This blog was only created as a space to house shownotes for my podcast. But as I have completely stepped away from Instagram (for now), and the podcast is having a Dark Night of The Soul, I have been longing for a window from which to share my contemplations and reflections.
So, here we find ourselves. It's 2022, and I closed my private therapy practice in SF Bay Area over 2 years ago. When I stepped away for a sabbatical in December 2019, I expected to return to the fast-paced work world within 6 months. I thought I just needed to go to a pottery class and take a few baths. Maybe I would shift the theoretical orientation from which I was supporting clients. But in the back of my mind, I knew a big change was coming.
No, I didn't predict the Covid19 pandemic, but I felt a strong pull to restructuring the values I was building my life on. I wanted so badly to have more space, more silence, more greenery, and live from integration of all my parts. I wanted my daughters to grow up with their hands in the dirt and getting lost in the woods. I wanted to connect to with Earth. What I didn't know is that the Earth wanted to connect with me too.
I am so grateful for the training and growth I had during my years working as an MFT. It was work that developed skills I already had talent in: listening, holding space for healing, and allowing feelings to move through us.
Over the past two years, in search of growing my life from a different place, I have returned to my roots. Having grown up in a spiritual community with a guru, I reached back to these ancient teachings to learn and integrate them as an adult. This has led me to deeper listening and restructuring of the way I hold space for healing.
In these times of "transformational coaching" and "spiritual healers," I am grateful to the structure and foundations I have in Psychology and Vedic Traditions. From here I can expand my ways of working with clients from talk therapy to include ritual, indigenous perspectives and the values of commitment, biological intelligence, divine presence and trust. It has taken much longer than I expected to, and honestly, that has been hard.
The patience I have needed to cultivate over these past 2 years has been a healing in it's own right. Honestly, learning to live the practices I was studying, and stay with them as they work their magic in my life, has been wildly transformational and has been hard. This work is not easy. You don't do daily mantra for a week and heal all your mother wounding. Knowing the meaning of the sanskrit words I am saying, knowing the reasons for offering water and ash to the earth with my prayers, knowing I am always gaining more knowledge and understanding more deeply and taking time each day to sit with my body and feel what I am feeling; these help me root into the experience of this moment and learn to have more love and patience for myself.
So, that's the update over here. The short back story to how I got where I am now. And an intro to how I hope this space will serve me and you! I look forward to taking time to share pieces of what is arising in my field, the spiral of healing I am working with myself and the beautiful guidance that comes through these reintegrated parts of existence.
May the blessings of your lineages be embodied and the burdens transformed.
with love,
Mallika
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