14 minute read
Sandra Laura Manuela
On a mission to inspire, uplift, and empower
We are very excited in this, our first issue for 2022, to feature an interview with Sandra Laura Manuela Deakin. A global transformational teacher, mentor, and public speaker, she helps sensitive, passionate, and powerful women discover themselves in a new way.
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Who are you?
Hello beautiful reader! I’m Sandra Laura Manuela Deakin. I live in Antwerp, Belgium and was born to a British father and a Belgian mother. Being born and raised in a family with two different cultures, I have always looked at myself as a ‘global’ citizen and so have always yearned to connect with all people. I have over 35 years of experience as a journalist, writer, speaker, producer, TV, and radio host, and most recently podcast hosting.
Today I work as a global transformational teacher, mentor, and public speaker, helping sensitive, passionate and powerful women discover themselves in a new way. I show them how to find that safe, sovereign space inside themselves that gently guides them into being the conscious creator of a life that feels aligned and true for them.
My purpose has always been to inspire, uplift, and empower my audience. I love helping women turn their own “blind spots” into “bright spots.” Because I believe every obstacle we face can become the biggest opportunity for inner growth, mastery, and harnessing of our utmost potential.
When I started my career in media more than 35 years ago, many of my journalist colleagues mocked me, thinking me too much of an idealist. Yet during that time, I was a pioneer in the Belgian media as I spoke directly from the heart. My listeners and viewers loved the raw honesty I brought them, and it showed in my ratings. And now even today, after all that time, people connect with me on the street just to thank me for all the joy I brought to their hearts.
Although my career was thriving, in my personal life I faced several challenges. I battled constant self-doubt. The simplest obstacles often overwhelmed me and relationships turned codependent. Behind the image of ‘a female media trailblazer’ was an insecure, frightened little girl and a wounded woman.
Until life gave me a wake-up call.
All these insecurities had manifested themselves in my body. Thanks to the many great souls such as Deepak Chopra, Brandon Bays, and Michael Beckwith I had interviewed and worked with, I learned to look at the body from a whole new perspective. They taught me that the body is the navigator of our life and vessel for our inner power, potential, and brilliance. I learned that our discomfort and pain are beautiful opportunities to become more conscious of what our soul is trying to communicate through our bodies. Once we learn to listen on a deeper level, our soul speaks through our body, and we can liberate ourselves from past thought-patterns and behaviours that no longer serve us. In this moment, the body can tune into its enormous capacity for self-healing. Through learning this, I was able to start liberating my body from past trauma and transform my pain into pearls.
I was revitalized!
During those intense, dark and challenging times, I developed a deep understanding and inner wisdom of how to embrace and become bigger than my fears. I learned how to have a healthy, loving relationship with myself. I stopped peoplepleasing and instead learned how to set healthy boundaries. I transformed a rather dull marriage into a magical juicy relationship with the same amazing partner. Today we celebrate 20 years of being together and we have never been so happy.
This made me realize how we all have the ability to become the creators of our own juicy, joyful, and fulfilled life. My biggest discovery was that we women are designed to be a pure expression of beauty, brilliance and power. We can have anything we desire once we reclaim our body, power, and our sexual energy.
What is the single best piece of business advice which helped shape who you are now and Why?
Take action! Just take small steps towards your goals, even if it doesn’t “feel quite right yet.” This is something one of my mentors, and dear friend, Marie Diamond taught me years ago. I used to always wait to take action as it needed to come from an ‘aligned’ place. But if we must wait until we are fully ‘aligned’ it will never happen, because the thing is there’s never a perfect time!
This is what I see happening to a lot of people. They’ve long had a dream that they never got started on because it was never the ‘right’ moment. But there will always be an excuse not to get started. Do you want to watch your life slip by and at the end of your life think to yourself: ‘What happened? Why did I never….?’ All because you were too afraid to take that one tiny step.
Letting go of my perfectionism wasn’t easy for me. I had to learn to trust the process and get out of my own way. I had to learn not to listen to the background noise and become bigger than my shame, fear, guilt, doubt, and worry. By taking action I saw myself becoming more and more that juicy, powerful woman I am today. Life is like a sculpture; we become more than the perfect original idea of ourselves while sculpting the road and taking actions.
How do you take care of yourself on a holistic level?
I have learned to listen on a deeper level to my body. This means although I lead a busy life, I carve out sacred time and space to nourish my body with relaxing moments. I love connecting with the elements in a very conscious way through little daily rituals. I have started taking cold showers in the morning to boost my immune system. I also love a good warm nourishing bath.
Before I give a webinar or do a public speech or show, I dare to take time off to have my bath and just be nourished by the warm water and my favourite oils. I love my food, yet I always make sure I eat living food and that I cook from the heart. I make sure every meal is a sacred time for me. That means during my meals no mobile phone or other distractions. This makes eating like a meditation and a nourishing moment for the body and soul.
Before I start each meal, I also think about something I am grateful for. Gratitude gives the body a signal to receive the nutrition from the food on a deeper and higher level. I also make sure I walk in nature at least once every day, even if I only have 15 minutes to spare. I make sure I create the time for me to connect with Mother Earth.
In my life and personal relationships, I have a few non-negotiables. One of them is NO news when I wake up and before I go to sleep. My partner is a news addict and so I had to make this a healthy boundary in our relationship. As I am a highly sensitive person, I try to avoid negative and toxic energies especially when starting and completing my day.
What is your favourite quote and why?
My favourite quote is ‘Beauty starts the moment you decide to be yourself’ by Coco Chanel. I love how Chanel helped women express their unique selves.
How do you remember your childhood and early background?
I had quite a happy childhood. I’m an only child so I was showered with a lot of attention and love growing up. However, being an only child meant my parents were hyper-focused on me and I felt the immense pressure to always “be perfect.” I feel I missed the spontaneity and playfulness of being a child because I was always expected to be the “model child.” I did well in school and got excellent results, however, this put even more pressure on me to keep being “perfect.”
Later in life this constant pressure to perform and achieve left me burnt out and with an overactive thyroid. I had to go through an intense healing process and learned how to let my inner child play and be spontaneous. The good part about that is that today at the age of 52, I play every day. It feels like I have to catch up on all those years I forgot to play and took life and myself so seriously.
I come from a very modest family that had to work hard in life to get that little bit of luxury. My mum and dad made sure I could go to the best schools and had beautiful clothes and there was always plenty of food on the table. Yet, it all came with a lot of struggle and sacrifice. As a child, this put a burden upon me and made me feel guilty.
My whole life has been a journey of giving myself the permission to shine and just be me, everything I was deprived of as a child. This is what I teach other women today. It took me years to become bigger than the fears I had inherited from my family and to give myself that birth right to thrive, be successful, healthy, abundant, and simply happy. I learned how to liberate myself from a certain way of victim thinking and step into my power and own it.
What are you most passionate about and why?
I am quite a passionate person. I love to live. I love to love. I love the good life.
When I do something, I do it with all of my heart or I don’t do it at all. I am passionate about expressing my true self in the world. My unapologetic shameless self. I am passionate about the true beauty, brilliance, and power of the feminine.
From childhood, I have read books about Goddess power and the Goddess Archetype because I believe every woman carries the flavours and colours of all these goddesses inside. We have simply forgotten by living a life that has pulled us out of our core being and nature, who we truly are. The only thing we must do as women is remember we are a goddess and the powerful creator of our own life.
I am also passionate about beauty and how to express beauty in life through fashion, lifestyle, elegance… It breaks my heart to see so many women who are constantly looking for beauty outside of themselves. Coming from TV land I have seen so many women abuse their bodies just to fit society’s idea of beauty. This disconnects them from the true vibration of internal beauty.
I am also passionate about alchemy, the magic of transformation, and the art of living a juicy life that feels aligned with your true nature. Coming from a modest background it felt like I could always feel that heaviness of life hanging over me. Being highly sensitive at the same time there was always something inside me that could connect to the purest light in dark and challenging times. I did this through meditation, music, or dance. Only years later I would find a way to transform my pain into precious pearls. This is what I call inner alchemy. Each day turning your obstacles into your biggest opportunities is something I have become very passionate about.
Why is the Sacred Feminine so important and we should work on it?
For centuries women have been disconnected from their true inner power and brilliance.
True feminine power is deep, dark, mysterious, and incomprehensible. It is the unspoken, it is the silence, it is the mystery behind all that is visible, audible, and tangible.
Because we live in a world that is so results-driven we only celebrate what we can ‘explain’ and can ‘see with our eyes’. We miss out on a significant part of life… the mystery.
Society often undervalues feminine qualities such as kindness, softness, true beauty, darkness, and silence.
To survive in a more masculine world women have adapted themselves so much they’ve been driven away from their true female qualities. Our power as women is our bodies, our deep intuition hidden in our hips and connected with our soulheart, and I teach women how to reconnect with all of that. If a woman learns how to embody her full being by having a deeper connection with her body, she becomes a living goddess. She has the power to transform her pains into precious pearls and radiate through her body her unique essence.
Living a life deeper connected to your body as a woman helps you step out of the rigid prison of your mind and into a more juicy and joyful life.
A juicy, joyful woman can transform, empower, and inspire a whole community just by her presence. This has been my own journey. I learned how to move from the thousands of stories in my head to my heart and sink into my hips. This way I also managed to reclaim my sexual energy and use this special sacred energy inside of me to fuel my dreams and make them come true.
We, women, have so much magic and power inside ourselves. We have simply forgotten or are too afraid to reconnect with it because of the centuries of torture, abuse, and victimhood. There is no better moment than today to reclaim it, heal it, and own it.
What is your part at the Transformational Leadership Council?
ATL Europe is a heart-based community of transformational leaders founded by Marie Diamond (known from the movie ‘The Secret’).
We have one big purpose: to help Europe and the world awaken and become more empowered and enlightened. Twice a year we meet with all the leaders from all over the world somewhere in Europe. This year it will be the beautiful Split in Croatia.
We support, empower, inspire, and challenge each other to grow and evolve. About six years ago Marie Diamond asked me to join this amazing group and it changed my life forever. As a highly sensitive person and someone who had done a lot of inner transformative work, I felt rather isolated and different from the people around me. By joining ATL Europe it felt like all of a sudden, I had a soul family, a tribe. They have helped me grow and evolve into the woman I am today. I am forever grateful.
Tell us about the book
We wrote a bestseller “38 Insights to Manifest Your Best Life. This is an amazing book with 38 stories written by our co-authors about how we turned our obstacles into treasures and how we became the heroes of our own life. My own story in this book is called “Get Nakedly Honest”. One of my biggest transformation lessons has been to get nakedly real with myself.
I used to tell myself a thousand stories just not to feel the reality and truth of things because it would feel ‘uncomfortable’. So, I had to teach myself to become nakedly honest. Only then we can create true change and breakthroughs in our lives.
How has COVID changed your way of working?
When COVID started I was just spreading my wings internationally as an inspirational speaker and I had started giving my seminars in London. I was booked at several events to speak, and then it all stopped… I decided not to dramatize this and simply act and go with the flow. So, I transformed my business into an online business. I created several online courses for women to transform their lives for the better and to reconnect with their true feminine power. I also started giving online webinars to these women.
Today, my business is steadily growing bigger and more aligned. I have learned to follow the flow of life in the ups and downs. Life is often not about what we think it should be, but about surrendering and anticipating and still following your inner truth and voice.
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Content: Discover the deeper mystery of your sacred feminine power. Remember, reclaim and embody your own power and sexuality as a woman and start living the life that simply feels good!
