21. Trusting Love, Healing, and Creating Your Own Traditions That Support You with Shayoon Mendeluk

Welcome back, Brave Table fam! Joining me today all the way from Bali is the incredible Shayoon, a Trauma Specialist and Co-Founder of The Lightforce Center, a facility that uses ancient practices for deep healing. As a fashion icon from Los Angeles, to Ibiza, to Bali, she has been featured on the covers and in publications like Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Travel + Leisure, plus many more, and was called “the powerful and most sought-after female healer” by Grazia Magazine. 

Here’s what we dive into:

- Dating outside of your culture and how to tell your family

- How to break free from the confines of family obligations to discover yourself

- Using your trauma as a tool for your healing and growth

- How to question when conventional medicine says you won’t be able to walk again

- Undoing your cultural and religious programming and creating your own traditions

- The lessons your children have to offer and how they can help you clear trauma from your lineage

- The distinction between faith and religion 

- How to fiercely use your voice, speak your truth, and stand up for what you believe in 

- Taking the leap when your soul is asking for more of life

- Sitting with ayahuasca, freebirthing, and moving through fear

Shayoon was born in Nairobi, Kenya, to a mixed-culture (Indo-Pakistani) and a conservative Muslim family. Shayoon’s family moved around the world before eventually landing in Oklahoma City when she was a teenager. Immediately, she noticed the differences between being Muslim in Kenya versus the United States, feeling like, in the US, she had to adhere to a certain identity that didn’t align with who she was and led her to ‘rebel’ against what was expected of her in her culture. 

Then at 18, she got in a terrible car accident that left her feeling broken. She was told she wasn’t going to walk properly again, wouldn’t be able to have children, and couldn’t continue to play volleyball, causing her to fall into a deep depression and experience anxiety. 

Longing for more than Oklahoma City could offer her, Shayoon moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in fashion. In 2010, during a weekend at Coachella, she would enter into a powerful love story, meeting her twin flame and now husband, Alexander. Shayoon’s relationship with Alexander was the catalyst for her deep healing journey and the beginning of her spiritual awakening. 

Still in immense pain from her car accident and managing it with Western medicine, Alexander opened Shayoon up to holistic healing, in particular, the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). Within minutes, after years of pain, medication, and feeling anger toward her body, Shayoon was freed from her chronic pain for good—and never took medication for it again. 

After seeing what was possible when you begin to release unhealed trauma and stagnant emotion, Shayoon trained herself in various healing modalities and techniques so she could pay it forward. Today this mama of two is dedicated to spreading the gift of healing far and wide to relieve others of their pain and disease, help them realize their power, and live healthy, thriving lives. Alongside Alexander, they have been able to heal clients of The Lightforce Center of everything from asthma to fertility issues to depression and anxiety. 

In this conversation, she also shares her free birth story, how nervous she was to bring home a non-Muslim boyfriend to meet her parents, clearing ancestral trauma, how to have unshakeable faith over fear, and trusting and honoring your intuition in choosing what practices will be most supportive for you.    

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out…

- Shayoon’s Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/shayoon_/  and The Lightforce Center at https://thelightforcecenter.com/ 

- More about your using voice and being yourself with Vasavi Kumar.

- Pursuing your dharma with Sahara Rose.

- More on healing generational trauma.

Thanks for listening and I hope you loved this episode. If you did, please consider leaving a 5-star review to help others find and benefit from the show.

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