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Iana's Story
Why I Do What I Do
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We all suffer.
I first woke up to suffering in 2nd grade when I saw a film produced by the United Nations about UNICEF. My favorite part of Halloween was receiving pennies in my little orange cardboard container for children around the world who were hungry and starving. In 4th grade I created my first street fair and raised $250 in the 1960’s for children with Muscular Dystrophy. It was one of my happiest moments of my childhood.
All around me, I saw people suffering. Every adult conversation that I heard and watched was about deep suffering. I was raised in a home and in a family system where English was not my parent's native language. When I was 4 years old I learned how to read my parent's and their sibling's auric field, know what they were really feeling, and could begin to “read” their inner stories and their hearts.
I did not know that I was suffering. I had no idea why I felt what I felt. I needed to be noticed. I needed to be smart. I needed to be the best that I could be.
At the age of 4, I was taken to a psychiatrist for testing. I had not begun to speak and my parents were concerned that I was mentally ill or mentally retarded. It was not until I was sitting on a cold metal chair, my feet unable to touch the floor, across from an older doctor with white hair and as our eyes met, I realized that I had to begin to speak to secure my well-being and survival.
He said, “you need to speak”. What he didn’t say verbally, his eyes communicated that there would be a consequence. Until then, I had lived in a world of pure white light that glistened and warmed my heart. I was happy where I lived and I did not want to leave the divine. No one in my family of origin ever spoke to me or asked me what I needed or what I wanted. Why should I speak? But, from that day onwards, I did.
That moment, in it’s own innocent way, began my quest to search for truth.
I wanted to find it with all of my heart.
When I was six, I would sit on the floor in my bedroom looking up to the ceiling light fixture and was positive that God was the light that I was talking to. I asked him to help me to find my way. “Please help me, God,” I would say. I would have also asked him for protection, but I did not know what that was or would even look like.
At age 8, my mother began aggressively and violently slapping me on the face if I said anything that upset her until my tears flowed like an endless river. I never knew what would upset her, so I would not know what was right or wrong to say. I would ask her questions about life. I was raised to believe that children were seen and not heard. Decades later I realized through my own inner work and then seeing the results with my clients, how to see and hear our lost Self—our wounded Self—to break through into our authentic and True Self.
That same year, I took a big risk by asking my mother if I could bring to school for show-and-tell a small porcelain teacup and saucer that belonged to my maternal great-grandmother who died in the World War II German concentration camps. To my surprise, my mother said yes, but in a stern and conditionally intimidating way said, “be sure not to break it.”
As I walked up to the front of the classroom, in my nervousness, I dropped the teacup and saucer and it shattered on the floor. There was silence in the room and a wave of foreboding fear of what would happen once I returned home swept over me. I internalized that if I speak in front of others that my life would shatter and that I would always be humiliated and made to feel less than who I AM. My mother never forgave me for this childhood mishap and continued her relentless cruelty to me throughout my life with different circumstances. Some inner pain and self-judgment take a lot to heal. I had to learn how.
When I was 12 years old, my mother said to me, “no one will ever want to hear what you had to say”.
Every time that I succeeded in whatever I was doing in my life, my mother manipulated me more and she displayed that contempt in many ways until the day she died. I lived in denial of who she really was and inwardly made her behaviors towards me my fault. Instead of providing love, it was taken away and she became the contrast of who I AM.
Yet, through all of her efforts to destroy my self-esteem, I eventually would see her as the “shadow teacher” to push me to heal and step into my spiritual and human integrated power, so I could mend many lifetimes at once. As I realized where the boundaries had been violated I could find my true essence that had been judged and exiled over many lifetimes. In an odd way, I turned around the misfortune of this relationship into being a great fortune.
My growing relationship with God Source helped me to awaken and to heal, and I would go on to help others end their denial patterns by realizing and aligning their heart to their True Self.
Patterns of trauma, self-worth, self-love, self-confidence, sexual abuse, mental and emotional misalignments, men’s and women’s work, reclaiming the eternal-soul Self, healing the splits and wounds of separating from the True Self, narcissism and denial, restoring and activating creativity, breaking through dogma and false beliefs, healing ancestral and karmic patterns, and finding one’s divine connection and living one’s purpose all became possible and led me to uncover the universal roadmap to becoming whole and ONE.
I was born with a vision. I was moved and driven by a force of nature that I could not deny. It began to awaken my soul and prompted me to follow its movement.
This force was gentle, strong, clear, and uncompromising. I studied dance in Manhattan with different modern dance masters such as Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Jose Limon, Alwin Nikolais, and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. When I auditioned for Alvin Ailey as a 15-year old I was chosen to be trained on scholarship. I had found the beginning of my life.
I went to college as a dance major. In many ways, it was a mistake because I had a lot of living that I wanted to do and the dance studio scene in Manhattan was powerful. Learning directly from the dance originators of their technique worked the best for me. With great fortune, I was given the great gift of training with the majestic and unforgettable ballet master Mia Slavenska of the Ballet Russe De Monte Carlo, and the phenomenal choreographer Bella Lewitzky at the California Institute of the Arts.
By my early twenties, I was experiencing incredible openings in my subtle energy bodies and having inner visitations where I could see and hear Masters of Light from a higher dimension. They became my spiritual teachers. My dance became a technical and soul-level expression of my moments BEing One with the divine. No one could understand what I was doing, and I had many questions about how God and life energies moved in the body.
I had been reading spiritual books and meditating since I was 14 years old and yearned to bridge my body, my feelings, and my soul. Late at night, I would book the big dance studio at Cal Arts and create time to BE with the divine Source in my body and allow it to move me. I would dance in the dark so that I could feel everything and not be drawn out of my Self, and each session was cathartic as I would open, sob, and create movements that emerged from feeling One with love, God, and light. Feeling suspended, open, broken, closed, exalted, seeking, tender, strong, and connected took me over.
My desire to tap into the Source within my body led me to doing a residential 9-month training at the first Polarity Therapy Institute in Northern California, the work of Dr. Randolph Stone. After spending a year being Rolfed and experiencing the beginnings of being cracked open to my hidden deeper Self, I was trained to become an energy healer. That was almost 50 years ago.
From there I had shamans, channels and light healers, spiritual teachers, some real and some fake come into my life to help me remember who I AM. My inner work of going through the veils in myself and spiritually dying to the idea and concepts of who I AM took me through a portal of awakening into my True Self.
By awakening to what was blocking and preventing me from BEing fully connected to “all that I AM”, I began to find what I was looking for—the true me, that had been overlayed by ancestral and parental suppression and my own past life wounding, beliefs, and fears that appeared in this present life in different archetypal forms.
My father in his unique way always believed in me. His willingness to grow and to evolve into his authentic Self and to move from his head into his heart after years of a tumultuous relationship together helped us to heal. His apology to me of how he underestimated me over years ultimately helped me to discover, know and trust my relationship with my own inner divine masculine Self which led me to authentically love, guide, and support men on their healing and awakening journey.
Since then I have helped more than 10,000 men, women, teens, and children to find their True Self, excel in their lives BEing who they truly are, and to follow the truth of their heart and soul.
The secrets of healing and self-realization were opened in me and through working with every life challenge that exists on this sacred planet, I learned what permanently shifts a person from their conscious or unconscious inner pain and suffering, into infinite love, freedom, and the divine power of their True Self, BEing who they truly are, and to follow the truth of their heart and soul.
What I have discovered is that people are people.
All over the world no matter what culture, gender, way of life, occupation or religion, we all share common stories of struggle, suffering, rebirth, liberation, and the desire for wholeness.
The work of Spirit Gateways® is a life-long journey, an adventure through the gateways of your inner landscape where you move through denial and fear into a new life and dimension of love.
I excel at helping women and men of all ages, all walks of life, and all cultures to break through and master their most difficult life challenges, awaken to how they ABR™ (abandon, betray, and reject) themselves, end their inner battles that prevent them from knowing and BEing who they came here to BE, and to bridge their material-spiritual power in order to manifest their life from their soul purpose.
The outcomes of these life initiations make possible moving into life with super consciousness, the clarity to see, feel and know one’s True Self, hear one’s remarkable inner voice, and to walk the journey of life through BEing connected to one’s personal connection with God—Infinite Source— while BEing True to one’s Ultimate Calling of fulfilling the meaning and purpose of one’s life at the highest level of love—our divine essence.
I help people unleash themselves to live a liberated, strikingly untethered, passionate and outrageously successful life.
I AM a True Self Liberation Mentor™.
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