Interviews | Gentleness Ambassadors

How to Come Home to Yourself as a Sensitive Person

An interview with Maia Thomlinson — Poet, Artist and Intuitive Guide

This article is part of an interview series, where I ask fellow sensitive healers, coaches, artists, and spiritual teachers how they embody Gentleness in their businesses and personal lives. I call them Gentleness Ambassadors :)

Maia and I ‘met’ in an online group program for healers, creatives, and entrepreneurs when I felt inspired to create an interview series of Gentleness Ambassadors. I posted a gentle request to see if anyone was keen to be interviewed. Maia was one of the first few who stepped forward!

More about Maia Thomlinson

Maia is a poet, artist, and intuitive guide.

She works with words to create spaces for people to breathe and come home to themselves. Her work is grounding, intuitive, loving, and practical, inviting new perspectives into the lives we live and the connection we all share in being human.

In her one-on-one sessions, she shares intuitive insight, astrological guidance, and practical tools to help people gain clarity on their path, moving forwards.

She has recently published a short ebook too! It’s titled: Just Breathe: Eleven Mantras + Tools to Come Home to Yourself.

It’s rare to chat with someone so young (Maia is 21 years old) and yet so grounded and connected to herself! Maia had an extraordinary childhood as an acrobat, growing up with her mom, who was an Olympic gymnast.

We had a lovely long chat via a Zoom meeting in mid-July. It was 9 am for her in her apartment at Montréal, Québec, Canada, while it was 9 pm for me in Singapore after my kids had gone to bed.

Here are the key highlights of our interview:

What is it like in a typical day as a poet, artist, and intuitive guide?

For the past month, I’ve been doing one-on-one sessions in the early morning or afternoon.

I have a nice morning routine of making breakfast, then I read a book for a while, and I sit down and eat. After breakfast, I usually have a little meditation, and I pull some oracle cards to connect to myself.

I don’t look at my phone for the first two hours of the day. I’m very strict about that because I find it helps me to be more focused. I also don’t sleep with my phone in my room because I find that when I do bring it into my room, I can’t sleep as well.

I’ll start by having a session, or I’ll be doing some work, such as writing. I’ve been working on creating my website and working on a few online courses and learning a lot!

I usually dance or do other workouts in the late afternoon or evening. Sometimes I’ll take dance classes online in my living room too during this quarantine period.

How do you embody Gentleness in your sessions with your clients?

I embody Gentleness in the way that I show up for people because I am honest while being sensitive to what they are feeling. I can intuitively sense and describe the energies that are moving within my clients. Sometimes I’ll even receive visions that are possible future timelines.

I help people form a healthier relationship with their sensitivity.

I work mostly with women, but I do occasionally work with men too, and some of them are very sensitive and intuitive as well.

Some people come to me in a very sensitive state. I would also meet people who are very strong and proactive. They would share how they feel tired to need to appear strong all the time, and this is when I would ask them if they were allowed to be sensitive when they were children. Often, we develop this persona like this hard rock to look strong-willed all the time, and people get a little surprised when I ask them that question.

I’ll often do Inner Child work where we give the inner child space to breathe and just be who they are, without needing anything to be changed.

It’s a simple practice of sitting with yourself, accepting who you are and what’s moving inside you, and forgiving yourself. This is how I invite more Gentleness, spaciousness, and breath into your life.

A lot of my work blends both the spiritual and practical aspects of life.

So I would take a look at what’s moving inside of a person, intuitively feeling into her energies. Sometimes I’ll sense there’s an energy in a person that’s throwing a tantrum, and there’s another one that’s crying at the corner because it feels neglected.

I might ask:

• How can we bring what you needed when you were seven years old and got yelled at by your father?
• That you couldn’t provide for yourself at that time imprinted on your life, and you’re still repeating this pattern?
• How can we go back and hold space for that seven-year-old child?

I think that rituals can be a beautiful way to hold space once there is an awareness of what’s moving inside of you to work with them.

I often give my clients meditation ideas, journaling prompts, or practices to balance the elements. These rituals can be moving your body, taking a bath, or taking a walk in nature, practical activities like these.

Rituals are essential in the work that I share. They also help us feel safe by having these structures to hold us.

How do you embody Gentleness as a poet and artist?

I have always identified with being a storyteller and started a blog two years ago to share stories with new perspectives.

I blend stories from my life with other stories from the world by absorbing deeply from these stories and connecting the dots between them.

For example, I’ll learn something from psychology and something from spirituality and then blend them with my personal life story.

My stories tend to portray the Human Condition — things that people have gone through in life. I tend to be more grounded in reality rather than get caught up in fantasy. So I love sharing and listening to people’s stories.

These stories get expressed even through my work as a dancer through all my dance pieces. I’ve been creating dances since I was 12 years old, and I would co-create with my mom. We created three shows together, and each show had a narrative arc to tell a story. This is one of my most potent gifts.

Bingz: You had such an unusual childhood!

Can you share more about your poetry writing process too?

I began writing poetry when I was eight years old. I will write the poem and not edit it; it just comes out the way it’s meant to be.

Some days, I’ll have an idea for a poem, and I will sit down and write for an hour and a half, and it will feel complete.

There’s a clear thread between all of my writings. It feels like my essence channels through me when I write.

It feels very authentic to me, more of an extension of who I am. It’s very grounded and intense energy, but it’s also very loving.

How do you embody Gentleness in your personal life?

It is a continual practice to be gentle on myself because I was brought up in a way that does not place much value on Gentleness. I was a gymnast for 11 years, and it was normal to push through the pain. I lived by the mantra, “no pain, no gain.”

My mother was a gymnast, and she had so many injuries, so she wanted me to take better care of my body. I have learned to balance my training workouts with yoga and meditation too.

It’s been a constant internal struggle because I want to be productive in getting things done too. To balance this, I would do my morning ritual of making breakfast, reading, meditation, and an oracle card reading to connect to myself. But there are some days when I would be too tired, so I will permit myself to go to the park.

As a circus artist and as a gymnast I was taught to push through pain, but about two years ago I started focusing more on dance in a way that is so much gentler than the way I learned dance when I was young.

In the last two years, I’ve dived into Contemporary dance, which is a very fluid motion. I’m also very inspired by Hip-Hop. I do have a part of me that’s very sassy and powerful, and I find that Hip-Hop gives me the space to express that.

My style is at the intersection between the two, where I love having hard hits and playing with staccato movements. That’s how I shape space.

I have learned to notice when I feel stuck and can’t work even when I’m trying to get work done. I would just go lie on the floor during those times. I took a dance class once where we ended up lying on the floor at some point and it just became a practice for me. In October last year, I was doing a show and I was so tired I just lay down on the floor for ten minutes! This simple practice of lying on the floor is definitely one of my favorite ways to be gentler on myself.

Other ways I’ve been gentler on myself are:

• telling myself that I’m allowed to cry right now and give myself the space to cry
• permitting myself not to do anything, lie on the couch and watch Netflix

I’m very fond of observing the relationship I have with the self. I can observe when I’m attacking myself.

As a dancer, I usually train very intensely, but for the past few weeks, I’ve been going through a bit of internal transformation, and the healing process has been super intense. So I had to permit myself not to need to train as much and listen to what my body needs.

How do you come home to yourself?

I have traveled a lot in my life since I was nine months old! I live in Canada, but I’ve been to Brazil and many countries in Europe.

I do love traveling, but I also am a homebody. I’m very attuned to the energetic vibrations of the places I’ve lived. I would feel very much at home in certain areas, such as Verona in Italy or Hawaii — these are two of my favorite places in the world.

I am good at creating this sense of ‘home’ wherever I go most of the time. I like to go to a new place and stay there for a couple of weeks, instead of traveling all over the place most of the time. I like to go deep while I’m there.

I can also adjust my energy to connect with people from various backgrounds. So if I’m speaking to somebody who has more energy then I’ll bring a different energy to the conversation than if I’m speaking to somebody who’s gentler.

I have had a strong sense of self for most of my life. My mom couldn’t force me to do anything I didn’t want to do since I was a child! I do know what I want, and I spend a lot of time alone to connect to myself through rituals and grounding practices.

I am very grounded in being who I am, except in my teenage years when I tried to make myself fit in with other kids and got caught up in more shadowy energy that didn’t serve me well.

I would peer into someone else’s life, think that was the life I wanted to live, and I would go after that goal. For example, when I was young, I’ve always thought I wanted to qualify for the Olympics games because my mother was an Olympic gymnast. I took on her goal even though it wasn’t in my nature to do this.

I did it again when I was a teenager and decided I want to go to circus school because I saw all these people on Instagram who looked super happy when they were there. This was why I moved to the city I’m living in now. But once I arrived at the circus school, I realized it wasn’t what I truly wanted. I didn’t fit in because they were trying to get me to fit into a box, but I prefer to go with the flow. I learned that it wasn’t the right situation for me.

How do you ground yourself through your emotional ups and downs?

We spoke about how Maia has an internal emotional rhythm of high and low moods, what it feels like for her, and how she manages it.

I’m expressive, but I’m also very good at hiding what I’m feeling. I have a hard exterior shell, so I’m working towards allowing myself to be emotional with the people I trust and love.

I’m a writer, so I like to write things down, or it’ll feel too much if they stay in my head. I write poetry also. Writing has helped me process my emotions for most of my life so far.

I love having heart-to-heart chats with people who are closest to me too.

Sometimes when I can’t express certain things through words, moving with my body lets me get it out. I dance almost every day, usually five to six days per week.

My art is a very sacred practice for me that’s very close to my heart. I create art because it’s such a natural extension of who I am — I can’t not write, I can’t not dance. The more I do art in a way that’s connected to me, the more I feel in tune with who I am.

Inviting Gentleness into the creative process

In Maia’s final message on Gentleness, she shares how, when she gives herself permission to be curious and explore more about the projects, they tend to end up with the best outcomes.

I hope you’ll enjoy listening to this mini-excerpt, where she shares more about inviting Gentleness into the creative process.

“We can do things in a gentler way that’s more open and encourages curiosity.

Over the past two years I’ve discovered that things work better for me when I allow myself to be curious enough to explore what happens, instead of having a fixed idea in my mind on what it needs to be.

This is how I invite Gentleness into the creative process.“

~ Maia Thomlinson

Closing notes

Thank you, Maia, for this soothing and honest conversation. You’ve been super inspiring!

You can connect with her through her website, Instagram account, and Facebook page.