Our final episode of Season One is inspired by Lily Allen's West End Girl. This is not a pop-psych analysis or an attempt to interpret the artist's life or relationship. I'm bringing this album into our space as a mirror for the work we have been doing here.

As I listened to West End Girl, I noticed how much it stirred in my own healing work. The linear and direct way she shares her experience feels potent, and the record spread so widely because it's deeply relatable. When we approach another person's experience with awareness, it can reveal something essential about our own.

Inside this episode, we move into the heart of some of the most painful and often misunderstood patterns in relational healing:

• saying yes when we mean no

• staying in situations that hurt because we're afraid to lose connection

• suppressing our truth to stay safe

• rumination as an attempt to feel in control

• and the quiet self-abuse that shows up as shame, self-hate, and self-abandonment

More than anything, this episode is about recognizing how we relate to ourselves inside relational pain — how quickly we blame ourselves, disappear, or try to control the outcome through self-abandonement — and how awareness becomes the turning point. Not by fixing the pattern, but by noticing and interrupting the moment we begin abandon ourselves to keep ourselves safe.

This is an invitation into awareness, compassion, and embodied self-honesty. Not to rush change or force resolution, but to stay present long enough for something deeper to shift — and to begin healing your relationship to self from that place.

As we close this season, I invite you to practice one thing: stay. Stay with your truth. Stay with your body. Stay with the moment you want to disappear or attack yourself. That choice — again and again — is where the healing begins.

If you are new here-go back to episde one. I invite you on a linear journey to come into a deeper relationship to yourself.

If you are ready to stop circling the same patterns and start living differently book a Free Connection Call with me to see how a 12-week guided 1:1 journey can help you rebuild trust with yourself and step into the life of radial self-acceptance and embodied love.

Book your connection call here

Learn more about me at www.healwithalchemy.com

Join our next women's retreat here

Meditate with me on Insight Timer Here

If this podcast is serving you please rate, review and share with a friend.

See you again in Season 2

Today I have someone incredibly special with me. Not just a renowned Toltec Master of Transformation, not just a teacher or an author, but a dear friend to me and to everyone he meets.

don José Ruiz is a Toltec Master, a storyteller, the author of The Fifth Agreement, Ripples of Wisdom, and My Good Friend the Rattlesnake. He's a speaker, a devoted vegan, a coffee lover, and someone who has dedicated his life to translating ancient Toltec wisdom into practical teachings that bring more truth, love, and personal freedom into the world.

But beyond all of that... José is someone who embodies unconditional love. He walks through the world in a way that makes people light up when they see him. His presence softens defenses. His humor and humility make the teachings feel accessible. And the way he loves openly, generously, and without condition is medicine this world desperately needs more of.

José shares his own personal story, the obstacles he has worked to overcome, his journey inside of relationships and addiction. He will inspire you to remember you are more than your human experience. You are infinite, and you have the power to create the life of your dreams. You have the power and courage to love yourself and soften to love others and the world around you, even if you do not agree with their personal dream.

This conversation is unscripted and straight from the heart. No planned questions. No performance. Just two friends sharing truth, laughing, exploring, and letting the moment guide us.

I'm so honored to share this space with him, and I hope you feel the love, the freedom, and the permission that José naturally awakens in everyone he meets.

*Content note: This episode includes a brief reference to sexual abuse. Please prioritize your emotional well-being as you listen.

Let's dive in.

Learn more about Jose here

Meet him in person on December 6th in LA. Get your tickets here

You can learn more about me and my offerings here

If you are craving a real shift, a deep return to yourself, explore my 12-Week Soul Return

This is my most intimate 1:1 container. Twelve weeks of guided healing, honest reflection, emotional processing, and spiritual integration, all designed to help you come home to the parts of you that have been lost, silenced, or abandoned.

This journey is for you if you are ready to:

• break lifelong patterns that keep pulling you back • stop betraying yourself in relationships • release survival-mode living • soften old defenses and open your heart again • reconnect with your intuition and your inner authority • step into a life that feels aligned, grounded, and true

Together we work inside the real layers, the stories you were shaped by, the beliefs you absorbed, the patterns that once protected you but now keep you small. You will learn how to meet yourself with compassion, build emotional resilience, and shift from fear to truth.

This is not passive coaching. It is a partnership, a sacred container, and a transformational commitment to your divine unfolding.

If you are ready for big shifts, deep healing, and a return to your soul's clarity, the 12-Week Soul Return may be for you. Learn more here

Yes — there are many people in this world you could be in a relationship with. There is no shortage of potential partners. But when you are struggling inside your relationship, when there is fear, insecurity, reactivity, shutting down, chasing, or any kind of trauma response, the idea that there's "someone better out there" doesn't empower you. It actually pulls you further away from yourself. It keeps you externally focused instead of internally connected.

For someone who is living inside anxiety, attachment wounds, people-pleasing, avoidance, perfectionism, or the pattern of running every time things get hard… the message "you deserve better, go find it" becomes another way to disconnect from yourself. It reinforces the belief that your healing lives outside of you. That someone else will come along and soothe everything you haven't yet learned how to hold within yourself.

And that is where this narrative becomes harmful.

Because it pushes people into the next relationship without ever stopping to understand:

• why they choose who they choose

• what part of them gets activated, frightened, or shut down

• what version of themselves takes over when things feel threatening

• what need in them keeps going unmet, and why

• what patterns they are replaying from their childhood or past

• what agreements or beliefs about love they are still living inside of

Without that awareness, leaving doesn't create clarity, it creates repetition.

If someone leaves without doing their inner work, they don't "find better." They find a new person to run the same patterns with.

They carry the same wound into the next connection. They carry the same fear into the next dynamic. They bring the same unspoken needs, the same unhealed parts, the same survival strategies — and eventually, those patterns show up again, no matter how different the new partner seems at first.

And because the beginning of a relationship feels exciting, hopeful, intoxicating… people mistake that dopamine rush for healing. They mistake the quiet of a new connection for safety. They mistake difference for evolution.

But when the high wears off, when the nervous system settles, the same wounds come forward. And the cycle repeats.

So when I say that "go find better" is harmful, this is what I mean: it seduces you into believing that your healing is waiting for you in someone else, instead of waiting for you in you. It distracts you from the work that actually changes your patterns. And it prevents you from looking at the version of yourself that keeps showing up in your relationships, over and over again.

You don't break the cycle by finding someone new. You break the cycle by coming home to yourself.

Learn More About Me and My Offerings at www.healwithalchemy.com

Book a free 30 minute connection call to learn more about Awakening Woman: A 12-Week Soul Return. A sacred 12-week journey for the woman who is ready to turn inward, meet herself with honesty, and remember the truth of who she is.

Release resentment in this transformative 5-minute spiritual based practice. Let go of giving someone or something your energy and power. Through a powerful practice of cord cutting, sever the ties that bind you to the other.

Step away from the ego's grip on resentment and step into the energy of your soul. Step into your courage and let go of giving someone or something yoru energy, your power and your time.

Close your eyes, take a breath, and allow the journey to hold you.

You can find more of my meditations on Insight Timer or my personal mediation App Healspace.

Learn More About Working With Me @ www.healwithalchemy.com

Find Me on Instagram @soulalchemyhealing

Welcome back to Healing Our Relationships. This episode dives into the space between who you have been and who you are becoming. The bridge is the place where awareness meets embodiment, where intent becomes practice and where the real transformation happens.

On one side of that bridge is the familiar self, the one who moves from the patterns of codependency that keep them "safe" to avoid pain, the side that is often built on the foundation of fear. Fear of not being good enough, not doing right or fear of truly being seen. On the other side of the bridge is what it looks like when you are living as your authentic self. It is here, on the bridge, it can be really uncomfortable, but where the real lasting healing and growth happens. It is in that walk across when the relationship to yourself deepens in love and reverence.

I will inspire you to have the courage to navigate the discomfort in the in-between of wanting to be chosen and learning to choose ourselves. We look at how the mind, body, and spirit each hold a piece of that work: the mind still learning to release the old story, the body remembering safety, and your spirit teaching you how to trust what's real.

This episode is about the devotion it takes to live in alignment with your soul — to stay steady when the bridge shakes beneath you, and to keep walking toward the life that's actually yours. It is on the bridge you not only meet yourself, but others walking alongside you, tools to help you keep walking and the awakenings that will forever change you.

The first step towards ourself is the scariest, the rest is an unfolding of more than you could probably imagine.

Ready to stop circling the same patterns and start living differently? Book a free Connection Call with me to see how a 12-week guided 1:1 journey can help you rebuild trust with yourself and step into the life you've been working toward. Book Here

Join our live monthly Zoom call for women on the last Thursday of the month by dowloading my free meditation app HealSpace

Thank you for being here. Don't forget to rate and review if this podcast is supporting you.

With Love & Appreciation,

Marisa

This week on the Healing Our Relationships Podcast I have a very special guest. She is the author of 13 books, the Founder of Venus Rising Association for Transformation and creator of Shamanic Breathwork. She has been a shamanic visionary teacher and guide to thousands of people over the last four decades, dedicating her life to assisting soul seekers to transform and embrace their lives. Star Wolf's lifelong passion and sacred purpose is to support personal transformation. She shares openly and vulnerably of her addiction and codependency recovery and brings forward a theme we have not yet touched on in our podcast, Codependency as a crisis of the Spirit.

In this vulnerable and intimate conversation, we explore how the roots of codependency can stem from spiritual disconnection, the forgetting of who we truly are and the divine source that is all around us. Star Wolf speaks to how recovery, in its truest sense, is a process of remembrance and of coming home to the sacred within ourselves.

Together, we discuss how healing moves beyond human behavior and into the realm of the soul, where surrender becomes an opening rather than a loss, and where breath becomes the bridge between the human and the divine.

We also touch on the deeper spiritual roots of codependency and how it reflects the collective wounding of the Divine Feminine under patriarchal systems that have long valued doing over being, pleasing over truth, and control over trust. In reclaiming our connection, we begin to restore balance within ourselves and the world remembering that our worth, our power, and our love were never meant to be earned, only remembered.

This episode is an invitation to those on the path to explore if a connection to something greater could help them reclaim the power of love, and to remember that the journey of healing is ultimately a journey of returning to wholeness, to truth, and to the heart of who we are.

I invite you to have an open heart and open mind. Take what feels in alignment, leave what doesn't and be curous about that which may push you to your edges. Remember we are sharing our own personal expereince- not overarching truths.

Learn More About Star Wolf and Venus Rising at https://www.shamanicbreathwork.org/

You can buy her new book Aquarian Shaman Here

You can learn more about SHIP (Shamanic Healing Initiatory Process) Here

Buy Jacquelyn Small's Book Awakening In Time From Codependency to Co-Creation Here

Learn More about working with me 1:1 or in a Cohort Here

Join our live monthly Zoom call for women on the last Thursday of the month by dowloading my free meditation app HealSpace

Thank you for being here. Don't forget to rate and review if this podcast is supporting you.

With Love & Appreciation,

Marisa

In order to be authentic we have to have the courage to be seen, judged and misunderstood.

So much of our fear of authenticity comes from making assumptions and projection — seeing others not as they are, but through the lens of our own unhealed stories. Whether we are the projectors or being projected upon, in this episode of Healing Our Relationships, we explore how projections keep us afraid to be fully ourselves, and understanding that people's personal experience with us, is rarely just about us. And how having the courage to live with this awareness transforms it into a pathway of freedom.

We explore the subtle and often painful ways projection keeps us trapped in fear — fear of being misunderstood, fear of being too much or not enough, fear of losing love if we show who we really are.

This is a conversation about learning to let others be themselves without trying to fix, manage, or interpret them through the lens of our own wounds. It's also about reclaiming your own freedom by allowing people to have their experience of you and learning how to hold judgement, criticism and someone else's fear.

Together, we'll explore what it means to stand rooted in authenticity, to hold the discomfort of being misunderstood, and to meet yourself with compassion when fears rise. Through reflection and embodied practice, you'll begin to notice the moments when projection takes over, and learn how to return to truth again and again.

Because when you stop trying to control how others see you, you make space for the one thing you've been searching for all along: the freedom to be yourself.

Learn more about me at www.healwithalchemy.com

Follow me on instagram at @soulalchemyhealing

Join us for free on live on Zoom on the last Thursday of the month for Healing Our Relationships the Circle

This month I am on an ancestral pilgrimage to Italy with my father so I am getting creative to bring you something every week. A couple weeks ago my offering for you was a free 7 Day Morning Practice at your own pace video course, last week I offered you a prayer for moments of relationship fear, obsession or disastermind. This week I offer you a guided meditation.

In this meditation you will embark on a profound journey to release feelings of insecurity, unreasonable expectations for yourself and "not enoughness," fear, and anxieties. Expand your consciousness, and transition from focusing on the micro to the macro. As you immerse yourself in the energy of your soul, you will rise above your current state, and transcend beyond the constraints of your rolls, expectations and surroundings. Find inner peace and transform your perspective in this empowering meditation experience.

Give yourself 10 mins to be held, inspired inside of your vision and connect to yourself. I have a reputation for being the best meditation teacher for people who don't like to meditate. I don't invite you into silence, but into vision, into a creation of an inner landscape where you can learn to trust yourself and remember who you are.

You can find more of my meditations on Insight Timer or my personal mediation App Healspace.

Learn More About Me @ www.healwithalchemy.com Work with me 1:1 , Join My Mystery School or Retreat with me.

Find Me on Instagram @soulalchemyhealing

This month I am on an ancestral pilgrimage to Italy with my father so I am getting creative in order to bring you something every week. Last week my offering for you was a free 7 Day Morning Practice at your own pace video course. Give it a listen for the free promo code.

This week I am offering you a prayer for moments when you are experiencing obsession and fear inside of your relationships. Whether it be catastrophic thinking, disaster mind, or fight or flight in your body; Ask the Spirit, the univer, God, whoever you connect to- for relief and the courage to come back home to yourself. Make room for your feelings, honor your experience, and soothe the part of you that needs healing, love, and support.

This is a favorite for all of my Insight Timer listeners.

I hope you will find your breath, inner peace and trust.

Learn More about me at www.healwithalchemy.com

Meditate With Me on Insight Timer

This week I have something special for you.

We can only go so long on our healing journeys with concepts and conversation. We need rhythm. We need practice. We need to move from head to heart to truly begin to embody the work we are doing. We need tools that helps us feel connected to ourselves in a real and powerful ways.

In this bonus episode, I'm offering you just that. A way to root deeper into self-love and self-trust. A way to expereince compassionate awareness as a real living thing and not just a concept. A space for daily practice, without pressure or perfection.

As I am traveling this month and can not bring you a full in depth episode this week, I wanted to make sure you had something substantial from me. So give this short episode a listen, head back here, click the link below, and put in the 100% off code.

On the other side is a gift from me to you — one you can return to again and again.

Your Free Gift Is HERE

Your Promo Code is: PODCAST22

You are worth it. Come home to yourself.

New episodes drop each week!

And if you'd like to explore this work more deeply in community, join me for my Healing Our Relationships live circle on Zoom on the last Thursday of every month. You'll also find guided meditations, teachings, and resources in my HealSpace app — your sanctuary for coming home to yourself.

Learn more at www.healwithalchemy.com

Email me your story submissions, questions or thoughts at [email protected]

Follow me on Instagram at @soulalchemyhealing

Join me in Sedona this November for Awakening Woman Retreat