Deciding not to do something isn’t a failure. It’s not a mistake and there’s a strong chance that what it really means is you know yourself so well that deep down you truly know what’s best for you. 

In the second interview of the Courageous Conversations series, I can’t wait for you to hear the story of Liana Naima who has shifted, pivoted, and returned home to herself all with grace. This isn’t a story of failure or mistakes. It’s one of following the path of your dream, seeing where it takes you, and checking in with yourself if this is actually what you want. 

A quick bio about Liana Naima

Liana Naima is a beloved and loving educator and spiritual wellness practitioner specializing in an array of healing arts, such as mindfulness meditation, energy healing, and breath work. Her practice is rooted in intuitive knowledge that trusts in the innate wisdom of the body. She creates brave containers for people to confront energetic blockages with curiosity and care. Her playful spirit makes the healing process enjoyable, operating from the heart, she invites people to meet her there for heart-centered transformations of the mind, body, and spirit.

Tell me about little Liana. Where she grew up, how she grew up, what she believed was possible for her and her future.

Liana Naima:

I grew up in New Orleans with a very colorful childhood that was kind of fearless in some ways. A lot of my childhood memories are of me sitting next to my father in the French Market as he’s making his jewelry and just this array of different people are engaging with him. He makes pins and earrings, and he's just a very colorful Sagittarius man. I grew up around this, like epitome of a fire sign.

Growing up in the French Market, I was always known as Oscar's daughter. I was always surrounded by artists and musicians. I also was always very curious and intuitive, which I feel like you have to be in New Orleans. Your intuition has to be pretty strong to be a kid wandering around that area. So I was walking into occult shops and different cafes and just spending the day there by myself.

I've always been a little bit of an explorer, just very open to what life can show me. I was very spoiled growing up just sheerly due to the quality of the art that I was always around. So I'm a bit of an art snob now because I am so used to the best food and the best music.

My mother is the picture of a wild woman, like a very free spirited being. I grew up with her taking me to Southern Decadence and pride festivals. This was me at like 13 years old, passing out condoms at pride festivals.

So, my parents gave me a lot of freedom, which led to good and bad things occurring.

I was very rebellious. You name it, I definitely had already probably done it at 16 and I'm grateful for that freedom because it just created this pathway for my life in which I felt like anything was possible and everything is possible.

I knew the importance of my own choices and how I was going to move about this earth. I think of my childhood in regards to fragmented memories. I think of tap dancers on the streets and I think of school bands during Mardi Gras. Then I also think of the fact that when I was six years old, there was a tarantula and a boa constrictor in my bedroom that we had as pets. So my life has always been very colorful and shadowy at the same time, but I am grateful for it. I'm grateful for that wild Rubik's cube coloring mosaic type of experience of all these random factors leading into the creation of me.

It seems there was a lot of permission to really think outside of the box. So, one of the things we do, especially in our late teens and early twenties, is we create “The Plan.” Like, this is what my future is going to be.

For you, did you have a “The Plan?”

Liana Naima:

I went to Bryn Mawr College and by my sophomore year of college, I was actually on track to get a PhD in philosophy and be a professor. A lot of people thought I was going to take that path. Then the first semester of my junior year, I studied abroad in South Africa. I was volunteering with the Cape Flats YMCA in Cape Town and they asked me to create this anger management program for a boys detention center.

So here I am, 21 years old in South Africa creating an anger management program from scratch, doing stuff that's mind-body related. Even though I had no words for this, I had no clue what I was doing, but I included music, meditation, and self-reflective journaling. Intuitively I was being drawn towards the path of working with teenagers and that experience was just so pivotal for me in regards to questioning freedom, my relationship with freedom, and what it meant for me to be in a space where I was with youth that didn’t have their freedom due to circumstances that pushed them to commit crimes at a very young age.

A lot of them are pushed into gangs as a generational thing and being around these kids that were accused of horrible crimes, like murder and rape and seeing them as these nuanced beings that simply wanted to be kids and be around each other really opened up the potential healing aspects of community and the classroom.

After that, I started to view classrooms very differently and the potential of what that can ignite. It's kind of shocking to think that I had never taught anyone before this moment and here I was with a group of like 12 boys with a guard outside the door as I'm teaching them anger management.

That moment created a pathway for me to reconsider if I wanted to get a PhD. Then in my senior year, one of my mentors at Bryn Mawr actually told me, “You don't really have it.” What she meant was my essence, my energy is meant to be with the people.

“You're meant to be someone that's shifting the world in a different way.”

I took it to heart because this was actually the second professor that had told that to me, even though I had the grades, even though I had the qualifications to do that, I'd been kind of nudged by people that I really respected that I wouldn't actually be happy getting a PhD or being in the academy.

So, from your experience in South Africa, you knew you wanted to start teaching?

Liana Naima:

I knew that I wanted to be with teenagers in some way. I knew that that was one of my “Big Seven.” So, my senior year of college, I wrote down seven words thinking, “If this could form some type of career, I'll be good.”

I wrote:

• Africa

• teenagers

• philosophy

• English

I just wrote random words that I knew I'd be comfortable with. At that time period, you couldn't have told me that there was any better city in the world than New York City. After undergrad, I got a job. I got an apartment. And I did the training. I got my EMED from Hunter and I was teaching in the South Bronx for two years. I was teaching seniors in high school that were 18, 19 years old when I was 22.

Fast forward a little bit to 2014, things seem to be going well until I had a very unexplainable traumatic back injury that occurred in April of 2014.

This back injury was due to a lot of different factors. One factor was I wasn’t taking care of my internal landscape. I wasn't meditating. I was just repressing a lot of stress at the time. Another aspect of it is that I had an unwanted pregnancy with a guy that I was hooking up with. I kid you not, I told him on Friday that I was planning to get an abortion and by that Sunday, I couldn't walk anymore. It was just the stress in my body from that situation, from my job, from not taking care of myself, from repressing emotions, from hurricane Katrina, from this constantly running and running and running to finish college to get this job.

So, I ended up thankfully having the safe procedure thanks to Planned Parenthood. I thought the back pain was going to go away, but it didn’t. Then he disappeared and there I was - alone with a broken body. I was crawling on the ground, seeing chiropractors, orthopedic surgeons, you name it. For six months of my life, I was basically on the ground crying and up to like 12 to 14 pills a day. I could barely stand, I was barely present, I was barely alive. I was very, very numb and I can't tell you most of the stuff that happened during that time period. I was so checked out. So, a couple months later, the school I was at pushed me out. They were like, this girl can’t even walk right now. She needs to get out of here.

By June, I interviewed at the school that I'm still currently at and it was like love at first sight. My principal saw me and my cane. She saw that I still had this spirit that really cared about teenagers and wanted to be in a school. She gave me a shot. That's like a little glimpse of the story.

You know, I met you not as the teacher, but as the healer. Was that part of you alive at this moment? When did you fully step into that or embrace that?

Liana Naima:

It started coming alive late October of 2014. I started to sense the presence of my grandmother very tangibly in my life.

There were just moments where I was walking up and down a street in Harlem and it was just so hard taking every step. I would feel this presence next to me and I'm like, “Oh, this is Jeanette. Hi, Jeanette, how are you grandmother?” But that was also a trauma cycle because my grandmother passed away in front of me when I was 16. So sensing her presence was beyond words. I had never sensed her presence before until then.

It was something that I had been deeply, deeply craving, that closing of that trauma cycle. But ultimately, I’d always think I didn’t have the time. So once I started sensing her, I kinda knew that something was pulling me to turn inward. So, I started painting. I started just doing things that would require me to be a bit more mindful.

The biggest shift was probably meeting my partner in October of 2014. He's a big meditator and a Yogi. I don't know what he was seeing, but he saw a little broken me and was like, “I’m gonna fix her. I'm going to help her.” He poured a lot of love into me. I ended up getting back surgery and the pain came back several times. We decided to try drastic measures and we turned towards plant medicine in 2015.

After doing plant medicine, things opened up in my subtle, energetic body very quickly. I started becoming more sensitive to music, to food, to sound. I started doing intuitive energy healing. And when I got Reiki attuned that year, the pain completely disappeared. So the pain now is something that is very, very rare when it comes up, but it was that moment of getting the Reiki attunement and working with plant medicine that my body was stabilized. Things just sort of took off very, very quickly at a rate that was almost unsustainable.

At this time, you’re teaching at this new school, you’ve met this new partner, then all your intuitive powers and abilities are really heightening. And then what happens?

Liana Naima:

It happened very quickly, but I started doing energy healing work. The people in the plant medicine community were intuitively being drawn to me during sessions. And it was just kind of happening. I was just moving my hands and I was just channeling this sort of universal life force energy and it just became this amazing, intuitive flow of me remembering something that was clearly from a past lifetime. There was no book that taught me how to do energy healing work. Intuitively it's just a simple cellular remembrance of something that is definitely old that was awakening.

One of the first people that shared about my work was also my business partner for a while, Brittany Josephina. She had a really big following on Twitter. She tweeted about it. And people started emailing me. We did amazing events together under the series called Divine Release in New York City. We must have hosted probably six to eight experiences from like 2016 to 2017. We did a bunch of events that were super beautiful with always like 30 people. This was at a time in New York where there was no other black women doing this quite yet so it took off.

*To hear the full interview, tune into episode 117 | Surrendering to your Intuition with Liana Naima wherever you love listening to podcasts (or click here) and don’t forget to connect with Liana Naima at any of her links below.

Connect with Liana Naima:

Learn more about Liana Naima

Follow Liana on Instagram

Follow Liana on Twitter

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98 | The power of Stopping, Pausing and Pivoting

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107 | Intuition 101

Have you ever wondered how to listen to your intuition? Or how to understand and strengthen your intuition? This week’s episode is a crash course in intuition that teaches you the basics of how to listen to your intuition and distinguish between the voice of Ego and Impulse.

A quote to take with you:

“It’s important to know that you’re not going to necessarily find yourself in a new choice or a new career pathway, but this is how your essences is desiring expression.

It’s important honoring the flow of what’s wanting to come through and surrender to the movement instead of resisting it.”

Did you know that each episode comes with free guided journal prompts?

If you want to be in the know and get each Mindset Monday straight to your inbox complete with journal prompts to take you even further, get on my email list.

About your host, Shirin Eskandani