204. Coming out of the spiritual closet

Do you have a deep spiritual connection but feel afraid to show the world that side of you?

Our guest today, Natalia Dunne can relate.

She lost both her parents to a car accident at just 19 and has been on a spiritual path ever since - one that brought her to the south of France, where she now helps women restore their connection to the spiritual world and reconnect with their feminine energy.

In this episode Natalia shares -

💙 How the voice of spirit showed up for her.

💙 Why she was censoring her spiritual side.

💙 What happened when she came out of the 'spiritual closet.'  

💙 The value of showing your whole authentic self.

Transcript

Hello, I am so excited to bring you this episode with the beautiful Natalia Dunne. She's on Instagram at Unleash the Goddess. I met Natalia on a retreat in France last year and actually you can hear more about that retreat in Episode 161. Natalia's story is so moving. She lost both of her parents to a car accident when she was just 19 and has been on a deep spiritual path ever since. One that led her from moving to Canada to the south of France, where she now helps women restore their connection to the spiritual world and trust their intuition. Natalia's feminine energy is palpable and her wisdom runs deep.

And as Natalia shares, it was a journey she was initially afraid to speak so openly about her spiritual connections and rituals. And if you've been following me for a while, you'll know I've been on my own spiritual path and slowly, slowly I'm sharing more and more of this side of myself. Thank you for embracing it. I get lots of positive feedback when I share this kind of content, especially about Episode 200, which was about which chakra is holding your voice back. I've got a lot of great feedback about that episode and those of you in Soul Speakers know I speak about this quite openly. And this speaks to the heart of the message Natalia is sharing in this episode. It's have courage to come out of the spiritual closet to share your gifts, to use your voice. Because when you show your true self, that's when you're embraced by those who love you for who you are. So are you ready to come out of the spiritual closet?

Sally:

Natalia Dunne, it is such a pleasure to have you on that voice podcast. How are you?

Natalia:

I'm good. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really honored.

Sally:

The last time we saw each other within the beautiful south of France enjoying our wonderful priestess retreat. Tell us about where you live and how you came to be there.

Natalia:

Oh my goodness. So I live in southern France and it's very funny because I used to live in Canada and I was working as an occupational therapist and I started having more and more feelings and calls that I have to move to southern France. It was really strange because I was just just connecting with my spiritual journey and trusting my spiritual intuition. And I heard this call of the God is like, you have to move to Southern France and you have to follow the steps of Mary Magdalene. And I was like, what? Who? Mary Magdalene, why do I have to move to Southern France? My job is here, my husband is here, my kids are here. How are we gonna move to southern France? And the more I tried to push this voice away, the more it kept coming back and it kept coming back strong.

Natalia:

And so my human, my really rational side and you know, I come from a very academic background. It was like, how are you going to make this move? This makes no rational sense. You're not gonna approve all your, all your family and move to southern France where you don't know anybody and how you're gonna do it logistically and the job-wise. And so I was pushing it away, but the call kept coming back. It's like, no, you have to move to Southern France and follow the steps of Mary Magdalene. I was like, okay, I don't know how to do this but I'm gonna stay open. And all of a sudden my husband calls me from work and he says, Nat, there is a beautiful job opportunity to just appeared in Toulu, which is in southern France, in the land of Mary Magdalene. He's like, should I apply And I was like, Oh.

Sally:

And you were like, Oh my goodness!

Natalia:

Oh my goodness he that, that's such a alignment. He wasn't looking for a job, he just appeared, you know? And so he applied and he did the interviews and within a month and a half we sold our house. After he finished his interview, we took the kids and moved to Southern France. And so that's how I ended up living here. And I started learning more about the journey and the goddesses and the spiritual side because I think in North America we're very disconnected from this aspect of the feminine. And Mary Magdalene, I never even heard of her, but her legacy's very, very present here in southern France. There's a lot of, you know, remembering of her lineage. And so that was kind of a catharsis to my own spiritual journey as well and to reclaiming the feminine and the spiritual aspects within myself.

Sally:

It's such a beautiful story. So when you say you were hearing those voices and spirit was saying go to Southern France, how was that coming about? Was it during meditation? Was it while you were sleeping? Was it just like, how was it showing itself?

Natalia:

It's so funny you asked because my husband asked me the same question, he was like, what? What do you mean you hear the voices? To me it comes through meditation. Like I really get a very clear sense of knowing. But it took me a lot of time to learn to trust that because I think whenever we are in the, you know, and I call it like the spiritual voice, I think when we are, especially if we come from a very academic background, it's so linear, it's so concrete, it's so, you know, matter of fact it can be a little bit tricky and hard for us to trust the authority of our intuition as well and to, you know, open ourselves up to receiving messages and trusting that those messages are not just part of our imagination, that we just made this up. From my experience, what I learned is that it's good to have this critical mind and have this critical checking to be like, am I just imagining this or is this like a real calling? But I think the more you open yourself up to the possibility that it might be a real calling, the more like incredible alignments and synchronicities will just appear in your life that your rational human could not even imagine or create because you don't have access to the information that spirit has access to.

Sally:

Yeah, and it's that crazy story about how the beautiful house came your way. How easy it was for you to find the perfect house in the perfect location when you got there.

Natalia:

When I was back in Canada, when I said you know, I heard this call many times, one of the visions I had, like I was sitting in meditation and I just saw myself living in southern France and living in like a stone house, like an old stone house with flowers on the wall. And it was so vivid and so clear the image like I could feel myself in this house. And then we moved to France and again, we were not looking to buy anything and I was just like, let me just look online. And I saw this house online in the countryside, but it was a bit further than I would've ever wanted to, to move. And I was like, okay, let me go check, just see, just see what this house is. And when I came to the house, I felt my whole being vibrating.

Natalia:

It's like, no, this is the house. And when I walked around it had the exact flowers I saw in my vision and my root chakra just like my feet. It felt like there was roots coming and going into the ground and it's like, no, this is the house of my vision. And I was not looking for it. I was not going to buy. And my husband, we just looked at each other and he's like, we're getting this house. So, you know, again, such alignment that she cannot, you know, my rational human would not be able to invent this and not find a path like rationally and logically to get there. You just have to open yourself up to the synchronicities.

Sally:

Oh, full body chills, Natalia. So let's go back a little bit earlier. Have you always had this connection with Vira? You always had these voices, these whispers?

Natalia:

That's such a good question. I think I always had, when I was 19, both of my parents passed away in a car accident and you know, that was a really, really strong soul initiation, you know, for myself to find out who I am as a human being and you know, find my own power within myself and find my connection to unconditional love without them being present. Because I think parents are such, you know, strong pillars of unconditional love if they're able to, you know, hold this frequency for their children. And so it was such an initiation of like finding who I am and learning to trust myself because I had nobody else coming from the outside to tell me, you know, well you are this or you're that. And so what was really interesting is that this experience also really opened me up to connecting to the spiritual world.

Natalia:

But I think back then I was not fully trusting it yet because I was very much in the academic world and I was still studying, you know, I did my undergrad in psychology, then I went, I did my master's degree in, you know, occupational therapy. So it was like a lot of very academic things. I didn't have a lot of people who would talk about that this voice is a bit suppressed and there's maybe this lingering fear of feeling like, oh, maybe I'm crazy if I speak about this, right? Like maybe I'm crazy if I trust this so much. So I think I always had very deep intuition and, and I always had this very strong connection with the spiritual world and I could go and give a lot of examples of how like my parents came to me after they passed away. I even had a dream of my dad who came two, three weeks before I knew I was pregnant and he showed me a baby girl in my dream and it's like she's coming. So there's like always this connection, but I was not so trusting it at the level I trust now. So that was quite a reclamation of owning that aspect of who you are as a being.

Sally:

Absolutely. And Italia, I think a lot of people can relate to that feeling of having these connections to spirit but feeling like they don't want to voice that because people might reject them or think that they're crazy or will be met with some kind of hostility. So how did you courageously step out and say, you know what, this is what I'm gonna talk about. This is what I believe.

Natalia:

It was quite a journey Sally. It didn't happen so easily, but I think a lot of it happened when I moved to France because I think my soul was meant to be in France. Even being on this land, there was a lot of activations that happened somatically in my body because I think energetically there are different places on earth that will activate different things in us. And my soul journey was to end up in France moving here, I didn't return to work as an occupational therapist, I created spaciousness for myself to take some time off and you know, I'm privileged to have had the time to do that, to really find out who I am in this new environment and what do I want to create with this. Because I felt like life just offered me this magical, beautiful opportunity. And so I created this specific time for myself to connect, to tune in and to find out.

Natalia:

And what I realized is that I was censoring my spiritual side in so many aspects. I was censoring myself in terms of like what I was sharing on social media, on how I was speaking. The tone I was using was very, you know, very academic a lot of times because I was afraid that if I started speaking from like a spiritual tone or like from that place, maybe I will get rejected. Maybe some people will really kill me. And I was still running a lot in the academic circle so I was like, oh my God, imagine all my classmates, they see me talking about this woo woo thing and I'll be like, who? Like what's up with her? You know, a lot of our friends are, you know, most friends from my husband and from his work and you know, my husband is an engineer. Very

Sally:

Facts and data.

Natalia:

Exactly, which is amazing. And it, not to dis discrete one or the other, but I was like okay, if I want to own my, you know, spiritual voice and I want to step into that aspect of myself, I need to stop censoring. And so I went to my husband one day and I'm like, babe, you know I have to tell you something. And it's like me coming out of the spiritual closet, which I realized I wasn't. I was like, I'm gonna do all my spiritual things but I'm gonna hide so nobody sees it. So my kids don't see it when I do rituals. So my husband doesn't see it so nobody knows. I was like really hiding in the closet, you know, I'm like, I can't live in the closet anymore, I need to come out. And so I went to see my husband and I told him, babe, you know, I'm a very spiritual being. I hear voices and I receive messages and I communicate to spirits and this is what makes me happy. This is who I am. And I had so much fear that he's gonna look at me like I'm crazy and he is gonna be like, Nay, are you okay? But he just looked at me and he said, I know.

Sally:

Oh.

Natalia:

And I was like, oh that's that. And I realized that so many projections, it was me. It was my own fears that I was projecting onto him. And what I was truly fearing was not his rejection, it was the rejection of like I was giving to myself, you know, and the censorship I was giving to myself. And he was just kind of like the person of whom I projected this, but he's like, I know, I know you're super spiritual. I see that. That's why I love you. You know? And so that was such, you know, such a healing in myself to be able to first of all stop censoring who I am and to allow myself to speak from the space of authenticity and not have to pretend to be somebody else because I'm afraid to be rejected. And I know that some people will not resonate.

Natalia:

But what I also find out is that so many people have this deep need to connect to something bigger, to the divine in their own way. They have those experiences like those mystical experiences where you're like, wow, I'm connected to something bigger or wow, I just had some intuition and it was so true that cannot be rationally and scientifically explained yet. But they center themselves and they don't give credit to that voice and don't allow themselves to own to that voice. And so when you own that aspect, what happens is that when you meet other people, it makes them feel safe to also go into that side of themselves. And you realize that how many people actually have those experiences but are just learn to censor themselves and not allow themselves the spaciousness to be authentic in that aspect of who they are.

Sally:

Yeah. You're so right. You know, I held this belief for a long time that corporate people were not spiritual people. So I could do all my soul seekers and my more spiritual type work with my community online. But when I did my corporate workshops, I needed to just be straighty 180, don't mention anything at all. And I was at a particular workshop where I just sort of floated the idea of a bit of breath work and I think I mentioned something about opening the throat chakra or just something small. And to my surprise, almost everybody in the room, their eyes lit up. You could just see they were like, oh my gosh, we have permission to talk about this hard work work. And it led to this beautiful session where we had this open spiritual being to spiritual being conversation. And that was a great lesson in not censoring yourself and not judging people, not thinking that certain people just aren't spiritual.

Natalia:

Absolutely. And I think we maybe misjudge how many people are craving to step into the wholeness of who they are as beings. And I think as like I think we all are spiritual beings as well, right? And it has been censored for so long and there's many reasons that could be a whole other podcast episode of like, why did we arrive to this point collectively. But I think pretty much most people, they do have a spiritual connection, maybe even if it's a small one. And the moment you open this space of safety for them to go into that aspect of themselves, you'll be surprised how many people will jump in and be like, oh my God, I've been craving to speak about this and I've been craving to explore this and give myself permission to speak about it. But I was so afraid that others will judge me.

Sally:

So Natalia, you work with a lot of women sort of similar work to myself in helping people come back to who they are and express themselves truthfully. And have you had any women who have had this issue that we're talking about where they've wanted to show more of their spiritual voice and have felt unsure? And what do you suggest they do? How do you help them come out of that spiritual closet?

Natalia:

Hmm. You know, I actually work a lot with women and one of my main pillars is working again around the connection with the feminine and the feminine energy is this, you know, this energy of going inwards, of getting to know who you are, of being, not doing something, not valuing yourself, but how much you do and how much you produce. It's again about connecting to who you truly are and creating spaciousness for this. And to me, I think soft love is a the biggest pillar of anything you want to create in your life. And when you're able to create this very compassionate, just start with compassion. Like I have compassion for all aspects of myself. Where am I not giving compassion to myself into who I want to be? Maybe I'm judging myself too critically. Maybe I'm judging myself too harshly. And the way I love to approach it, it's gonna sound a little bit funny, but I love creating like, you know, like they do in spiritual communities when they do like a healing circle where everybody sits down and shares.

Natalia:

I love guiding my clients to create a healing circle in their heads for all aspects of themselves and for all voices. Whenever we try to shame an aspect of ourselves, it will always create a shadow and it will create a psyche fragmentation part. And so it's very hard to then go and work with that aspect of ourselves because we're hiding it. And the only way that I can see all of this coming to wholeness and for us to be able to shift this is by creating compassion. And so we create this loving circle where every part of you comes to play and you just listen to them and you listen to what they have to say.

Sally:

You write it down or are you just listening?

Natalia:

Yes. Well, in one-on-one sessions, what we do is we actually sit down and we, I'm like, okay, let's who else is coming and who else is coming? Like we actually talk it. But for those who are listening and they want to create that, you can journal, you can sit down and be like, I'm gonna create a healing circle for all aspects of myself. And it sounds funny because then it looks like we have multiple personalities, but we all do in a way, it's about giving them a voice to be heard. And once you give them a voice, even the parts that sometimes can feel scary or parts we don't want to see about ourselves. 'cause You know, a lot of women repress rage and emotions that were deemed like less appropriate socially, but those emotions are there, they're just in the background and they come up in very maladaptive ways.

Natalia:

And so when you create this spaciousness for them to come and to be heard with compassion without judgment, like in a healing circle, like what do you want to tell me? Tell me I'm listening. Oh my God, the shifts that happen, the wholeness that happens, the years of stored trauma that was never addressed and never seen. It just like, it's like finally I have space to be seen and heard. It's really, really transformative. So if anybody who's listening who's like, I don't know where to start, sit down and imagine yourself. You're like leading the circle for all aspects of yourself to come. And even if there is aspects you still can't talk with, just take note that they're there. Invite them to sit in the circle. They don't have to speak yet. I want to love all aspects of me, all aspects of me are worthy. And at the end, what we realize is that every single one of them is trying to protect us. It's, none of them is evil, none of them is bad.

Sally:

Yeah. What a fantastic exercise that reminds me in my Fear to Fierce course. One of the exercises is write a letter to fear. So it's kind of that similar thing, rather than trying to shame something and reject something, it's bring it to the table, acknowledge it, and then you can move forward. Also, Natalia, I think one of the reasons I've become so calm at this stage of my life is because I did feminine rage work, when you can get outta the feminine rage, it's like you can be so much more calm. Like I realized I had so much bubbling beneath the surface. So that's a great exercise. What about somebody who is wanting to start a business or they already have a business and want to show this side of them and they've got that moment of, I don't know if I should post a social media video.

Natalia:

What I found is sometimes the best way to get over something is to just go and do it. 'Cause You can spend the next 10 years trying to understand the underlining reasons. And what happens most often is that once you actually go and post this thing or speak from that space, all the fears you had, most of them usually don't come true. We go back to the example where I, you know, shared with my husband, what happens is that those were my fears and we are more afraid of our own fears than what actually is going to happen. And so sometimes the best way is just go post it and look at it as a game. It's like, okay, let me play this game, let me just test things. And it's like an experiment, like, you know, like little kids, they just test things and let's see what happens, you know, and just post it and be like, this is a step that I'm taking towards stepping deeper and deeper into my own self authenticity. People are magnetized by the authentic voices of others. They're like, oh, they can be themselves. I also wanna be myself.

Sally:

Absolutely. And if you're listening to this in you're wondering how then by my course, the magnetic voice formula, because that's exactly what we talk about, how to get to that magnetic voice. And it reminds me of that quote where fear is false evidence appearing real, false evidence appearing real. It's really, you know, not there. And Episode 195 of That voice podcast, which is the power of imperfect action.

Natalia:

And you know, that's the thing is that a lot of the women I work with, they're like, okay, I will do it when I'm not scared anymore, honey, that will probably never happen, every time you're doing something new, do it. Do it scared. You know, when I went to see my husband and I told him that I was scared when I started sharing publicly on Facebook and on Instagram around, you know, spirituality, I was scared. It's, you still have to do it even where you're scared. And this is how you learn to teach your nervous system that actually this fear was not real, right? Because then you see that nothing happened, like no horrible things happened. The world didn't explode.

Sally:

Yeah. And it's like not just safe to be yourself. You are embraced by being yourself.

Natalia:

If you are wearing a mask that is not you, the people who are meant to love you, they cannot see you, they see your mask, and so you're going to attract the wrong people. The moment you dare to remove the mask and be like, this is who I am. Yes, maybe some people will live the one who were, you know, there for your mask, but the ones who are craving you, the authentic you who are there to love you, they will come.

Sally:

Oh, I miss you. I've, I think about our time together in France. It's just, oh, being around your energy. You are so feminine, you're so connected, there's so much self-love that emanates from you. And I'm sure people listening will feel that from you as well. How can they connect with you?

Natalia:

Oh, thank you, beauty. Well, the best place to connect with me is on Instagram. It's Unleash the Goddess. So it's pretty, you know, on point. So I'm, I'm mostly there. I'm also on Facebook and you know, I organize retreats, so if anybody feels the call to connect to their feminine and we do a lot of somatic work of connecting to the body of unconditional, loving the body, stopping into a feminine. We visit a lot of sacred sites connected to Mary Magdalene, to you know, the Goddess because there's so much history here to the Black Madonnas. We visit a lot of amazing spaces. We do energetic work, so if somebody, you know, this is their cup of tea, I would love, love, love to welcome you here. And yeah, just imagine to my universe.

Sally:

I'll put all those details in the show notes. Natalia Dunne, thank you so much for coming on that voice podcast.

Natalia:

Thank you so much for having me. You're such a jewel of a human and thank you for doing what you do.