Soul Growth, Turning 40, + Sacred Leadership

What I've learned about power and how life wishes to move through these bones..

Happy New Moon!! And welcome Mercury Retrograde.

About a month ago, I celebrated my 40^th birthday and I thank all of you for the beautiful wishes ;)

So, where have I been? Well, I took a full month offline!

I didn’t respond to texts; I didn’t go on social.

I got to experience my travels and be present in life.

I assisted a two-week retreat cruising up the Nile in Egypt led by Jasmeen Hana where I saw the subtlety of how magic works as I transmitted to 20+ people the practices of Vocal Alchemy + Empowerment as I watched them all sing from their hearts and souls in The Great Pyramid on the last night of the retreat..

I retreat-hopped if you will. It’s better than club hopping :) and visited one of my astrologer friends in Bali who was leading a workshop at Dragonfly Village where I contemplated my karma and destiny and took some time to decompress and integrate my Egypt experiences while I was there.

As well as open to the magic of Bali and the beauty of being in a confluence of eclectic, sophisticated souls from all around the globe.

I contemplated my aloneness and my truth that my yogic lifestyle gives me a lot of freedom and magic and helps me so much on my path where I have been growing for the past ten years and maturing into my abilities to teach and lead others.

That nothing in my life is actually wrong.. even though I don’t fit into crowds or play social hierarchy games or even the game of social media very well.

I reflected on how my art + my contribution..
And my authority and self love
Must all come from within.

And on healing...

Healing the heaviness our souls seem to carry from the weight of our karmic predicaments, our spiritual and genetic lineages, and attaining a personal sense of freedom, empowerment, + oneness with all things is really the ultimate spiritual truth.

This is TRANSFORMATION.

I saw how I help my clients (and those who read my work online) do this for themselves and how I myself am constantly supported and helped by others who are teachers + guides for me.

We facilitate each other’s awakening. Constantly.

This is what I have found lightens our walk.

And this is what I am in service to.

I know I have to get busy writing again. I am looking forward to being on Substack and creating more long form content. Social media and the short quick snippets and popularity contest (and the superficial fake-ness) of it all don’t really suit the crone-style medicine woman that I am.

My intention is to be here and work. To sit down in the chair and create.

To organize these writings over the past ten years and really build something true.
Maybe create that book once and for all.

I pray that 2024 helps me to create the time, space, and simplicity to really anchor into that.

---

Letting go of Popularity to Find Your Unique Purpose

If you are interested in reading further, I will share with you a bit about my personal journey of discovering what this turn of the spiral has meant for me and my creative work, as well as some truths and medicine from my travels and spiritual journey.

This past month was a ritual for me.

Where I closed the very initiation-focused chapter of my 30s in order to understand myself and my roles and begin again, renewed.

I thought perhaps I would have marriage and a family during that decade but instead I gained the maturity of being a teacher + facilitator of transformation.

Someone who has been carved.
Who now walks in beauty and teaches about integrity.
Who keeps it real, who speaks from depth.

I noticed in this last year, those who work with me kept sharing with me that they saw me as ‘an alternative’ to our modern superficial spiritual-coaching culture.

And I myself have had to continuously deprogram my creative work that it’s for likes or an ends to winning some sort of game. That all artists in order to be relevant must use trending hashtags and keywords, and parrot what other people are saying to attain the limelight so we become insta-famous, build a brand, and gain mainstream popularity..

In hindsight, thank goodness I wasn’t successful at this.

It’s given me a new sense of leadership. This not fitting in.

Because what really has come through to me (again and again and again) is how the cord and thread of ancient magic that I carry is truly about being offered through subtlety and humility.

What author + teacher Caroline Myss would call, “Invisible Acts of Power”.

True power is quiet.

And yet, we live in a day and age where there are those who are trying so hard to ‘look like a thing’ and compete for power and clamor for it —

And then there are those silent ones who in their presence and being just whisper and they transmit it.

My work on my own ego (which I can hear flooded within this writing even as I try to neutrally explain these concepts — I am doing my best) is continuously letting go of resentments for the way our society operates by ‘wearing masks’ and playing the game, and instead learn to love and forgive and accept humanity at the level it is on.

En mass. Even when it’s in the current disarray of separation that it is currently in.

And also to love my own humanity as much as I love my spiritual nature.  

I also recognize that the role of the wounded healer is to simultaneously sit with the pain of your own wound and be effected by it —- so that you know how to heal that same pain in others.

And, for my own personal sanity, I must also realize the level I am on. And seek out other ancient yogic ones who have minds and souls like my own.

Deep thinkers, those with virtue and integrity.
But also be ok with them being few and far between.

I know that right now we are all scattered across the globe like little points of light doing our work on the web of life.

Like an Indra’s net of beings with Intergalactic Consciousness.

I know that in order to be truly happy life needs to be simpler.
To lead a yogic lifestyle. To not get lost in the chase of status.
To not lose oneself in the ambition of life.
To take one’s time and be an example of a slower, yet more mature way of being. To not trade false niceties for power.

That one has really been a detriment to the art I wish to create.. and I pray that in my writing of this, and my exploration of writing long form again.. it will rectify and balance.

A big part about the creative life is about being yourself and owning your true nature. And it takes time. Time to discover who you really are.

The soul slowly reveals itself like a lotus flower opening a petal at a time.

---

Egypt was a life changing experience.

I waited since 2015 when the call to journey there first came in. I waited for the right group to join and the universe fully blessed me with it. Jasmeen Hana is an incredible facilitator, priestess, and yogi. I can feel that we serve and are devoted to (and possibly initiated by) the same things.

I knew also, that it was important for me to have a role where I could show up in my leadership and support the circle. Leaders tend to fair better when in facilitation roles, and I was able to share with 20+ people the codes of how to become an instrument of healing.

How to use your voice to share your soul song.

How to allow your channel to open and allow Spirit to sing through you.

I was able to work with a few people 1:1 and really open them up.

A woman who felt intimidated by a large Sekhmet necklace she had purchased days earlier because she felt it was ‘too fierce’ and ‘too much’ started wearing it the next day after I worked with her! She found her primal growl and started speaking from her belly. She vowed in the last sharing circle to stop wearing the meek masks she wore socially. And on the last shopping excursion, she bought a long cane embedded with jewels and started walking down the aisle of the long tour bus like a pimp ;) The swagger is real. And a beautiful gift for myself to witness.

Even the leader of the retreat was blessed with the inspiration to sing and share song.

I watched, my magic, subtlety get blown like the wind emoji I so often use.

🌬 🤲🏽 🪶✨

I speak sometimes that clients who come to me are like flowers that are so ready to bloom 🌺 open. And like some sort of magical faerie, all I have to do is blow on them and bless them with my magic and watch them open and their wings unfold and they blossom fully into their true power.

It's exquisite.

That pose of blowing the breath of life is one when in my early 20’s when I was a faerie at the Renaissance festival and my best friend and I blew glitter on each other and sometimes on children to bless them.

That pose, I also used as a symbol of creation for my graphic + web design business as I was using the tagline “breathing life into every project”

🌬 🤲🏽 🪶✨

That pose, which I now witness moving through my healing work, as a blessing that helps shift and transform the souls around me into waking up.

It puts the many reactions I have been receiving from others as I have stepped more and more fully into my teacher self over the past 10 years.

Sometimes, I trigger people and they project onto me.

Sometimes, people ignore me as if I am unseen.

And sometimes, they bow.. as if to let me know they see the sacred within me.

And other times, the quiet ones, reveal the magic inside of themselves.

Let me feel their multidimensional weight.

And take their own cloaks off.

They let me know I am fully seen by them and they let themselves be fully seen by me.

How I wish we all were doing that with each other.

---

I am a Mental Projector in Human Design. I am learning this kind of being seen is also an invitation so that I am being brought in to a field where I am able to guide + direct others and use my gifts.  

Human hearts all need some kind of external validation.

It’s not a deficiency or something to transcend.

Our desire nature is beautiful.

I am a yogi --- but I am also a tantrika.

Our feelings are to be honored, but not to be lost in.

We all need some signs from the outside world that our inside inner child is ok. We all need a level of security and certainty.

So we don’t have survival fears.
So we are accepted by the tribe.
So we are seen and loved for who we are.

It is hard to be creative when we are hijacked by these survival fears. Feeling like something is intrinsically wrong with us is a very common psychological wound that many live with and have to overcome.

Especially if there was abuse or we did not receive safety or validation from our family. And yet, there are those who like myself, whose task in this life is to resource that sense of security and fully seeing and loving yourself from within.

This also applies to most of the people who work with me. The love that you seek does not come from what you achieve externally. It comes from trusting your voice, knowing who you are, and honoring your divine authority, and holding yourself with a regal power as if you were a child of the universe.

Knowing your place within The Cosmic All.

Once you touch that, your entire life shifts. And then Grace comes in, and you get to tap into it, every day, in little moments.

Remember the gateway to the infinite exists in your own heart.

The results of your inner life that result from this kind of orientation may not be celebrated or even understood.

They may not gain you recognition far and wide.

But they will be deep. Real. And honored.

Maybe honored greatly in the subtle, almost intangible invisible realms.

The move is to be ok with that. To find peace that is sourced from within.

And if you are reading this, this is most likely what you are also seeking.

My students and clients often have achieved a measure of success in the outer world. They have the family, the roles, the accolades, and yet they come to me asking, “How do I achieve peace from within?”

And then, I share with them this healing journey of transformation that I have been carved by.

Initiated into.

This Mystic’s Journey of remaining on the bridge of this life.

Between the worlds.

Not fully in the marketplace, but enough to be seen so I can be accessed from it.

Not fully in the ancient world, as a monk or a renunciate on a mountain getting away from paying rent and mainstream life.

But positioned, just between as a guide and a bridge worker helping beings across from one realm to the next.

Helping people access the mysteries of life as a portal and holding some kind of energetic gateway open. Some opportunity for them to carry out their own threshold crossing.

Just a guide on the bridge helping souls across.

Like Anubis as a threshold guardian.

The invisible world has so much power.

The energetic world sustains us all.

It’s not just me here.

There are those of us who are already walking this path.

Who are INITIATES.

Who stand between the realms.

Who know that they are on a continuous journey.

Who are meant to mature their invisible gifts.

Who are in service.

Who walk as if they have wings in this world.

It is you that I am a guide to.

If you would like to speak about working with me, I have a few opportunities at different levels of engagement.

---

3 Ways to Work With Me in 2024

For a group program, I will be starting the second round of INITI∆TE in the Spring of 2024 which is a 6-month mentorship for those who feel called to gain confidence in their leadership.

I am also considering starting a membership community called Astreya.

For 1:1 private mentorship, I have 3 spaces open for Vocal Empowerment Coaching which is where you receive so many modalities of healing from embodiment work to voice activation to channeled counseling – it’s really amazing the transformations that happen in this program.

My clients experience feeling self-love for the first time, finding faith in the universe, a spiritual connection, confidence, trust in themselves, spiritual awakening, voice activation, karmic clearing and so much more!

If you have interest in being trained and mentored by me, let’s connect by booking a call by filling out this form so we can discuss the next steps that you are ready for.

We are on this path together, you and I.

This Healer’s Journey of Ascension.

Holla if ya’ hear me ;)

If you are with me, raise your wings.

All my love,

Michelle Coutinho

12.15.23