Your Body Knows

Presence Over Performance w/Melanie Santos

• Shanetta McDonald

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In this episode, I’m joined by writer, creator, and guide Melanie Santos for a conversation about embodiment, intention, and what it really means to come home to yourself.

We talk about Melanie’s journey from disconnection and navigating mental health struggles in silence to building a body of work rooted in presence, integration, and everyday healing. And together, we explore the tension between spirituality and real life, the pressure to perform wellness instead of live it, and how identity, culture, motherhood, grief, and transformation shape the way we access ourselves.

This conversation is an invitation to slow down, reconnect, and consider what it looks like for your life to become the work.

Connect with me:

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to Your Body Knows, a podcast for women ready to return to their bodies and reclaim their power, their truth, and their way forward. I'm your host, Shanetta McDonald, a somatic life coach and writer. Each episode will explore the messy, beautiful work of healing, self-trust, and learning to feel at home in your own skin. Whether you're in a season of transition or simply longing to feel more like yourself, this space is for you. Let's listen in.

SPEAKER_01

Today's guest is someone whose work lives at the intersection of intention, embodiment, and the quiet, radical act of coming home to yourself in a world that constantly pulls you away. Melanie Santos is a writer, creator, and guide whose work explores what it means to tend to the mind, body, spirit, and energy. Her approach is rooted in the belief that the ordinary moments of our lives shape everything and that choosing presence over performance can shift not only how we live, but how we lead. Now, Melanie has a layered body of work that has supported thousands of people by blending the cosmic with the practical and holding space for both the expansiveness of the universe and the very real complexities of being a human. Through experiences like marriage, motherhood, grief, and personal transformation, her work has evolved into a deeper inquiry around integration, what it actually looks like to live what we know and not just understand it. In our conversation, Melanie and I will explore her path from disconnection to integration, the tension between spirituality and real life, how identity and culture shape the way we access healing, and what it looks like to choose intention in the middle of everyday life. Welcome, Melanie. Thank you so much for having me. Yes, yes. So excited to have you on the podcast. I've been following your work for a few years now. I think actually right before I relaunched the podcast from Motif to Your Body Knows. So late 2024. How is it 2026? That is wild. That is wild. Yeah. Um, and and because time is just flying by, I always like to ask guests how are you feeling in your body these days? And what season of life does it feel like you're in right now?

SPEAKER_02

That's a really good question. And I appreciate you asking that. My body. I feel like this season of my life, as it pertains to my body, has to do with being very tender with it. I'm usually a very go, go, go, let's do it all, be the mom, be the entrepreneur, be the wife, be the friend with all the things. And I think life has really slowed me down, um, dealing with some chronic illnesses and things that are coming up, um, and really being forced to look not just at the symptoms, but what are the root, what's at the root of them, and just be very tender, very, very gentle, and really seeing my body and my life as a whole for what it's experienced. You know, how has my body been the site of all the experiences that I've been a part of, all the injustices, all the all the things, all the learnings, all the transformations. Um, so I'm on quite a ride. Um I'm happy to be on it and grateful to be on it. And uh yeah, just trying to really listen.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. I'd love that. Um, and that's just very aligned with the work that you do. Your work is rooted in intention and the idea that how we move through everyday moments. It shapes everything. What first brought you to this way of living, this very intentional way of living?

SPEAKER_02

I'd say, ooh, this brings me back to like my early 20s when I think I this is during the era of like the secret. Like my mom was very big on open. Oh my goodness. And I remember her watching the episode with the secret, and like, you know, sort of being in the kitchen, but like listening and being introduced to like the law of attraction and the law of assumption, and really feeling like it wasn't like I was learning something, but more so remembering something that my system already knew. And just becoming like super enthralled. I'm naturally curious. I'm a Gemini son, born in June. So I'm just like love to Gemini. Oh, so you you get it. My husband's gentising. You get it.

SPEAKER_01

I get it. I love it.

SPEAKER_02

I just became like enthralled in like the curiosity of like, well, what does that mean? Being a Catholic schoolgirl, right? What does that mean? How can I, you know, what does it mean that you get to like set an intention and watch it like manifest? What even is manifestation? And even beyond that, what does it mean to really set your mind, body, and spirit to something that you want to achieve, that you want to see, that you want to create in your life? What does it mean to be the creator of your experience? And I think it just snowballed from there. And um, I've been talking about it with everybody who would listen to me ever since.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Um, and specifically blogging about it since 2013. And I think that has snowballed into a lot of what I talk about today.

SPEAKER_01

Beautiful. The secret was, I feel like, the unlocking for me as well. I actually recently reread it. I heard the um the creator, the the main author of it, is it Rhonda Byrons, I believe, on a podcast recently. And I was like, Yeah, I think it is. It's Rhonda something. Um, and I was like, Where's my book? Where's my book? And I like flipped through it again and I was like, oh my gosh, this is such a beautiful memory of like, yeah, where it all started for me. And similar to you, it felt like a remembering. It didn't feel like necessarily new information, it felt like a remembering. And so I love that. Yeah, yeah. Um, you shared that your journey began in disconnection, especially around mental health growing up Caribbean in New York. Curious, uh, what did that disconnection feel like for you at that time? How did it manifest?

SPEAKER_02

I'd say the first word that comes to mind is super isolating. Um, grew up in Washington Heights, New York City, very vibrant uh cultures around me all the time. My mother's Cuban, my father's Dominican, two cultures that are very like lively and loud. And so everybody's talking all the time, but nobody's really talking about what's real and what's deep. Nobody was having mental health conversations. Um, nobody was talking about neurodivergence, which I've now learned in my adulthood there runs rampant in my family. Um, and so it was very isolating being someone who has always been highly sensitive. And now that I understand that I'm also neurodivergent and just wired differently. Um, I feel like as a little girl, I had so much to say about what I was seeing and how I was experiencing the world. And I don't think I ever felt like I truly had permission to share that. And so, you know, it was truly such a journey. I remember now times when I was younger, just like truly witnessing the world and like being in my little body and also witnessing the girls and boys around me, and even some of the men and women around me, and just paying attention to patterns and mannerisms, and just starting to see just how sensitive other people were around me, and also seeing how people were assimilating to like the roles that we were being given, even at that young age. And it's just so crazy to just like remember all that because now I can see it. Now as an adult, working with people one-on-one and and holding space in community and talking about all these things out in the open. Um, I send so much love to that little version of myself. And um yeah, and now I'm a mother of like an eight-year-old little girl who's also highly sensitive and so curious, and so it's so wild to like be on the other side and like give her all the experiences that maybe my parents didn't feel welcome to give me. Um, and also have those conversations with my family and my parents. It's just such like a twilight zone moment, but like uh a really heavenly one. Yeah. It's uh it's it's been quite the ride.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And you also say you struggled with mental health challenges. Do you think it was in relation to your neurodivergence, separate, just based on society and cultural things? And also how did you navigate and get through that?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that was also quite the ride. It's just been on a ride my whole life. Yeah, I uh was formerly diagnosed with um generalized anxiety disorder and clinical depression at 18 during a doctor's visit on uh one of my like trips back home from college, one of my breaks back home. And I was just like, I don't have that. That's for white people.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

That's not for me. Not for us, what? Um and of course couldn't talk about that with my family. And so I kind of just like stuffed it. And it wasn't until I was like 23 or 24, I had a really debilitating like mental health break that um almost ended my life. And I think that was like a wake-up call for my family. And I think I was the the pioneer of I kind of made everybody pay attention. Um, so it was really sitting down with my mom and my dad on my couch and calling our insurance and being like, hey, can you give us the phone numbers for some mental health therapists? And that was my first instance with like going to therapy and starting to have these conversations out in the open because I was truly suffering. Um yeah. Yeah, like the wild like entrance into it all.

SPEAKER_01

Right. And then how did that entrance, based on your experience, um lead you to want to be in the wellness space? Like what was that journey like?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I uh never imagined myself doing what I'm doing today. I think if there was uh a way that I could tell myself back then, like, hey, you do all these things with all these people, I would think I was lying. I thought I wanted to be um, I would thought I wanted to work as a magazine editor. I've always loved art. Um so it's really crazy. But it was art and music that truly like validated me and helped keep me safe when I didn't have those like resources to turn to. Um, a lot of the resources that like we're creating right now, like a lot of the resources that I create as well. Um, thankfully, um, there's so much more out there than than we had when we were growing up. Um, but it was really like music and art that really saved me. And so that's like again, snowballed into like, well, what does it look like if I make some of my own? Um, what is what would it look like if I write about my experiences? And so in 2013, I started my first official like blog, and I'm just like, I'm gonna talk about this. I'm gonna talk about my diagnosis, and I'm also like not gonna contain myself. If on Thursday I talk about depression and on Friday I want to write about my new pair of sneakers, I'm gonna do that. And so I did. And uh yeah, that literally became I've refined over the years. I, you know, have transformed so many times and have taken that little blog into a website and changed that website and rebranded and rebranded and rebranded and transformed and like almost like died onto myself so many times that um this is where I am. And I'm like so immensely proud of myself and also of the world for being so welcoming of um, I want to say folks like us who have like been able to like live out loud in that way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I also really love your Instagram content. I wasn't around or to see the beginning of your blog and and see that blossom. But when I started following you on Instagram, you're like her. We all had blog. Your blog was probably way better than mine back in the day, but blogging 10, 15 years ago was wild. We just said whatever we wanted to do. Crazy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I feel like your social media. So here's here's what's happening for me, and I feel like a lot of people. Uh social media is overwhelming. Instagram in particular, I think there's so many platforms, there's so many places to be as observers, community members, but also as business owners. And I feel like you show up very authentically in a beautiful way. And so I'm really curious as to how how you got so good at the content. Number one, girl. Um, and then number two, uh, how what do you have a process for like how you show up online and what that looks like? Um yeah, just curious.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I love talking about this so much. I can nerd out about this my all day. Um, I I really do love it. Um, I don't have like a set process. I really am, it's funny because in my day-to-day, I'm very like type A minus, not type A, but type A minus. I'm pretty organized and pretty structured. Yeah. Um, so I just, in terms of creating, create like dumping spaces for myself where I could just like throw my ideas out there and my outlines and my scripts and things. So like as soon as I get an idea, which usually happens in the shower, um, I usually keep my phone like on the shower just in case I could be like, hey, Siri, record this audio because I got an idea for like a video, a short film that I want to create. Um yeah, so just creating like different like dumping spaces for myself, always having a notebook around me where I could just like write things down. It really comes from lived experience. I I have never, ever, ever had a like content calendar or anything like that. It has to be like spur of the moment. I also don't like content calendars because I am constantly taking social media breaks. If I don't do that for myself, I think all of the oversaturation of like how to be authentic content starts to get to me. Um and I think it has over the years. Um, and it ends up, you know, just crowding your judgment. Like it, I think it's so funny and counterintuitive to create content about creating authentic content.

SPEAKER_00

Like just show up and be yourself. Just show up.

SPEAKER_02

It's it's it's really so crazy to me. Um, that's sort of like what my process is like, just like give myself the space to like dump it out and then refine, refine, refine from there. So it's like put the block of clay out there and see what comes up, sort of thing. Yeah. Do you still write? I absolutely do still write. I just went on a rant about that on Instagram yesterday. Where um I'm like, there's a there's so many crises going on at the same time right now. But one of the crises that were going on that are is going on right now is a literacy crisis. We're like, we don't want to read, and the writers are not writing, and AI is taking over everything. And I'm like, you know, as as a girl who's like tech obsessed, I do think that AI has a place somewhere in the creative zone. But people are just like losing their ability to truly translate. And that's such an incredible gift, especially for like creatives and sensitive people, to be able to translate their experience or perspective onto a video, right? A podcast, a script, an essay. So I absolutely, it is, I feel like it's part of my practice, part of my spiritual practice, part of my artistic practice, part of my dharma to continue to write. Um, I have so many essays and so many captions and scripts and things that will probably never see the light of day because there's only one me. Um, but it it is part of my practice to continue to write and like just get it out of me and let it metabolize.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I was just talking with I have a nutritionist that I'm working with and not surprisingly but not surprisingly, at the top of whatever you want to eat to nourish your body is primary foods, which is uh career, relationship, success, blah blah blah. And uh, we did a rating the other day, and I was a little low on creativity. And she's also a writer, I think she's a screenwriter, this woman I'm working with. And I was like, Yeah, I've just been feeling creatively stuck lately. And she was like, I know the feeling, but we gotta get it out of you. We have to get that out of you. And so I think uh the creativity that comes with any art, but especially for those of us who are writers, it's just so important to keep writing whatever it is, even if it doesn't see the light of day, you know, because it's it's really for us at the end of the day, you know? And so I think that's so important. And um, I also read that you've left your corporate career in healthcare marketing to continue on this path. Tell us about it. What did that require from you emotionally, mentally, spiritually, all the things?

SPEAKER_02

Uh, it required all the things. Um I left my corporate career. So, for context, for anybody listening who doesn't know me, I graduated with a degree in communications. Again, I thought I wanted to work at a magazine or do something creative-wise. Um, so I specialized in like journalism and marketing. And so I graduated in 2011 during the recession. So there were no jobs. So I was just like, I got a loan to pay, I got to get whatever job comes up. And so I went from working uh as a receptionist at a dental office to eventually working my way up to like marketing manager and then working at a healthcare marketing, um, healthcare marketing um corporate space. And uh, so I have a nine-year career in in marketing and I really loved it. And then I became pregnant. Tell me that any of the um and not only does like motherhood obviously change your body and your mind, but it changes literally everything about you and the way that you see the world. And so when I went back to work, I was just like, I don't think I want to do this anymore. I really don't think I want to do this anymore. The joy is not here. Um, there's also something about there that we could talk about in another episode entirely about how the workforce treats new mothers who come back uh to work. I haven't, I don't think even in the in the nine years, eight years, nine years that um I've been away from that experience, I've digested all of that, but I do need to. Um, but yeah, I kind of discovered that like I don't really want to do this anymore. And I will say that while I was pregnant, birthing, working, coming back to work, I was already developing what we call now content. I always say, like, I was content creating before it was content, yeah, but like filming for YouTube and like having in-person events and speaking at panels, I've been doing this for a very long time. So I sort of already had the social backing um to like leave. Um, and my husband was like, listen, leave. If you're not happy, leave. Yeah. If this is what you want to do, leave. Like if we have to like make empanadas and sell them outside of our window, we'll do that to make ends meet. If this doesn't work out for you, but like leave, do this. And so shout out to shout out to Huey, shout out to my husband for like the ultimate support and the ultimate push. Um, but I left. I left in um December of 2018 and I've been on my own ever since. And so it's all just really asked me to surrender. It taught me a different level of surrender that I hadn't really experienced yet. It taught me to really consider the bigger picture, um, specifically as it relates to not just what I want, but what kind of version of me the world gets from me. Right. I was constantly exhausted. I was constantly like drained creatively. Um, and like, yeah, this is not gonna be the easy road, but like, is this going to give me the chance to be the best version of me? Yes. And so I took, took the plunge and it's been it's been me and this thing ever since. And it's just been evolving ever since.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. There is something about a woman, a mother in particular, who decides to work for herself, build her own business. And it really happens once. I mean, I think it shifted for me a little bit before I had my daughter. Um, even how the workplace began to treat me once I was even pregnant with her. And then once I had her on was like, yeah, I don't want to do that no more. And that was very clear and very real for me. Uh, it definitely opened something up in us, I believe. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Um, I believe we're all intuitive, but I believe a part of your work is your, you know, you're highly sensitive and your intuitive uh capabilities. How does that come into play when supporting clients and working with people? And then how do you stay grounded and protect your energy, most importantly?

SPEAKER_02

One of my favorite things to talk about. All of this is all my favorite things to talk about. Um yeah, I like to say that my work really sits in between like the cosmic and like the human, that I'm always like straddling both worlds. Um the the phrase as above, so below is really like a state of being for me. And so I very much like like believe and and live in and like to teach about like we are energy in a human body, right? Um, and everything that I do, I try to remind people of that. Um, and so we have to take care of ourselves in mind, in body, in spirit, in energy. Um, that always comes through in every single offering, whether it's one on one or I'm speaking to a thousand people in a room. Um, I've always been obsessed with astrology and energy and health and wellness and all these things, and was obviously thrown um headfirst into uh a season where I had to understand what mountain. Health, mental health really meant. And so, yeah, staying grounded for me is extremely important because a lot of people straddle, you know, straddle that fence between the cosmic and the ethereal and like what's really here, the 3D. And some people end up getting lost. It's really easy to like fall off the fence, for lack of a better phrase. And so making sure that I have balance in how I do things and how I am literally doing everything is really, really important for me. I taught a class, and I've since coined the phrase with my community, uh, flowing with the cosmos. Um, and that's really is the way that I live my life, uh, which anybody's listening to this right now, I'm revamping that class and putting it uh in uh as available again on in my devotion lab. But and in the class, I basically talked about how to live your life aligned with the energy of the planets, because there is no way in hell we are living on this floating rock and we're not affected by the other cosmic bodies around us. And so, how to live your day, like how to like today that we're recording this, it's a Thursday. Today's a Jupiter day, so anything that we do is expanded. So, shout out to your podcast being expanded, right? Um, Mondays for me are sacred, being somebody who's a cancer rising. I'm ruled by the moon, right? So Mondays are very, like, very emotional. I try not to take calls and meetings. Um, I do all my like journaling and like reading personal readings for myself that day and really like formulating my days, my humanly aligned with what the energy is that day. Um, I don't pay too much attention to like horoscopes. I think people are like very obsessed with like, yeah, oh, this person's a Pisces, so I can't like rock with them. And it's just like, that's not what that means. That's not that's not what this is for. That's not what you know what the universe wants us to use for spirit or whatever you want to name, um, higher power, but I do believe that it exists. And I do believe that it's like almost like a map or like a frame, a framework for for us to live our lives. And that's in it very anchoring for me, super anchoring for me.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I feel like it's a tool, you know, they are tools. I I had on the podcast uh AC Brown, who is a astrologist, intuitive, AC design expert. She's amazing, she's amazing. And uh she describes astrology, I believe she describes it as the who, what, why, and human design as the how. And so when you bridge those two together in any tool you decide to use, it's a framework. What do you think gets in the way of embodiment from your personal experience and your experience of connecting and working with others? What makes it so challenging for us to really embody this higher way of living or the authentic way of being ourselves?

SPEAKER_02

I love how you worded that. Um, and it is also, I know I've said this for every question, but one of my favorite things to talk about, I just let a uh I just let a 40-day practice for embodiment in my community because it is something that runs so rampant, especially in the healing space. In my personal experience with myself, because we all, you know, go through these things and in working with people one-on-one and in communities for so long, it comes down to a few things. I think one is definitely, we just spoke about it, overconsumption, right, of material with no real plan to integrate it, right? Um, and I think that always boils down to the fear of like getting it wrong or the fear of choosing the wrong thing. Um, and it's like, babe, you can't get it wrong. Yeah. You literally can't get it wrong. There's always going to be an opportunity for you to evolve, no matter what it is that you do. Whether you choose the thing or not, it's always gonna show up for you. And then um the next thing I would say is I think the performance of healing. And this is like a little bit of a hot take, but like, and I've definitely been guilty of it in the past too, and maybe it has shown up in my content, but like the performance, the aesthetics. Um, how does it look? What do I need to wear? What kind of books should I be reading? What kind of astrologer should I be listening to? What kind of podcast should I be listening to? Is it the right thing? Um, like performing, feeling, and looking healed when really it's the unsexy, ugly work that really works. Yeah. Right? It's it's the sitting with with your your shadow. It's the, you know, and do it all, do it all. That's I think that's how we get to the unsexy and the ugly when we realize like, wait, all this like floofy stuff isn't really working for me. I gotta get down and granular, especially for people of color, that we have such a rich history of like healing techniques and technologies. And it's just, and so getting to the this the unsexy, um, but the really powerful work of like sitting with the shadows and um really confronting yourself and allowing yourself to be confronted and really seeing how there is a literal mirror in front of you every second of the day, um, is what can get in the way. The last thing I want to say, which maybe you resonate with working with somatics, is is uh disconnection from the body. Um, and I think in the popularization of therapy, I want to say, and I've definitely been a champion, still a champion in therapy, been in therapy strong for so many years. Um I think it is really also important to recognize and to acknowledge that we cannot talk or think or pray or meditate our way out of a pattern, right? Or out of a behavior, out of a trauma, out of an experience, or through it, not even out of it, but to be able to live with it, right? Um, it is so incredibly important to get in your body in whatever way your body allows. Um, and I'm curious, like, what's been your experience with that? Um, for those listening, I teach yoga, breath work, all the things, somatic release. And so that's been so incredibly um, it's been so gratifying to be able to help folks when we finally get to that point of like they realize, oh, I have to work through my body. Like we don't even have to say the words.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I think two things come to mind. One, as it relates to, you know, showing up online. I think for me, the most important part of working with someone or just admiring someone is their personal journey. And so the healers are healing too. And I I want to see more of that versus uh I think I don't know if you said performative and I'm saying performative, the performative action of like, I need to be an authoritative person in this space. And so I think the realness, the rawness of like, you know, how did you get to where you are? What what are some of the practices that you're using? What does it show up to like live and perfectly and sometimes messy? Um, and I think that's what resonates with most with people because it's real. Um, I deeply, deeply obviously because of the work I do, but believe in the somatic experience and most importantly, the mind-body connection. I was just talking to someone recently about the importance of it. And you need both, you know. So you need the therapy, the support system, someone to talk it out with. If you choose prayer, that whatever works for you, but also how do you embody it and connect it to what's actually going on inside of you? Um, that's why I wrote a story about my awaska journey earlier in the year and how important integration is after it. So you have this very spiritual, embodied experience. And if you leave there and have zero support after, so no tools, whether that's journaling, breath work, meditation, yoga, I had all of those. Um, I had a therapist, I have a stigmatic experiencing practitioner. Um, I'm not saying you need all of that, but if you have no plan on how to support yourself and to integrate what you've learned or felt or come to understand about yourself, then it's going to be really challenging to maximize that moment. And so that that that experience is of of having both, whatever that looks like for you, it's different for everyone. It's just yeah, so deeply important. Both. Not one is more, I don't think one is more important than the other. Um, but but I think having access to to what what's going on inside of me right now, and is there anything I need to do about that? Maybe there's not, you know, so having that deep connection.

SPEAKER_02

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Uh what does it look like for your life to be the work and not just support the work?

SPEAKER_02

A new chapter that I'm in right now. Yeah. I think I uh to really give an answer, I gotta think about where this started. I started to really slow down and take a step back from everything that I was like offering and doing back in early 2024. So I'm like two years into this process of really taking an unsexy look at myself and what was at the root of what I was doing, how I was doing it, and how I really felt about it, away from the performance of being an authority in this in the space, right? Which I I later realized, like, hey, a lot of this stuff is me, but it's almost like a caricature of what I think and how I really am. And so in this season, in allowing myself and giving myself the permission to be the work and not just share the work and not just support it in others, it's become a little bit about me. And so right now, um in the business side, I've sort of started to create a separation between the work and me. I think for so long it's been blended that um it started to leave very little space for my experience. And it became all about like what I can teach, right? Um, where it's almost like a remembrance almost because I'm sort of coming back to where I started when I started my first blog, which was like, let me talk about my experience and then people learned from there. So it's been now I'm at the pretty part, it's becoming a lot less unsexy. It's becoming beautiful again. I'm starting to enjoy the process of sharing bits and pieces of my life and like what does it mean for me in this body, in this life, um, in this world to like bounce off of like what I am viewing through this sensitive, beautiful brain. Um, what am I learning that maybe you can take from? And if you don't, that's cool. So there's no like performance about it at all. There's no like catering to what I think people need to hear. It's just like this is what this is what it is for me right now. You could take it or leave it. Um, it's definitely been a process of like refining. So very vulnerable, I will say. Yeah, very, very vulnerable. I'm in a very, very vulnerable um part of my life. Um being the artist that I've always known that I am. I love it. Um, stripping away all the titles and just being Melanie is beautiful and also terrifying. Yeah. But we're doing it. We're doing it, man. We're doing it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Well, not to be too into astrology again, but you know, the whole Uranus transit is gonna affect us very, very deeply. Your husband. It already is. Yes, I already feel it. I deeply feel it. We talked a little bit about motherhood. So I'm interested to know. You have an eight-year-old, I have a baby who's gonna be four in two weeks, which is wild. A week, week and a half. What season of motherhood are you in right now?

SPEAKER_02

Gosh, I am in the season of motherhood where I will say this. I've always been very honest with my girl about the things that I'm going through as a woman, um, and always putting it in context that she will understand. And so now our conversations sort of are getting a little bit more complex because she's starting to go through puberty and she's starting to experience like issues with friends that have nothing to do with, hey, she won't play with me, but things that are more complex. And I'm also going through some of these things. Yeah. Having been or being somebody who's dedicated to transforming, none of my relationships are the same. Nothing that in my life is the same as it used to be. And so even just recently, I was like going through something with a friend, and I'm like, hey, can I talk to you? And I want to hear your opinion. And she was just like, tell me. I love it. Like, what do you think about this? What would you do if this was your friend? And so it it feels like a again, an extension of like the honesty, the vulnerability, the unstripping of like the rest of my life. Um, and also seeing how all the healing that I've done and also the healing that I haven't done is being mirrored in her and just almost feels like a second chance. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. I deeply feel that with my daughter. Uh, it feels like what I tell everyone is that she is the free version of the younger me that I wish I was. And so I'm giving her this freedom. Uh, and she she's very free. She is very free. Borderline feral, but she's perfect and amazing. But she's a very free child, and it's like, wow, look at that. Look at how amazing it is to just be yourself, like to just be yourself. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Isn't that amazing? It is. It is to see ourselves, Susan. But they are their own people as well, you know. So that that's its own journey. How can people work with you? What are some of your offers, upcoming things that you have to offer your community in this one?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. So I just launched fresh, fresh, fresh for us. We're in beta right now, but something that is called the Devotion Lab. Um, the Devotion Lab is what I like to call a living practice community where it feels like it's going to be like an archive of everything that I know. I really want it to survive me. Um, even long after I'm gone. I want this to be a space that um holds. Um right now I'm developing uh uh recordings of like different practices that I know from Kundalini Yoga to breath work, um to somatic release to dance to all the things, but also the courses, like the Flowing with the Cosmos course, um, different courses that I've taught throughout the, throughout my my career and and and also a space for connection. Um we're brand new. So we have like 42 members at the moment, and we're closed down because we're in the middle of a a 30, 30-day practice dedicated to emergence, working with the energy of like this Scorpio full moon that we just experienced and Taurus season and sort of coming back to our inner fire. And so throughout um the year, we'll host these like 30-day, 40-day, 14-day practices where we'll all practice together um what we like to call sadhna in um the yogic, uh, yogic community, which is just daily spiritual practice. Um, and I love it. I love this like separation of like who I am with uh like what I do. Um, because now the devotion lab really gives me a space to be excited about all those things and share what I know. And I could just like talk about motherhood or like perfect what I'm going through on my own. It's like a Gemini's dream. I would love it. To be able to be like all versions of myself at the same time. Um, but yeah, the devotion lab, you can um right now we don't have our own website, but you can check it out at melanysantos.co. Um, and yeah, that's really what I've got going on right now.

SPEAKER_01

Uh, I would love to meet people there. Perfect. I'll put your website and your Instagram handle in the show notes. And of course, it was such a pleasure to spend time with you today. Thank you so much, Melanie.

SPEAKER_02

Likewise. Thank you.

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Shanetta McDonald

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