarification of what your desires are. And you can't hear what your desires are or listen to yourself really if there's so much noise within you. So a lot of the practices you were talking about earlier. And then also for me, taking periods of life, a time in my life where I was solid a bit, I think also really just support you in honing and clarifying your own energy and your own desire and allowing those noises of other people's beliefs to settle. And then you can start to attract magnetize, seek out individuals that are in alignment with your way of viewing the world and sexuality. And then you can come into partnership. And that is a really deep well

to explore. There's so much within tantra and exploring the multi-sensory experience that it is to be a human being. And it's just a really fruitful path to explore. Just like what's authentic to you and what do you really want? And like that's

a process of clarifying what that really is. Yeah. But then it feels so good to actually honor yourself. Like really what your yes is and what your no is and your yes has no power unless you're able to say no. you know like unless you have a clear sand for what does and doesn't work for you then your yes is just like it's not really your yes it's kind of somebody else's yeah it's it's an obligational it's not an

empowered yes maybe yeah yeah that's like a while to learn i think a lot of women have obligational sexual exchanges because they don't want to deal with the discomfort of their partners by saying no and that took me years to move through and know that know that it's okay to make someone else uncomfortable in order to protect the safety of my own body and womb. There's so many different, there's so many avenues. I could literally, we could go on for hours and hours and hours. I'm like there's so much to unpack here. I know. There is. And I'm sure we'll have to run it back again in another time as well. I've been loving all the different avenues we've already been exploring in this podcast. I want to explore just a couple different, a couple different things before we start to head towards wrapping this puppy up.

Yes. Okay. So I'm just trying to pull out what I feel like. some listeners of yours maybe want to hear from you in this format that they haven't typically, you know, heard, which is probably pretty hard to find because you share so much about so much on your channel, which is great. I love that. I'd be talking. Yeah. For individuals that feel called to share themselves in a similar way with either creating a YouTube channel, sharing themselves online, but being authentic to whatever their spiritual practices are or their process, whatever people want to share, however their vehicle of connecting with people via online is, what advice is, what advice do you have for conscious content creators?

I really love this question because I'm so passionate about what I do. I love being able to make videos. And I feel like I've been able to balance my sort of wellness journey, my spiritual journey with just being a human and not needing to take it so seriously. I feel like I don't intentionally make wellness or my mental health journey the main part of my videos. I weave that into my day-to-day life and I really like to share beautiful aesthetic moments. But then with my spoken word, with my poetry that I share, I get to bring people into a deeper experience. And I think that is really beneficial because a lot of times people aren't looking for someone talking about their mental health journey.

Like all of us do maybe need tips or want guidance, but a lot of people do go on social media to be entertained. And if you can do both entertain, excite them, inspire them creatively, and drop in some nuggets of wisdom throughout that. That can be really accessible and be something that just helps your content sort of take off in the fast-paced formats of social media. So I think not shying away from any aspect of your experience, not needing to rest fully into just your spiritual journey, but also how you live your life and the ways that you adorn your maybe you make more ethical or conscious choices with what you wear and you can share that and maybe you're an artist and you can share all the beautiful aspects of who you are and your life as well as the spiritual journey and the mental health things that you may be going through. It feels like sharing the deep down parts of yourself and bridging that with the beautiful

exterior that a lot of people do gravitate towards on social media and sharing many different aspects of your life helps you bring in a broader audience as well because some people might just be interested in vegan food videos or some people really like ethical fashion or ceramics. I mean these are just things that I share but then they say for you know the genuine authentic unmasked heart that's behind all of that so I think not shying away from sharing all all aspects of your life and not needing to stick with a certain niche or put yourself in a box too soon and brand yourself as something. It's pretty much just being genuinely,

authentically embodied and knowing that you're bringing that into everything you're doing. And people will be interested if it's, you know, coming from a true place inside of you. Not needing to rest too deeply into an identification with like spirituality or wellness. but sharing it the authentic way it shows up in your life. And I also recommend not absorbing too much content either so that you can figure out what you want to create, the way you want to create it, the text you want to use, the music, and really getting excited about sharing your story in your unique way

rather than outsourcing templates of how other people have done it. Yeah. It's powerful. I feel like for you, for me as well, for so many creators, it's a process of discovering what uniquely lights you up and like what can authentically bring you excitement for what you want to create and how you want to share in the world. And that's a process of self-discovery, you know, as much as it is self-expression. They're like one and the same really. Removing those voices that aren't yours, discovering what really lights you up, how you want to share. And then getting good, like putting in the time and the effort of whether it's editing, whether it's filmmaking, photo making, painting.

It's like whatever your art form or vehicle of expression is how it gets shared with the world, not just what you're sharing, but the way in which you get shared, that's a process of commitment over time to really get good at something. And you've gotten good at making videos and understanding how you're doing thumbnails and titles and creating engaging topics and sharing it in a way that is concise and really breaking it down for people to be able to digest and apply on their life. And a lot of that, because it seems so useful, people probably wouldn't have, they don't see the behind the scenes work that you put in to do that. But there's a saying that those who know knows who know. So like being able to see somebody that creates at a certain,

in a way in it that's packaged and that feels easeful. I know there's a lot of effort that's gone into that over a lot of, you know, big period of time. Yeah, it's a lot of filming and editing. It's so funny because I will spend like three days working on a video and I'll have spent a lot of time inside editing, but the video is me outside, like living this great life in nature. And I'm like, wow, they don't see that half the time. I'm like crunched up underneath the blanket just on my device. and actually really connected to technology and social media. But I do really like to completely log off the moment that I upload. And this is the reason why I don't always interact with comments because I could spend like full time just responding to comments.

But the moment that I post, I'm like completely done. I need to go outside and touch some grass. And that has been a really helpful practice for me. But keeping it embodied, no matter what you create, just keeping it aligned with what you're, actually trying to create in your life and not something that takes away or not something that feeds to the performance, but something that aids your liberation as well is helpful. And I really like what you said about insigratable content because I do like to share the exact tips of what I learned, even in my sexuality videos. I'm like, here's how to do the stroke or like,

here is the breathwork practice to end your anxiety. It's just like, this is straight to the facts kind of thing so that people can watch for five minutes and get an actual tool. That's really helpful. Yeah. For anybody that wants to live a life where they're waking up and doing what genuinely lights them up the most, which we all, of course, want, we've shared so many tips today about, you know, how you can go on the path of self-discovery and actualization and clarify your gifts, clarify your desires, all of that. And I feel like it really just comes down to if you get masterful at anything that you're really good at, that you love, and you're only going to get masterful at something if you really love it. Otherwise, you're not going to have the endurance,

the longevity to really to dive into it. But then the money piece, which is a big piece of how the sustainability of it comes, we'll just come. You'll be able to figure that out. If you create something that is really meaningful to you, that is actually good and can be received by the world, and whatever it is, I truly believe any of it can become monetized

and you can create a career out of it, which is so great that you've been able to do that. And I think what you just shared is super helpful for individuals to continue to unlock that and share that with the world. Okay, a couple other quick things. How do you feel like the richness of your bloodline affects how you infuse the way you weave in the world, but then also your content? Because you do have a very interesting mix. And it's super rad and beautiful.

But I'm just curious how you feel like that. And your ancestry informs who you are and how you share. I grew up in a household with siblings who all came from different backgrounds. We have the common lineage of my mom who's Venezuelan and Ketruin. But I immediately identified how we were all had slightly different energies because of the other half of our ancestry. And I just feel like for me, I can relate to a lot of people's sort of confusion in the world when it comes to who they are and where they come from as someone who's mixed and not having connection to. my ancestry in a way and knowing yet that I still feel and remember things in my body and in my DNA. I just think that's helped me to relate to a lot of other people who are trying to reclaim

themselves and their full power and their lineage. And I'm really just on the journey of that now. I think that I even experiencing sort of like discrimination in my childhood or being bullied because of my race. Also, I see the struggle of people's lived experience. And that's something that has made spirituality more integrated in my life is that I have never bypassed, like, oh, we're all one, so it doesn't matter. Like, no one's at fault for this or that. Like, we all in some ways have been indoctrinated with certain forms of prejudice against

other people. And I think that has just informed a really grounded form of spirituality that. doesn't really allow me to bypass when it comes to really important things like race and queerness and things like that. I just feel like it's really important for me that everyone feel seen and safe and I am aware of those like social issues a little bit more. And a lot of my audience are also like BIPOC individuals and I feel really grateful to continue learning how to make everyone feel safe in a space and advocate for all different kinds of people. But I think that's mostly it. I'm still learning about myself and who I am. Really? Who would have thought? You're very

wise beyond your ears. Oh my gosh. Likewise. Yeah. It's so beautiful. So last little thing that I was thinking of. What do you feel like is the most worthwhile investment that you've made in yourself? It could be with money or just time and energy. What do you feel like is that? I'm going to say two things. One is definitely the yoga teacher training containers. This is now going to be my third one. And whether or not you're seeking to become a teacher and instruct yoga, it is a really great container for you to build your own practice for life. And the second thing is more energetic is that I used to pause my joy and my ease in my body until after I finished my work. I would wait until after a video was uploaded or I finished a deadline to give myself some relief by going outside or being kind to

myself and I don't do that anymore. I will give myself a moment of pause in between editing or in between meetings and fill myself with love and good feelings. So really just allowing myself to take pauses and knowing I can still get everything done through joy and ease has really changed my life. Time, just time spent doing nothing essentially. So, so important. I actually. Sometimes when I go to bed or I could close my eyes, I then feel like I just get a jump of inspiration out of nowhere and I have to journal or something. So last night also I had just like in my bedroom there's like a kind of like a glass wall where I can see the outside. But I caught like a glimpse. It sounds like so like out of a movie or something.

But I caught a glimpse of the reflection of myself in it. And maybe I'm just too deep. But like I could just feel like I caught a moment in time of presence and to realize that like my life. life is passing by me. And we're both excited to continue to share our journeys and develop our careers. But like the true joy in our life really comes from how present we are. Like that's, that's the real amount of success and how much time we can infuse and pump by how present we are in our life. So I just love that those investments into yourself that you shared allow you to cultivate joy irrespective whatever the external circumstances. Like that's true success in my

eyes because the nature of life is impermanent and phenomena is going to continue, arise and pass away. And the moment something beautiful happens by nature, by definition, it's also going to pass away. Same thing with those low moments. And so being able to invest in who you are with you alone, doing nothing, and finding contentment and stillness and fulfillment in that is probably the most rewarding thing that we can do. Absolutely. That's my dream. And I can do it any moment that I choose to pause. Yeah. One of my intentions is just to not rush, and that is definitely an investment as well, to know it's okay to slow down and invite all of that. Yeah. Yeah, there's that saying that rushing is violence, you know. It feels like that in the body. Yeah. Yeah. So good. It's been so good to be able to

drop in with you and get to know more about you and your story and your heart. And it's, I just, I'm so proud of you for the path that you've, that you've walked and the honest, genuine, an inquiry within that you've been able to take in your life and the way that you share it, it's just so awesome. So thank you. I'm so grateful to both of us for just showing up and believing, even in the things that weren't there in the moment, but being guided by our hearts and the deep down places. It's really beautiful to share the seed of awareness.

I know we're sort of like looking through a similar lens into the world, and that's really beautiful, like a lens of loving awareness. So thank you for meeting me there. Yeah. Yeah. Pleasure is mine. Yeah, so good. Is there anything else on your heart that you want to share that you feel called to before we begin to wrap up? The last thing I want to share is that nothing that you can feel is wrong, that all of you is welcome. And in every single moment, you can return home and empower yourself in some way. In each now moment, there's something you can do to help bring you closer to where you want to go or bring you closer to your breath or to spirit. and there's space and you have time and you are infinitely redeemable.

You're infinitely redeemable. I love that. Thank you so much. It's been such a joy again. I'm sure we'll link everywhere people can find you in the description below, but is there anything else you want to point people to where they can find you or connect with you or anything before you wrap up? No.

Great. Yeah. All right. Well, what a beautiful drop in. I'm so excited to rewatch this back. There are so many incredible moments. throughout. And again, I just want to acknowledge your authenticity and your vulnerability for showing up and crying within the first 20 minutes of the podcast. Our intention was really met because I was like,

I hope we cry, laugh and like share some deep truths and all of that happens. Thank you for creating a space for that to happen. So easy. Yeah, my honor. My pleasure. And for everybody that has been tuning into this episode, I think we both feel this collective soul family that gets to tune into these conversations and we feel you in us and around us in these conversations. And so I just want to acknowledge you for doing the work, for being interested in these conversations, for providing yourself, hopefully through this conversation, a little bit more acceptance and patience with you on your journey and know that even if it's just through these cameras and microphones and also energetically, that word is here to support you on your journey and proud of you for doing the work also. So thank you

for coming on this journey with me on the show of me doing my favorite thing. but it's getting to sit down with right human beings and connect and drop in heart to heart, soul to soul. And ah, ho, thank you so much. Until next time, be one.