Remote Reiki Testimonial

I received a lovely testimonial from a new client, Paris, after her remote reiki session.

I just wanted to thank you so so much for our reiki session. The morning after our session, I felt a clearness within that I don’t recall ever feeling before. It felt like the feeling after you’ve deep cleaned your home and just lit a candle. Relief, calmness and inspiration are just a few things that I’ve experienced in the months that followed. Before this session, I struggled with the path I wanted my life to go in. I felt like I was making some progress in the right direction but still missing the mark. After the session, I had an epiphany that seemed so obvious that it was almost laughable. Now I am taking steps in this new direction and I feel so inspired and alive.  

10-Series Testimonial

Grace first worked with me in a clairvoyant healing, which later led to an integrative, then an integrative 10-series. It was beautiful to watch her shift from fear paralysis to making a power move with her job, her relationships and finding full agency in her life, and even discovering some of her spiritual gifts! —- in just 2.5 months.

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“Maria is an amazing healer! I did the 10 series integrative healing and it made a profound impact in my life. I started to suffer from depression in 2021 and it kept on getting worse as the months went by. I've never been in that bad of a mental state in my life and I knew I needed help. I sought help from a professional therapist for a couple of months but it didn't work for me so I eventually terminated the therapy sessions. After that, around February 2022, my internal voice told me loud and clear that I should try out alternative healing, that's when I found Maria.

During the integrative healing sessions with Maria, we uncovered that the childhood trauma I suffered from my mother has been negatively impacting me my entire life and is hugely contributing to the grief, anxiety, and fear that I experience on a daily basis. Knowing that, we did a lot of trauma relief work and with the help of Maria, I was eventually able to walk out of it and heal. At the end of the 10 sessions, I truly understood what it meant to be present in my body and to be in touch with my emotions --- something that I've always been avoiding subconsciously. Maria also taught me how NOT to be an energy vampire and instead find the power within myself. That was a very hard yet important lesson for me.

This healing journey with Maria was not easy. It required hard work and facing some of my darkest fears. But it was extremely rewarding and effective. As cliche as it may sound, but ‘the only way out is through’,”

10-Series Testimonial

Colby first worked with me with past life regression, when I used to offer that (I no longer offer the hypnosis session, but past life readings can be done with Clairvoyant Healing). He then worked with me with Clairvoyant Healing, which showed us a bird’s eye view template of what he needed to heal. It then became very evident that the 10-series would be the way to go. Below is his testimonial after his 10-series:

“I have a deep sense of gratitude for Maria and the art of her craft.  She embodies her work - she was made for this.

I started into this searching for answers in my past lives, hoping to know what might have happened to me - why do I feel so disconnected with this world, with other people and with myself?  What is my purpose for being here? 

Through our first insightful session, my trust and respect for Maria grew.  Shortly after I decided to go forward with 10 sessions to work through this life, here and now. 

Early in these sessions I came to know and confront the true nature of my father and mother and the trauma of my early years. 

Through this work, Maria always met me in such a steady and assured way.  Memories and flashbacks were pieced together, and we worked through some of the pain held in my body.  I found myself answering questions I hadn’t dared to ask myself before.  There were many intense and long repressed emotions that came to the surface and were processed in these sessions. I now feel that the ‘lost boy’ in me who felt unsafe in his own body, is here with me now and greatly at ease.

Maria was quite adept, sometimes subtle and sometimes direct, at pointing me back to myself, to my own inner strength - to take agency for my life and for my well being - something I learned to give away in my earlier years. Taking greater care of myself is how I am carrying this life forward now.

Though I have more work to do, I’ve never known such long periods of calm and peace.  I am forever grateful for finding Maria and that I took the plunge by reaching out to her,”

Parallel Mothers

I’ve been watching a lot of films related to motherhood- Pablo Larrain’s Ema, Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter. Also, the last film I mentioned on my blog is also about the actions of a mother which makes sense why I thought of it recently.

All of these films show a range of motherhood- the sincerity, the struggle, the failure. Most of these, especially Ema, The Lost Daughter, Nobody Knows also discuss abandonment. In our social narrative, mothers rarely abandon their children. Mothers also don’t necessarily get a wide range of permission to show or discuss what they truly feel regarding their children.

A book I read a few years ago called Mean Mothers which I’d highly recommend to women who are healing through their relationship with their mother that spoke about the taboo of mothers being represented as anything but kind, giving, nurturing. There’s a potential jealous side to a mom/daughter relationship, a destructive side, a cruel side. To not have much exposure to these sides makes it so that abuse within the mother/daughter dynamic is harder to see and therefore the impact is harder to heal.

As children, our moms are like deities. We accept everything they do without a second thought, until we later come to find how imperfect they were because they too are human. We come to realize that they have their own traumas, and that some of them were emotionally immature. As we heal our wounds, we realize that our scars are also their scars.

I used to be very scared of women in particular. Well men, too, for other more overt reasons due to parenting, but I never fully understood why I recoiled around some women and especially older women, I felt unsafe. I felt judged, criticized, surveilled, and I knew to always put myself down and minimize attention lest I seem “threatening” in the least. I didn’t understand why I attracted, and naturally let in women who were very jealous of me, tried to control me in overt and covert ways and tried to destroy me. I didn’t understand why I felt like I was my mother’s mother at times, how she seemed like she was my baby. It made no sense. And so as I peel back layers of this and start to see the true complexity of motherhood, it helps me to understand more of this narrative that has been silenced. But, what could be more dynamic than a mother/baby bond? It is our very first one, all of us have had one, and it is not an easy one.

I think about what my mother must’ve felt or thought when she abandoned me when I was very, very little. In my infancy. I’m lucky in that she did come back for me years later, but those years she wasn’t there for me when I truly needed her the most had a very big impact on my psyche. It had a big impact on my health as well, as babies do better when they get to nurse and also get to attune to their mothers emotionally and physically. When all your can encode in your consciousness when you have no pre-existing memories or thought processes as a baby except that your mom didn’t want you, that becomes the foundation. When the very next one you have with her is that she lost you in the international airport the first time she travelled with you to America when you were three, it raises some questions.

Obviously this is a much bigger topic, and much more complex one, but here are some of my thoughts and hopefully they can conjure up some of your own. It is absolutely essential to see our mothers as who they were, as human, instead of defaulting to the comforting narrative that they were perfect and did nothing wrong. The more we can accept their humanness, the more we can accept our own, and the more we can uncover the repressed emotions that we may have about their actions, their inactions, their mistakes and their effects. If we only accept that they were perfect, we cannot access those emotions and heal.

My Book

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

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

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

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

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

With love,

M

Nobody Knows

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

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

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

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

Emergence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Healing Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Testimonial from a lovely client!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trust your gut & try a session.

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

Perfectionism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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