Spotlight: Deep Wild Coaching, Healing Queen, and Woke Magic
Sharing las ofrendas from members of Ofrenda’s community marketplace.
AS WE WRAP up the year and head into the holiday spending season, we’d like to encourage you to explore Ofrenda’s Community Marketplace: a place we allow advertisers from our community to share their ofrendas. We invited a few vendors to go a little deeper into their work and practices through the short interviews below. Get to know the people behind the ads and what inspires their work. Let’s support each other this season and through the next year!
Images courtesy of Salem Islas-Madlo.
Salem Islas-Madlo of Deep Wild Coaching
Vienna, Austria
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your ofrenda.
I’m Salem Islas-Madlo, the founder of Deep Wild Coaching and a holistic energy coach. I support womxn and femmes in transition to trust the gift of their presence as they open to their own intuition, creative power, and energy flow inherent of their deep wild nature. This path is about seeding a new life where an individual’s natural rhythms come into alignment alongside the cycles of Mother Earth.
What’s the story behind your business? What was the inspiration for getting it started, and what do you hope your customers will experience?
As a Xicanx, I have the sacred honor and privilege to draw from a rich, indigenous heritage of Yaqui lineage entwined with Germanic/Spanish European roots. The dignity this human experience brings into my life allows me to honor my ancestral truths and reclaim the freedom and sovereignty of my deep wild spirit back into a celebration of life and beauty. Bringing this deep wild nature into alignment has not only been the inspiration behind my business, but the whole story from where I started until the present moment within my life and work. My personal experience lends me strength and insight as I help people in transition; it also allows me to hold space for them to reclaim, trust, and embody their own deep wild nature while connecting to the Earth through the gift of their presence.
What’s your favorite Ofrenda Magazine article, and why is it special to you?
I have to say my favorite article is “A Día de los Muertos Perspective: My Path with Mictecacihuatl, ‘Lady of the Dead’” by Maestra Cuauhtli Cihuatl. It’s special to me because in many ways, it reminds me of how my own soul has connected with death and life since I was a child. It also brings me tenderly to a place of honoring my own ancestors and their legacy of remembrance.
What are you looking forward to in 2022?
I’m looking forward to completing my second coaching training, which will be working as a trauma recovery coach, working with a mentor to continue walking the red path of growing into curanderismo, and returning to the land of my birth—Puebla, Mexico—in sacred pilgrimage to sacred sites.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your business, Healing Queen.
I’m a bi-lingual bi-cultural love conscious coach and holistic energy practitioner. I established my practice, Healing Queen, in 2013 which is based in unceded Kizh/Tongva territories (Southern California). My practice reflects a mestizaje that blends traditions from my ancestors, many of whom were curanderas, midwives, herbalists, and sobadores, along with modern energy healing modalities such as Reiki, 13th Octave LaHoChi, and Polarity.
When I began my holistic energy practice, I incorporated both ancestral and modern traditions to create my own signature offering called Love Limpias. The Love Limpias guide folks to understand the root causes of feeling disempowered in this area of their life. By identifying and clearing limiting beliefs, a transformation can emerge, and clients become more resourced to reclaim their connection to their soul’s purpose and love as an expansive force in their lives.
Image courtesy of Reina Prado.
What's the story behind your business? What was the inspiration for getting it started, and what do you hope your customers will experience?
I created this work that centers on love so that it does not take anyone years to trust love again. This is why I call my coaching “Love Conscious.” When we cultivate a deeper and greater awareness about love guiding our choices in life, we can experience more joyful living. When I was ready to meet my divine match, I had done my own work but I was not fully stepping into my power. I was the best at camouflaging my heart’s desires, and accommodating what my then-partners wanted in their divine match. It wasn’t until I loved from my heart’s truth that I met my divine match. We’ve been happily together for over 10 years. Living and honoring my heart’s truth also allowed me to heal from my mother-wound tending to at least four generations of healing within my matrilineal family line.
I have expanded the work from the private Love Limpias into workshop series and group coaching programs to support women to learn to trust Love again. Workshop series include Love You and The Hummingbird’s Map. The group coaching programs are Ámate and Alchemy of True Self. Since 2018, I have seen over 400 of my clients heal from wounds of feeling unloved and meet the love of their life. I have even been invited to officiate a couple of weddings. I cultivate deep relationships with my clients and peers, many whom I have worked with for over a year through different programs I offer.
What’s your favorite Ofrenda Magazine issue, and why is it special to you?
I’m creating a book tour for my newest publication, Spring Into Love, a twenty-one-day bloom of guided experiences and reflection prompts, which is being published by Balboa Press. I’m also excited about traveling to the East Coast and meeting with the spaces Minka in Brooklyn and Rainbow Soul Collective in Gloucester, Massachusetts. These two venues have welcomed my practice, and I’ve been doing offerings remotely through them. Many new programs and birthing another book project are in the works, too.
What would you like Ofrenda’s readers to know about you?
Hola, friends! I’m, Brandi Amara Skyy, a queer, indigenous, non-binary artist, curandera, and transformational coach. I’m the HWIC (Head Witch In Charge) of WOKE MAGIC—a galaxy centered on personal, creative, and life transformation through Radical Personal Alchemy. We offer tarot and astrology readings, 1:1 Strategy VIP days, an online community and resource library, plus books, candles, and other magical mano-made tools. Our galaxy vision also includes an Intersectional, Queer, BIPOC, and marginalized folx publishing haus focusing on tarot/oracle decks, magic/medicine tools and books, and a foundation plus animal sanctuary.
Image courtesy of Brandi Amara Skyy.
What sparked the idea for your business, and what’s your vision?
I want to live in a world that is radically inclusive, deeply transformational, and rooted and connected to everyday magic. As someone who lives in the intersection of multiple identities, I never felt at home in any spiritual/magical community. One side of myself always seemed to be missing from the narrative. And I got tired of waiting to be anointed as special, magical, and purposeful. So I anointed myself—and created the kind of world I was seeking out. I was gifted WOKE MAGIC in a divine download, and I’ve been following Spirit’s guidance in its creation ever since. I don’t see the folx who come into my orbit as customers. We’re familia; we’re soul-gente. And just like my blood family, I want mi familia del alma to experience the power of real transformative magic—the best this life has to offer. And that begins with personal agency. That begins with harnessing our experiences and oppression into our power—and powerful art, life, and magic. I want you to experience this life, multidimensionally. And that’s exactly what WOKE MAGIC was born to do.
What’s your favorite Ofrenda Magazine issue or article?
I hold a two-spirit answer. The Power issue. That entire issue itself is a manual in personal transformation and the spirit of WOKE MAGIC. That issue spoke to my bones. But my heart and spirit wants to claim my own article, “Nepantlera—Becoming Verb: Shapeshifting in the Modern World,” because I wrote it as tribute to my grandmother before I found out she had colon cancer and was dying. A few weeks after writing this piece, I was writing her funeral memorial.
Tell us your plans for 2022.
I’m continuing to build, usher, and steward in the kind of world I want to live in through WOKE MAGIC. Deep, radical personal transformation and magic for myself, my wife, and the world. Quiet evenings. A slower pace. Word magic. A tarot and oracle deck. And a deeper connection to my own medicine and magic. Walking in tandem with my ancestors. Healing myself and mi gente whole.
Are you interested in advertising your own business on Ofrenda’s website? Check out the details on our advertising page. Online advertising is free for those who sign up in 2021. We’re also offering paid print advertising in 2022, and you can request more info when you sign up.
SALEM ISLAS-MADLO (Xicanx) is a poet, writer, educator, speaker, and holistic energy coach who likes to talk to trees while delving into zen realms of mindfulness and meditation. By day, she works at Deep Wild Coaching, and by night she takes to her broom to commune with the sun, moon, and stars.
BRANDI AMARA SKYY (Brown Indigenous Xicanx) is a healer, writer, and Nepantlera for folxs who are ready to make (r)evolutionary change in the world by living, creating, and sharing from the center of their full, authentic selves. Book a reading, listen to her podcast The Plática Sessions, and join her free Mi Gente Communityat brandiamaraskyy.com.
