Welcome to the she who is seeking podcast. We just exited a particularly nasty mercury and retro grade. In which everyone I know was either sick or dealing with some major disaster. I had. Some illness. That you'll hear in my voice off and on in this recording. My grandmother is currently still in the hospital. And my beloved koi fish, Nico. Was presumed, dead and eaten by a crane or a Hawk. And was gone for 10 days and reappeared. The night before last. In desperate need of medical attention.
Please. Forgive what, is maybe not the most delicious edited podcast that we have here. Welcome to she who is seeking healing. I'm Meena Melissa Leigh and this is the She Who Is Seeking podcast. And today I would love to welcome you into our magic space, our little parlor, grab yourself a lovely cup of tea, or start that scenic drive, go for a walk or get in the sauna, today on the show we explore healing. We touch on what is nearly a bottomless subject for me, at least.
And I suspect for you too. So some background. Let's go back about nine years or so. I found myself in deep pain and it was stemming from a marriage I had really fought for, but was over. I had to start all over again in a new city with a tiny toddler and a baby. Two precious little souls that needed me to be okay and take care of them and fix everything.
I knew I needed healing from it all too, but I felt BLOWN, I was in mama bear mode and doing what needed to be done, but really in need of healing. I knew I needed to be a clear vessel to be a conduit of healing for them, but it just felt like it was all too much. I returned to practices that had gotten me through other tough times, meditation and Kundalini yoga. And that is where I met my next teacher.
Wahe Guru Kaur I signed up to do a year long healer training course with her focused around Celtic, shamanism and healing breath work in this course, there was so much remembering, and awakening, her love always shines through and the space we opened when we called in the elements, directions, guides and guardians felt warm, powerful, and safe, and had a glow. We were someplace else where the healing comes through portals that time out of time. Recalling practices.
I had played with as a youth and learning new techniques felt natural, like memories. The group was loving and supportive. When you go through such deep and vulnerable work with people in the same path, you connect in a way that's more soul to soul than heart. Each season, we explored the elements in a deep and visceral way, connecting us to our true essence. For me, it was through the pain. We went in deep.
I say that to say I was raw, my nerves open and like electric wires, the body remembers the psyche remembers. And so does the spirit, there's no time limits or barriers to unprocessed pain. It lives in a space between time in our cells and DNA ,in our lineage and our personal narrative. What we carry around as raw material in our coding echoes through memory, epigenetics and ancestral heritage. It goes up and down the family tree and back into history.
If we don't accept the challenge of doing this work in our own lives, it trickles through our family trees, into the new shoots and fresh growth birthed into being. For my children, I knew it required me to acknowledge the pain of our lineage and of the history of my own. They say history repeats itself. It can be a reminder or it can be an ominous warning. I would start to lose my voice out of nowhere during these really heavy healing weekends.
My throat chakra and all its connections, sending clear messages to me about what I was and wasn't acknowledging and which truths I was, or wasn't speaking out into the world. I wanted to accept and pursue a lightness of being, but as we uncovered layers, one by one, we can see them more clearly for what they are. Rather than what we always assumed them to be. It's clear how things fit together and amplify one another. When you give them the space and lay them all out.
Often my realizations were, as I was sharing the experience of the healing breath, the words that came out of my mouth were never what I had planned to say when I was waiting for my turn. I leaned in to all the tough questions. And when it came time for the shares, I cracked open. I shared from places in my body that were decades old, hard dried scratchy cutting mean things that had shaped me, came out in shared stories, and in tears, I bore my soul to these people in a space out of time.
Things I had hidden for years, tried to forget things I thought I had moved on from and worked through, things I thought I was over. It was infinitely frustrating. The meaning of it all unfolding before me. In real time, I was bearing witness to the truth that lay before me as the words piled on my lap I could see it only as I surrendered to the experience that deep layer of protection peeled back to let the truth flow out.
Each time we met, I went down more layers, apprehensive and brave in equal measure. It was such intense work, but I knew I needed to be all in. To be honest, I was so tired all the time from being a mom to these amazing and intense little ones, that part of me just wanted to sneak in naps during the meditation and the breath work. But I didn't, I did every assignment, the weekends of class, I would be a complete puddle, a ball of tears and weeping.
I'd lose my voice almost every time, maybe it even was every single time, but I was determined and I did tremendous work. I went in deep and I ran towards the fire. I had healing visions that took me to the next step. I listened to the guidance and then learned from the work I had realizations and then more questions.
I had shame for the wrong done to me, for not protecting myself, even though I was just a child I had blame for not having boundaries that would have sealed out fresh and fractions. I had regret for making decisions that I wish were different. I was so used to feeling like everything was my fault, even if it wasn't and I had to develop a deeper understanding of how we are all doing the best we can. At any given time, including myself, we don't do poorly on purpose.
We just don't have the tools to do better, until we do. We also tend to believe what we believe, even if it's wrong. I realized that I had felt broken my whole life up until that point. I operated in that space. And during this year I saw for the first time, that little girl ,and I held her with love and safety. She was perfect and strong. I was perfect and strong how easy it had always been to give the understanding and grace to others when they needed it.
But so impossible for me to give it to myself. I denied it to myself without even realizing it because it never occurred to me that I was the most important person to shower with this unconditional love. I had to learn, really learn that I was whole and perfect and doing the best I could. This realization today is so commonplace. Every millennial and younger has probably been raised on these notions, but that's the thing with healing.
Like I said, when we do this healing for ourselves, it ripples up and down the family tree and we are all so intimately interconnected at the end of each weekend, I'd pull myself together and meet up with my whole family for dinner. It was always quite a shocking reentry. Maybe that was the hardest part of the weekend ,but it did teach me an interesting skill. I would need to get through the night, until I could reset myself with a good night's sleep.
We can be doing the work while it's on the back burner. We don't need to turn our lives upside down or burn it to the ground to change profoundly. It's all a process and a practice. Always. It was one foot in front of the. I doubled down on salt, baths and meditation. I went to more yoga. I took care of myself and I remembered that self care was important, but I never lost sight of the purpose, which was to heal myself enough to be able to be there fully, be there for my kids.
I signed up for yet another year of training and I went deeper, I cleared more, brought more up, worked on that. It seemed never ending. I kept doing all the work, but there was always more in the inbox. And the thing is I didn't give up, but at some point healing couldn't stay my number one priority. I had to have time to do other things. And this is where that compartmentalizing trick came in handy.
So at a certain point, I scooped up all the rest of the darkness and pain that had been bobbling around and I set it down and I walked away. Not in a denial way, but I just needed a break to garden and paint and play with the kids without the heaviness, with that lightness and the space. I was able to let new things in. More healing and new skills. I learned to see what the pain of others look like, because I wasn't so tired from the burden of carrying my own.
It was in these years that I learned to deal with the trauma I had been carrying around my whole life. It was liberating, illuminating, inspiring, and freeing. I learned to live without the weight of shame. And that is the only way to live when we're under the power of shame. We are stunted and so very tired. I felt like I was chasing the light, always under the warmth of the sun.
But after a few years of living in these healing, rays, it began to feel like it was time to let the night catch up darkness isn't bad and light is good... They're just two sides of the coin. All of life is cyclical. It's all phases and ebb and flow. There's no bright full moon sky without the darkness of the new moon. I learned a lot in those years of healing about the way pain looks and feels in the body. The way it can make a heart heavy and thick and calloused.
I learned how to see light and shadow in others with new eyes. I was able to learn, to see with the eyes of compassion. I've had the desire to move past old hurts because I realized when I held on to the anger and resentment, I was the only one that was suffering. I didn't want to carry that weight anymore. Sometimes I had to come at a situation from the other person's perspective. I could no longer view the world as good and evil, black and white, right and wrong.
During this time I tried to cultivate a heart of non-dualism it's something I still continually work on. When we see the interconnectedness of all things, it brings us to our knees. We can no longer grasp to the things the way we once did. Not when we're in what my teacher, Dr. Raven Lee calls our mystic double the learnings surrounding the Mystic Double and cultivating the ability to inhabit that space. I learned from her and I will always be grateful.
My learnings fromthat are when we interact with the world from this place that is higher than ourself and purer than ourself, and yet is still ourselves we begin to see things from a new perspective when that's not as connected to the heaviness of certainty, we can still be certain without wearing it like a crown. When we operate from the Mystic Double we are in our default operating from our highest potential. And that isn't controlled by the ego.
When I studied with Raven, it was illuminating, it was painful and it taught me how to stay on my knees and just listen. It taught me how to work with the Dark Goddess and honor her great power to cut through illusion, to see her fierceness with the heart of a child. Who feels the protection of the mother, not with an adult's fear, but with certainty and comfort, from a place of feeling protected and cared for.
When we can cultivate and embody these things, it allows us to show up in our power with our purpose front and center, and it keeps us honed in on what's. Important for several years, I worked and learned from my teacher how to be a student of the world who stands with feet planted in humility and power. I re-wove my body with these lessons and learnings.
And with these new eyes, I saw the truth, shedding the pain was not the goal and setting it down for reprieve was not a free pass, or a vacation from hurt, but rather it allowed me to take some deep breaths in between being slammed by waves. It was setting down the trauma on a warm rock to take a dip in a refreshing river to heal and cleanse and float along the current.
To cool my body to the core and soothe my aching muscles to the point where I was energized and ready to pick it all back up and put it on like a cloak. The way I saw it, I had to shed the rest of the pain and darkness for awhile, to be able to embrace the light. I just couldn't access it with all the darkness in charge. And though I felt light and I was teetering into dangerous territory at some point. And I was out of balance.
We cannot be in the space of willfully ignoring unprocessed parts of ourselves for long. I had to circle back around and gather up all those pieces of myself back up. I did that during those years of working with Raven, and doing multiple soul retrievals. There were fragments that I knew I had taken out of me and put down, and there were parts that were forcibly expelled as a young child. And as a young teenager, pieces of me that were too hot and too dangerous to hold with that delicate skin.
But the work I had done of confronting the flames over and over again, toughened me up enough to do the work. It made me resilient enough to do it. It was not light or easy work to assimilate these pieces back into my life. But I was ready. This was low and slow learning. I had the space and guidance, the want and will ,I was able to hold it all, because I had done it all step by step. And this is the power of being ready of learning from those who have lived. Of being willing to go deep.
It isn't meant to be pain-free or easy. It's meant to change your life. And it did change my life. This is work that cannot be undone. You're always better off for digging into the muck and sorting it all out with bravery, honesty and sincerity. You become a stronger vessel. And you can take more without breaking or yielding. You learn how to bend and sway while remaining firmly planted.
I felt it was important to share a bit about my healing journey, because we don't always talk about what it's like to go through it. Each person's healing journey is nonlinear. Healing has huge periods of expansion and growth, followed by that dreaded contraction, which feels like backsliding, but it isn't, it's just part of the cycle. I don't hear many people discuss their journey because frankly it's hard to do, especially from a position that's open and honest.
It can make us feel hyper vulnerable. And I know that there's so much power, and being in our authentic selves and from sharing from a place that doesn't hide the challenging parts. When we only see the successful afters, without seeing the before struggles, we set people up to feel like they're behind or they don't measure up, but that's simply just isn't true.
We don't always see the work that goes into the transformations and the growth, and we aren't always privy to the struggles and you don't need to compare yourself to anyone else. Not only is it easy to have blind spots about where we can let in more lightness and space into our lives, but we don't always acknowledge the way in which our actions affect one another. We are so interconnected as beings, that are part of a bigger whole.
How every step forward for humankind nudges us forward as a collective, the reverse can be true as well. And it's our sacred responsibility to make the best choices for ourselves, one another and the planet, I believe being on a conscious journey and in community are some of the things that keep me connected to my purpose and my light. When we're inspired by those doing good work and we're connected to things outside of our own experience and needs.
We can remember the larger work that we want to accomplish. . The She Who Is Seeking Podcast is the love child of me, Meena Melissa Leigh, and all views ideas, and thoughts are my own, except where noted and credited. The music is the beautiful song, Snake River by Siren and the Sea. And I just want to say thank you for listening. Thank you for those of you who have subscribed. Thank you. If you have left a review, thank you. If you've shared on social media, thank you.
If you've just sent me positive thoughts through the ether, I received them. Thank you. Thank you. And I just want to tell you, I love doing this so much, and I hope that you're finding some value in it or that I'm keeping you company in doing whatever you're doing. And I also would like to. Say I've had the glorious privilege to work with some incredible teachers over the years. And I'm sure you'll hear more about them in the future. And for today's episode, I want to thank my teachers.
Wahe Guru Kaur for allowing me to do work trades and energy exchange and providing such a safe container for me to do this work at a time that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. And I'm forever grateful and I love you. And to Raven, I am so grateful for the years that we worked together and all of the grace and opportunity you afforded me. And I take my learnings with me into the world with a heart full of gratitude. I will put some more information about both of them in the show notes.
If you're interested in learning more I'm sending you so much love and until next time, just continue to stay curious and seek out the things that make you happy and bring you joy. And if you don't already follow me on Instagram, I'm over there at she who is seeking and also Tik TOK at she who is seeking. I guess you could say I'm all over at She Who Is Seeking. And I'm sending you love and. Victory to the goddess. Blessed Be!