#176 When Staying Quiet Was Survival and Listening Became Healing

Today, I interview Desislava Dimitrova, who grew up learning to stay quiet in order to keep the peace. She shares what it was like growing up in a strict home where it did not feel safe to speak, and how being quiet became a way to protect herself from a very young age.

A major turning point came later in her life through a serious illness that divided her life into before and after. The long healing process forced her to slow down, listen deeply, and face her biggest fears. Through years of meditation and healing, she began reconnecting with her heart and the deeper knowing that had always been there.

Today, Desislava uses her voice to help others slow down and listen to their heart. Through meditation and a personal, intuitive approach, she supports people in finding healing, clarity, and a deeper connection to themselves.

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Desislava Dimitrova is a holistic whole health consultant with intuitive and healing abilities. She is passionate about helping moms improve their lifestyle and live with more joy and inner peace. People she has worked with often describe her as practical and motherly nurturing, and she offers a very personal approach that works with mind, body, and spirit.

She is certified in multiple healing modalities, but life experience is her biggest credential. Desislava works with mid age professional and business women who feel overwhelmed, stressed, or are going through major transitions in their lives. She helps them find peace, hear their inner voice, and move past blocks so they can take their next inspired steps with confidence and clarity, while creating a calm and safe space for healing and growth.

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Find Desislava here:

Website: https://desi-divine.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/desislava.dimitrova.3110/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/desislava-dimitrova-30271293/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/desisdivine/

Transcript

Transcript of Interview

Find Your Voice, Change Your Life Podcast

Podcast Host: Dr. Doreen Downing

Free Guide to Fearless Speaking: Doreen7steps.com

Episode #176 Desislava Dimitrova

“When Staying Quiet Was Survival and Listening Became Healing”

(00:00) Doreen Downing: Hi, this is Dr. Doreen Downing. Welcome to the Find Your Voice Change Your Life Podcast. We are now closer to 200 episodes, and I keep finding fascinating people who have had what I would call a miraculous journey.

From what seems like a really strict environment where there was no opportunity to be more expressed or happy as a young little girl, to somebody who is now standing up and saying, "I know what it takes to be more of who you can be." This is a wonderful new friend to me today. Hi.

(00:46) Desislava Dimitrova: Thank you.

(00:48) Doreen Downing: Deva, I would love to have you pronounce your name but let me try first because I have been practicing. Desislava Dimitrova.

(01:01) Desislava Dimitrova: Yes. The pronunciation is Desislava in our country.

(01:09) Doreen Downing: Desislava. The accent is on Desislava. Wonderful. What country is this?

(01:20) Desislava Dimitrova: I am originally from Bulgaria. I do not know if the name comes from the roots of the country. It used to be a bit modern for the time when my parents chose it, but it has a good meaning, so I am keeping it.

(01:41) Doreen Downing: The name has a meaning.

(01:45) Desislava Dimitrova: Yes. I became interested a few years ago and did a little research. It means something in the lines of glorious. Slava, the second part, is also like glory, like victory.

(02:04) Doreen Downing: That fills me up with a new sense of the beauty of this name you have. I also noticed on your email that you use Desislava Divine.

(02:20) Desislava Dimitrova: This is more part of my work name. More of a spiritual kind of accent that I want to put into my work, into who I am actually, and what my essence is about. Because it is Desi, but we are all divine beings.

(02:53) Doreen Downing: I love that you claim it, that you radiate it, and that you then say, “Hey, it’s in all of us.” Before we get deeper into our conversation, you sent me a bio, and I want to read that so we get a sense of what you are all about nowadays.

Desislava Dimitrova is a holistic whole health consultant with intuitive and healing abilities, and she is passionate about helping moms improve their lifestyle and live with more joy and inner peace.

People she has worked with call her practical and motherly nurturing, and she offers a personalized approach for mind, body, and spirit. She is certified in multiple healing modalities, but life experience is her biggest credential.

She works with midlife professional and businesswomen who struggle with overwhelm, stress, and transition periods in their lives. She helps them find peace, hear their inner voice, and move away from blocks to their next inspired actions with confidence and clarity. She fosters a calm and safe space.

Wow. It almost sounds like I described myself. That was wonderful. I am so glad I get to be on the platform with you and share your story today. I am so inspired.

(04:34) Desislava Dimitrova: Well, it is not an accident that we got connected and met.

(04:42) Doreen Downing: With immigration.

(04:44) Desislava Dimitrova: Yes.

(04:46) Doreen Downing: I feel the same. And folks, today this is our first conversation. We have done a few emails, but this is us sitting down for the first time, introducing ourselves to each other. I am introducing you to this wonderful new friend of mine, and I am also getting to know her at the same time.

This is all fresh. It is not scripted or prerecorded. It is just so in the moment that we trust. I feel little chills on my skin because I feel so open to this experience with you today. Big breath.

I like to start with where you grew up and what your family constellation was. I understand as a psychologist that many times our ability to say, “Look at me,” and to be excited about being seen and heard happens in that first environment. When that does not happen, we carry that into adulthood.

So give us an insight. Say as much as you can. Share stories about what growing up was like for you.

(06:15) Desislava Dimitrova: The first thing that came to mind while you were saying this is a memory from my grandparents’ house. I was there with my sister. She is only one year older than me, so we are almost the same age. I thought we should be treated the same way.

I remember my grandparents had this little chair. They would put it in the corner of the room, and she or I would step on the chair and perform something. They would teach us songs. Mostly songs, not poems.

I felt at that time that they liked her more than me. They wanted to hear her talking, her saying things, her singing. Even in their house and in other environments, not even talking about my parents, I felt that I was less than my sister.

They treated us equally, but that feeling stayed with me. That is what remains in my mind from when I was about five years old.

(07:45) Doreen Downing: And you were the older sister or the younger sister?

(07:51) Desislava Dimitrova: I am the younger one. One year younger.

(07:53) Doreen Downing: Very close in age. Did you ever explore that with your sister? Did she feel the same way?

(08:10) Desislava Dimitrova: I do not know. We did not talk about that. But I can tell you the after effect of it. She wanted to become a lawyer. She is constantly talking, and when we are in the family, she takes the stage. Everybody is listening.

I am always there too, but I am the quiet one in the corner. That is part of how they set up the environment in our family. That is where I became the quiet one.

Even if I had something to say, it felt like it was not so important. Or your sister is better. Or she is saying it better. Or she is thinking better. Or she is even cooking better.

That is something my mom would sometimes say because she loved being in the kitchen and she praised her more. She has always been the prized one between the two of us.

(09:15) Doreen Downing: Already I am feeling a resonance with what you are saying. I have one sister. Her name is Ginny, which is very easy to remember. People always remembered Ginny. She had a bright spirit.

Doreen was harder to remember. They could never remember my name. So I understand what you are talking about. The way energy gravitates to the other person, your sister.

As I am listening to you, there is a sense that maybe you came into this world with a different nature. Maybe not so extroverted, but deeper. A different kind of connection to something inside of yourself.

Already I feel like I am falling in love with you. I want to know that deep self within you that probably was already there. People did not quite appreciate it because people often appreciate the burst of energy more than those of us who are deeply inside of ourselves.

Thank you for sharing that memory.

You mentioned your father to me. I would like to go there now because I think that is important for listeners to hear.

(11:04) Desislava Dimitrova: I have forgiven everyone. I have no resentment toward anyone in my family, no matter how much I have seen they were wrong with me.

He is still alive, and he has started to regret some of his actions. But when I was little, growing up, he was a military person. He was a major, and he trained people.

He was very strict. He would command people what to do, teach them how, and he brought this home. He tried to control, raised his voice, and screamed a lot.

He was not always present. When we were very little, they would send him to different towns, so there were days when he was away. It was mostly our mom who was with us all the time, and our grandparents.

For the first four or five years of my life, we all lived together. It was one old house. On the first floor there were two bedrooms and one kitchen. In one bedroom were my grandparents. In the other bedroom were my father, my mother, me, and my sister. The whole family.

(13:01) Desislava Dimitrova: My father was an only child, and he was raised in a poor family. We were poor at that time too. My grandparents worked in a factory where they manufactured shoes. My father was in the military, and my mom stayed at home because my sister was one year old. I was born, so I was a baby.

We lived in one little house, a small space with everyone together. He would travel, and when he came back, he would drink. Sometimes there were people over. I do not even know how I remember this, but I feel like I was a baby at that time. I remember a lot of music, people having fun in the kitchen, and I just could not sleep. I wanted to sleep.

Later on, he would drink way more than he was supposed to drink. He would raise his voice and scream at all of us. A lot of the time it was about us not being right. We were never right. He would say, “Shut up. Quiet your voice. Who are you to tell me?”

Even in our teenage years, we did have a voice, but he still had that job, so he was still very controlling. Controlling, angry, tired. He would calm himself with a glass of wine, and then another one, and another one.

His life was probably not easy, but we had to live with that. I learned to be quiet. I learned to protect myself, to just be quiet, because I knew he might get even more angry.

He tried to hit my sister once and my mom once. I would not allow myself to speak up because it was not safe. Peace was more important.

(15:50) Doreen Downing: Peace is more important. To keep the peace and not aggravate or antagonize. Being quiet is a strategy, for sure. A protective strategy.

Thank goodness, as little ones, we figure that out. We learn to stay small. Before I go into the consequence of that as an adult, I know you also wrote that your mother was an angel. Before we leave this part of your life, I would like to turn to her and see what comes up when you talk about your mom.

(16:32) Desislava Dimitrova: Yes, I want to move on to her, but if you allow me to mention one more thing that came to my mind.

I clearly remember I was probably around five years old, and I had this deep desire to see people healthy and to help them be healthy. I would see them drinking, and I would go and say, “Why are you drinking? Can you stop drinking? That is not good for you.”

When he was not drinking, he would be nice. He would be nice to me and to everyone. And then when he drank, he changed. He turned into a monster. I would say, “You have to stop. Stop drinking. This is not good for you.”

He would laugh and say, “Oh yes, what do you know? Who are you to tell me?”

I wanted to say to all these people, “Stop drinking. This is not good for your health.” My soul at that time was all about wellness and health. People should be healthy. They can eat plants. Why are you smoking?

I did not realize the stress they were under. I was only five or six years old. But that stayed in my mind. It was like, who are you? Your feelings and your wisdom are not important. You do not understand us. We are older.

After that, I learned not to tell him what was good for him or not.

(18:55) Doreen Downing: I just so relate to what you are saying about that intuition of being able to… I think one of the strengths that you brought into this world is that you are looking around at your environment, even at five or six years old, and you are knowing something.

That is what I am hearing. You were already knowing into something. And then of course you are going to want to say, “This is what I think could be better.” Hello? Because that is what you do now. Help people who want to get better.

But he did not want to get better. Not only that, he put you down for it and made you feel that you did not have anything to contribute. You were just a kid or something.

(19:52) Desislava Dimitrova: I understand. Instead of nurturing or fostering someone and saying, “You are important. You have talents. Explore,” I am all about that. For kids too. Not only moms.

On the other hand, my mom was, as I said, an angel. She still is an elementary school teacher. After being a cancer survivor. Just a year before my surgery was her surgery but thank God, she is still alive. She went back to work, and she just spreads her love with the kids. She is like their mother.

She spends time with them, and she was the only one at home, besides my sister when I was older, in middle school and high school, that we could really be honest with. We could share what we experienced, what we thought, what our desires were, what we wanted to do with our lives. We could just be like friends.

Because with him, we never had this relationship. Every time we said something, we would be judged. He judged us all the time.

I think this judgment part of character is very common in our country. It is not only him. It is more of an ethnic thing.

(21:44) Doreen Downing: Alcohol also affects people in the way that you are talking about.

That really shook me when you said “monster,” the way he would become like a monster. That has to be so frightening that you have to shrink.

(22:03) Desislava Dimitrova: To see him like that when you are that little, and you see someone really hurtful, hurting someone else that you love.

(22:16) Doreen Downing: And then you also see what he is like when he is not on alcohol.

That reminds me of a situation with my grandma who took care of us while my mother was sick. She was housed in the back of the house. It was really dark and she was depressed. But outside, my grandmother had flowers, like what you have in the background there today. Life was growing. There were bright colors.

Both were true. There was life that was abundant, and there was life that was full of pain, which was my mom who was suffering.

What I am hearing about you is that you can see both. You can see people who are suffering. Your dad obviously was carrying his own pain. And yet you are surrounded by flowers, my dear.

So, what happened that you started to wake up to a new kind of life, where you were not so hidden and held back?

(23:32) Desislava Dimitrova: I paint flowers. I love flowers. I want to make the world a better place.

I do not know exactly what happened. I just always followed my path. It got deeper when I had the chance to really listen more deeply, because there was so much conditioning in my young years.

Until about 20 or 21, around that time, I left my parents’ house. My sister and I went to our grandmother’s house, where we were when we were babies. We just wanted to get out of the house.

I met my first yoga teacher. I went to a webinar. It was called Heal Your Eyes with Your Hands. I started doing what my soul was calling.

(24:50) Doreen Downing: Your heart. Your soul.

(24:53) Desislava Dimitrova: Listening, like you said. My interest was not really in what I was actually doing. I went to study engineering. I became an engineer. Oh yes. But that is when you do things for society. You think about work to make money, to provide, because you do not follow your voice.

Then I realized, after I started working, very soon, less than a year into that type of work, that this was not what I wanted to do. I could not do it. I realized I could not stay in this office eight hours a day. It was just not me.

On the weekends, I would go to these yoga teachers. I did a yoga training. I started doing yoga classes. I learned how to breathe deeply. That is when I started to connect to my soul.

(26:00) Desislava Dimitrova: And that is when I started to ask deeper questions. What am I doing? Why am I doing this? How do I even go to this place that I work?

At that time, freshly married to my husband, I started having these conversations with him. Why are we doing this? Why are we here? I started explaining how unhappy I was with the life we were living at that moment.

We decided to move to America, to have another chance. It was not easy. You need a visa to come here. You do not just buy a ticket and move. You need to get a visa.

Because my husband had been a student here before he came back to marry me, he still had documents that allowed him to return and study legally. I was his wife, so I could come with him.

I said, we should do that if you still have a chance, because what we are doing here is not going to be good for our kids.

(27:38) Desislava Dimitrova: We wanted to give them a chance to live a better life, and we decided to take this adventure.

(27:46) Doreen Downing: I love the way you called it an adventure, because that is truly what it feels like. It takes faith, spirit, vision.

(28:04) Desislava Dimitrova: Or you have to have something. Courage. A lot of courage. A lot going on in your mind. I had nobody here. No friends. Nothing. Nobody.

When we told my parents, they could not believe it. They did not want to accept it for a very long time, especially my father. He did not talk to me for several years. He took it personally.

(28:48) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(28:48) Desislava Dimitrova: He took it personally. It was not about him.

(28:50) Doreen Downing: It was not about you.

(28:52) Desislava Dimitrova: Exactly. It was about what I wanted to do with my life.

We wanted to give a better life to our kids. It was super hard to take this decision, not knowing where you are going, not having a job waiting for you.

We moved to Boston. My husband went to college. He had loans to pay off. He had to study and work at the same time because I could not work. My visa status allowed me to be here legally as his wife, but not to work.

What happened next was that I became pregnant. Just a week later, I found out I was pregnant with my daughter. That is when my next stage of life started.

(30:04) Doreen Downing: Great. I am going to pause right there and take a brief break. I want everybody to take a breath and say, okay, we are going to be right back. She just got us to the point where something is starting to open up, a new chapter, and we want to hear about that. So we will be right back.

Hi. We are back right now with Desislava. I have already been so fascinated. You have got to go back and listen to what we talked about in the beginning.

Growing up with a kind of military, strict, alcoholic father. I am putting that word on him. She did not say that, but that is how we describe an alcoholic and the effect of being a young girl who had to hide herself in order to keep the peace.

The journey, though, and starting to listen to what is inside of her, her soul, the deeper sense of who she truly is, that is what is exciting. That is where we are right now. Okay. We are back. What happened next?

(31:30) Desislava Dimitrova: The journey continued in a new country. Of course it was very, very challenging. When I look back now, it has been eighteen years, and so many times it was so hard raising two kids here, abroad.

It was so hard that I just wanted to say, if I knew how hard it was going to be, I would not do it. Probably it was that hard. But then I am so proud. I am so proud that I had time with my kids because I was a full-time mom. That was what my soul wanted.

I struggled a lot of the time. I would be happy, but at the same time unhappy, because I was giving everything to them. Everything. All of my energy.

From the family I come from, I wanted to be better. Better parents. Better, better, better. To give them more than they gave me.

So, I spent a lot of time with my kids. At that time, as a full-time mom, I did not respect myself enough. I did not respect my desires and my needs.

(33:15) Doreen Downing: Yes. Your desires, your needs.

Somewhere along the way, you changed. Not only do you now respect your own desires and needs, but you teach others how to do that. I would like to look at that.

Given the history you have talked about, and then this moment in life where you focused only on your kids and then came back to yourself, how was that?

(34:00) Desislava Dimitrova: What happened was my son was almost four. I was not nursing full time anymore, so I signed up for a yoga teacher training. I became a yoga teacher on the weekends.

I came back to the path. My daughter is four years older, so that means about seven or eight years later, still being a mom. But I said, that is what I want to do because I know that is something for me.

Everything I did made me realize I wanted to teach others. I saw the benefit of it. I saw how it helped me and how it changed my life. I did that, but still, that was nothing major. It was good for me to start healing deeply.

(35:10) Doreen Downing: Sounds like it. Yes.

(35:13) Desislava Dimitrova: Yes. But then there was another big event in my life, four years later.

I was not only a yoga teacher, but I was also teaching math to elementary kids in a private school because at that time I was legally able to work. I had classes that I taught.

Then all of a sudden, in 2019, four years after I became a yoga teacher, I was diagnosed with a one in a million disease. It was a spinal cord tumor.

(36:01) Desislava Dimitrova: I do not think I mentioned that to you. So, you do not know about that?

(36:05) Doreen Downing: No, I do not know about it.

(36:08) Desislava Dimitrova: That moment basically split my life in half. My life is now before that moment and after.

(36:22) Desislava Dimitrova: It was. And it was because I had to face my biggest fears. This process of healing allowed me to have the time to study and to experience all the healings that I now teach.

So that is how I was able to become a spiritual life coach, a Chopra meditation teacher, and a Vedic health coach.

This was because I had five or six years of intense meditation and going through all these courses where I was healing myself. I had the chance to now share this with others.

All these challenges that I went through, they say when your soul goes through something hard, it is because your soul knows you are strong enough to go through it. I almost hated that spiritual teacher who said that, because I was like, how can my soul be choosing the hardest part ever? It was so hard.

During this time, I also had relationship problems with my husband. On top of the health problems, it was really hard. I woke up from the surgery mostly numb from the neck down. I could not walk. I could not feed myself. It completely took my body away.

I have been healing physically, spiritually, and mentally for so many years. And now I can tell that I am on the other side of the river, where the flowers are.

(38:45) Doreen Downing: Such a beautiful time to be meeting you, rather than in the depth of despair. You are now in the knowing of what it takes to heal yourself, spiritually, mentally, and physically.

Let us talk about the programs that you do now.

(39:10) Desislava Dimitrova: What I offer is a personal approach, because I have this intuitive gift where I can know and feel what people need. I blend that with all the modalities that I have, including emotional healing.

But my biggest focus right now, and always will be, is meditation. I help people learn their primordial sound. This is the sound that vibrates as the vibration of their soul. It is connected to when they were born.

It connects them to their soul very quickly. Because I practice it myself and it helps me every single day, I recommend it. It helps me connect and know what the right next step is.

I offer personal one on one coaching. Yoga and Ayurveda are part of this. Ayurveda is the nutritional side of yoga. Yoga is the physical aspect. Ayurveda is a science of life. It teaches people how to live according to their nature.

It helps me connect to my nature and learn who I am, and to follow that nutritional approach. It is mind, body, and spirit. I have the tools to work with all of it.

(41:36) Doreen Downing: With the journey you have been on, and all the learning and integration, people listening today can trust that if they reach out to you, you can help them. Whether it is healing or coming more fully into their world, being more of who they can be.

We will have a link to how people can find you and anything else you want to share today about what you do.

(42:19) Desislava Dimitrova: They can visit my website, desidivine.com. I have a free guided meditation and journal. The meditation is a short fifteen-minute practice that connects people to their joy.

I believe that just by listening to it and journaling a little, it can connect them to something deeper. It helps them slow down. It is about slowing down and listening.

(42:55) Doreen Downing: What I would like, given that we are coming to the end, is to open up and have you be in that listening phase, this listening moment together, and see what wants to come to end our time today. Maybe what you would like to leave the listeners with.

It comes from you. It is usually just in this now moment, from having been in our conversation.
Big breath.

(43:31) Desislava Dimitrova: Always honor and follow your heart. I wanted to say voice, but people sometimes may think they are listening to something when it might come from here rather than from here.

What you feel here is your guiding light, because that is where your light is. That is where God gave you this energy and this breath to sustain your life. God is there, and you have to honor this, because there is no other path that is right for you.

The rest is conditioning and beliefs. You might not have had my traumatic experience, but any kind of experience is conditioning. It can make you think you are less than who you are or what you can do. But you can do anything you want.

(44:41) Doreen Downing: Yes, you can. What I am getting from you is that it is not about listening to voices around you or what you think.

What I heard from you is that the most powerful voice is in your heart. Learn to listen to your heart. Yes. Yes. Yes.

(45:04) Desislava Dimitrova: Once you start doing that, what people experience is pure love. My saying is always love, always well. That is true, and I know it from the root of who I am.

The rest is just thoughts, or something temporary, because what you believe is what you create in your life. You have to be very careful what you say and what you think.

(45:40) Doreen Downing: You have to learn something that you teach. What I teach is how to listen more deeply into your heart and your soul and let that be the guide.

Then the voice is not just a voice out there, disconnected from anything. The voice is authentic because it is truly yours, and it comes from deep within you.

It has been wonderful to spend this time with you today and to share your voice and your message with the world. I hope we will have more time together again.

(46:24) Desislava Dimitrova: Yes, it was such a pleasure to have this time with you today. I really feel honored.

Whoever is meant to hear us today will hear us, and they will hear the message. If they want to reach out, I will be honored to help.

(46:45) Doreen Downing: Thank you so much.

(46:54) Desislava Dimitrova: I have learned a lot of beautiful words in the eighteen years here. Yes. Learning.

(47:01) Doreen Downing: Where we started today was glory, which has to do with your name. We have come full circle.

(47:12) Desislava Dimitrova: Thank you. My name is beautiful. I can say so because it is unique. I do not know any other Desislava’s.

(47:20) Doreen Downing: I love the way you say my name too. Sometimes people say Doreen differently, and I love the lyrical way you just put it. That makes me feel good. Speaking of voice.

Thank you. I am going to say goodbye for now. Thank you. Bye.