Healer Q&A: Building a Wellness Community with Maria Marshall.
The following interview is a transcript excerpt from The Heallist Podcast episode. Listen to the full audio version below and subscribe to get notified of new episodes.
After years of personal healing and spiritual growth, Maria Marshall, CEO and founder of Gaia Goddess, joins us on a transformative journey to discuss the power of cultivating a wellness community rooted in the divine feminine connection with nature. In this episode, Maria shares her personal healing journey and how it sparked the creation of an online sanctuary for women to explore and awaken the healer within. Join us as we explore the wonders of remote healing, leadership in the healing community, and the strategies for building an authentic social media presence.
We reflect on the challenges healers face as they transition into roles of influence, addressing emotional blocks and societal perceptions that can conflict with the values of the healing and spiritual community. Maria and Yuli share personal experiences with embracing creativity and the flow state, as well as the impact it has on personal and professional development. Additionally, we explore strategies for building an authentic community on social media, highlighting the value of staying true to one's brand message and creating content that reflects your genuine personality. Don't miss this enlightening conversation that weaves together the threads of community, healing, and digital innovation.
Learn more about Maria's mission at https://gaiagoddesslifestyle.com and @gaiagoddesslifestyle on Instagram.
Making Healing Accessible Through an Online Platform
Yuli: As someone who is set on this mission of bringing the new generation feminine energy, bringing groups into communities for healing and exploration, how did the idea start? How did you decide that this is the format, this is where we do it? You decided to use an online platform, and this particular niche came up. What was the process?
Maria: You don't always know, when you're starting out, where you're headed. I knew through my own healing journey, my own dark night of the soul that lasted years, and all of the energies that I had to heal that really had to do with being a woman, being disempowered, lack of self-worth, lack of self-love, abuse from childhood, inner child stuff—all of this stuff that everyone deals with.
We as women, particularly on the planet, have a lot to heal, and men do too. For us to come into balance with the masculine, for the divine feminine to awaken and embody her power, there is a lot of individual and collective healing that must be done. With the lack of community, it is so much harder. I was meant to go it mostly alone so that I could see what could be created for women that would support them on their journeys.
While healing can be expensive, there's a lot we can do collectively over Zoom. A Zoom Reiki session with me or one of my healers, or a Zoom breathwork session, is incredibly powerful. The online content gives a curated program to heal through, to understand healing.
I've had the good fortune to work with shamans, plant medicine, chiropractors, acupuncturists, craniosacral therapists, psychics—you name it. I have explored most of the healing I've done on myself. There were times I heard, "You need to go to so-and-so because this is going to be a tough one." It was a hypnotherapist where I saw repressed childhood trauma. Sometimes you got to see it to heal it, feel it to heal it.
For me, the community and the on-demand is what supports women in between their retreats, in between their events, in between their one-on-one sessions with other healers. We all are our own healers. We all have the ability to be led and lead ourselves to the right thing at the right time. That's why I created the online content. It's very powerful.
Every woman on the planet deserves healing. Through my platform and others that are out there doing this work, I can make it accessible to every woman. It has the ability to stretch across the world. We can collaborate with women in other countries and bring humanity together too. As the divine feminine, we're one with everything. We have to come together to support each other.
Spreading Awareness of Remote Healing
Yuli: I'm excited about the way you talk about remote healing because it's close to my heart. I still find that the idea itself, as much as it's not a novice idea for entrepreneurs, it's still new for a lot of people. Do you feel like it's one of your missions to promote the idea that it could be accessible, remote, and easy, or do you find that people that come to you are already aware and just looking for a community to join?
Maria: Well, right now we'll find out because we haven't launched the membership yet. Part of the membership will have a monthly breathwork. My experience with it on Zoom is that it's very powerful. When you come together with people, even through Zoom, it's amplified because there are other souls that have shown up, your soul knows you're going to that breathwork session. Even if we're doing something remote, it's going to get the benefit.
With Gaia Goddess, a lot are at an entry-level stage where they don't even know what tapping or theta healing is. So much of it can be done remotely and in a group. It'll be interesting to see, but I believe when people come to Gaia Goddess and experience their first group breathwork, they'll feel different.
I was on Laura Day. She's an intuitive with a big following. She invited me to send some healing out to the group using a light system in sacred geometry. I started pulling out lights and picked up some sadness. People listening live on Instagram, and even after, felt the lights. I believe it works. If you're in tune and ask how you feel before and after a Reiki session, you will notice a shift. They feel more empowered. Suddenly they feel it's real because they experienced it themselves.
Where we have been as a society and where we're going is setting a stage for people to be way more open to this than they have been in the past.
Experiencing Miracles Through Healing
Yuli: For many people, it's just having that first experience and knowing that it's real. When you experience a miracle yourself, something shifts.
Maria: I remember the first time I felt energy in my body. I had been yearning to understand so much in life. My first experience of feeling energy in my body was like, “I can't believe this.” I felt the buzzing. My heart was open. I started getting messages, tears of joy streaming down my face.
I had been so unconscious, walking around with an ice pack on my back for 13 years, and suffering through life. To learn and feel energy, know energy healing exists, and feel your soul is like a miracle.
Yuli: You mentioned Laura Day. One of my most profound miracle experiences was doing Laura Day's workshop five years ago. It was the Goop summit in New York City with a thousand people for a full day of wellness and spiritual exploration. It was eye-opening to realize there is a community seeking this kind of knowledge. I was still closeted as a spiritualist.
She taught us intuitive reading. I knew nothing about it but was drawn to her. At the end, she asked who wanted to practice reading. My hand went up, and I did a reading for Laura Day. It was a shock to my system. This was my miracle moment. We all have this ability, and I just uncovered mine. Since then, my life hasn't been the same. It's interesting that we both connected with her.
Synchronicities and Being Guided by Spirit
Maria: It's interesting that I just chose to bring up Laura Day to talk about remote healing and then you had that aha moment. I talk about synchronicities in my podcast because I had a major one with Ethan Hawke, the actor, and being a crazy one in a delightful way, in a miraculous, wonderful, awe-inspiring way, I really believe that part of the healing is to know how powerful we are. We get messages, through synchronicities, confirmations, and coincidences.
As someone who has never had a psychic reading until my mother passed and I was well into my 40s, suddenly I was introduced to a man who I call my spiritual father and my spiritual mother. I had nobody guiding me and so I have many conversations.
I'm also attuned to the Akashic records. I just did a reading for a friend this morning. She wanted to test some places. She thought she was moving. For those who don't know what the Akashic records are, it's a place in the spirit realm where we, as souls, have a book of all lifetimes and even our businesses have books. You can go there and access information and get downloads.
As far as my guides, I have gotten a few readings, and early ones did not predict this business, because they said I would have gone running for the hills. I hadn't healed yet. I had a major fear of failure.
I believe that I'm very led by spirit. I see myself first as a spirit more than anything as a soul. I also relate to other people that way too. Usually the people I resonate with, I feel a very strong connection to. I might even have awarenesses of past lives with them. Spirit to me is just always guiding me and sometimes it's kind enough to give me the blueprint and the confirmation that I need to keep walking this walk.
Challenges of Stepping Up as a Community Leader
Yuli: You touched on a subject many listeners can relate to—stepping up as a community leader. It's not easy for many healers due to emotional blocks, especially empaths. Many are called to step up from solo practitioners to community leaders, which requires a different energy. Leadership is often perceived as masculine, which can be uncomfortable for those in the healing space. How did you overcome that block and become ready to lead this community?
Maria: That's an interesting question. Well, firstly, I'm a Leo and, as you know, Leos are born leaders and I always wanted to be the boss. In school, I sat in the front row. There is an element to my personality that can be comfortable in the spotlight as a musical theater—singing and dancing.
Now that I make reels and there are social medias asking me to do dancing pieces. I'm not that uncomfortable with it, so it's served me. But, as far as leading the team that I'm working with right now, it's been an adjustment for me because there is a certain amount of boundary setting you need to have. There is a certain amount of masculine energy you do need to have.
For a while I was very reluctant to step into that because I had experienced, through the masculine, a lot of trauma. I avoided the masculine energies and felt more comfortable with the feminine. I realized that to truly be in balance, you have to be able to work with both right. You could still be a woman, beautifully balanced in her masculine and feminine, and still be feminine. That is one of the opportunities my business has afforded me as a spiritual teacher.
Navigating Social Media as a Spiritual Business
Maria: I myself do not consider myself techie and not a big social media user. Having to do it for a business, it can be a full-time job. I have been lucky to work with people that understand it and can make recommendations. What doesn't work is having someone create social media for you that doesn't know how to spell or speak English as their first language. Find somebody who can help you and make sure they understand your brand's voice.
You want to reflect what is authentic and feels real. If you try to create a trending thing that will go viral and you're not being yourself, people pick up on that. You want to be authentic and true to your brand. Try to flow with it when you're inspired and stack the content ahead of time. If you have to film something day after day, it will block your creative flow.
It's very challenging because social media is saturated. It puts a lot of people off, but I don't know that you could do a business today without it.
Yuli: Totally agree with you. There's this misconception that all content is produced live. People don't realize that a lot of us create evergreen content that can be posted tomorrow, a year from now, or a month from now and still be relevant. Create evergreen content in batches, like you said, in the flow state when you feel inspired.
Maria: Social media is not going to correct a business that's not thriving. You have to be careful not to get sucked in and create a balance, knowing that you have to focus on your business being successful. Then the social media grows with it.
The Importance of Community in Driving Growth
Yuli: We talked about all those different channels, using social media, and stepping up as a leader, using your own persona to attract. What do you feel like, at the end of the day, is going to drive your community? What's really going to form it? Maybe it's all of the above, but do you feel like there is something that might create that tipping point, something that maybe our listeners can use as advice as they think about creating their own communities?
Maria: Well, as far as the community of healing that Gaia Goddess is creating, I believe that it's the confluence of in-person and people, seeing people coming together, but also feeling the effects of working with the healing content, and feeling the effects of jumping onto a group breathwork, where all of those people on that call are members. Those connections become another part of your community, your friends, and your supporters, that person you call when you're experiencing something.
There won't be just one thing that will encourage the community to grow. It will be many things coming together and what will bring everybody together is the common thread and the common desire to heal and to explore. Whether it's an online community, in person, sometimes online, some in person, but it's really the healing, the desire to heal, the desire to expand that will encourage the growth. Then that community gets bigger and bigger.
It's not just healing. It's women in financial literacy, women in business, women working with indigenous tribes, women healing the earth. It's so many ways to heal ourselves and the planet.
