Interviews | Gentleness Ambassadors
How to Feel Safe and Loved Through Being Seen
An interview with Kellita Maloof — Showgirl Shaman
Kellita and I were part of an online business mastermind group this year. I love how unique her business is, how she serves highly sensitive women too, and how her soulful work is about dance, which I love also! Dance can be a very harsh and competitive industry, and I am so very grateful that Kellita inspires us with so much Gentleness and shimmering love.
More about Kellita Maloof
Kellita is lovingly known as the Showgirl Shaman.
She is here to guide women towards a more authentic, vibrant, and possibly very outrageous version of themselves! She feels honored to guide women back to the center of themselves (in one-tenth the time it took her) with ample support and copious delight along the way.
Kellita loves witnessing her Awakening Showgirls go through a transformational journey with dance, movement, music, and mindset shift.
They get to experience first hand that access to the fountain of self-love within is just a shimmy away.
Without much ado, I present to you the dazzling Kellita Maloof!
Being a Showgirl Shaman
Can you share more about your work as a Showgirl Shaman?
I’ll define both of those words very briefly.
A showgirl is a woman who generously reveals her true radiant essence and thereby shows the way for her sisters.
This can be through the creation of a conscious burlesque solo, but not necessarily. Any time a woman (or anyone) is shining out her essence through her body and letting other people bask in her radiant essence, she is an awakening showgirl.
I see myself as kind of a post-modern shaman, because I’m facilitating the creation of a conscious burlesque solo as a way to do soul retrieval. That’s where the shamanic aspect comes in. We’re just doing it in an unusual way.
In summary, I am a somatic Burlesque educator, facilitator, and mentor.
How did you arrive at this work as a Showgirl Shaman?
When my life was in single digits, I felt very free to be myself. I wasn’t worried, I did my homework, and nobody needed to remind me, I put myself to bed. I had a lot of agency as a child, but I didn’t feel a need to have perfect grades until I had sexual trauma.
After that, I became very interested in having perfect grades, and I wasn’t a good friend to myself.
I was expecting a kind of perfection, and but I didn’t even receive it. I would start to get all A’s, but I didn’t receive the joy of it. I only felt the lack of it if I didn’t get it.
I think a part of my soul left my body, some of my sweetness left. I didn’t live in my body anymore.
A part of my soul left to keep the most precious part of me alive. Because it didn’t feel safe being alive in my body at that time.
It’s going back like it’s off in the forest. It’s almost like we had a little whisper like I was still connected and I would get instructions. One of the instructions was to dance, to take dance lessons which I never needed in the past because I had access to my joyful spirit.
I dance like you, Bingz!
With the joyful spirit as a child, I didn’t want dance lessons. But after the trauma, I asked for classes because I needed someone else to help to heal my instincts so that it would feel safe for my radiant essence to come back.
It took me almost 20 years to find the right form of dance that nourished my spirit. I honestly didn’t even know it existed. It was dance specifically — not just dancing by myself for pleasure, which is a great pleasure. It was also performing with someone seeing me.
When I use the word performance, I don’t mean putting on an act to be someone else. Somehow, it was vital to me to do the movements that felt the best to me because I knew that’s where my essence was.
To let someone see me while I was doing them.
Performance, for me, is actually a practice in being seen for who I really am, not as another character.
Bingz: Yes, I feel that movement is a very profound way to be seen, other than just speaking about it, like giving a speech. I love this work that you do. I love the principles that you are building behind it, and how you bring your tribe of sisters together. It’s so beautiful!
About Gentleness
What does Gentleness mean to you?
When I think about Gentleness, I’m often referring to Sensitivity — having kindness towards our Sensitivity. I might talk about Kindness and Sensitivity, but I think I’m dancing in that realm of Gentleness.
How do you embody Gentleness in your work?
I’m working on writing and publishing a tiny book, and the working title is “How to create a burlesque solo from the inside-out.” The subtitle is “never, ever, ever show a disembodied boob!”
Watch and listen to how Kellita describes the way she uniquely holds space for her clients in her online group workshops in this short excerpt from our interview.
What kind of Harshness do your clients come to you for processing and releasing?
It’s this Harshness towards herself.
It’s a bit like what I shared about how I was very harsh with myself, expecting only A’s but not enjoying the experience.
If these women were dancing, they would do it precisely. I help them appreciate that their bodies are the temple for their spirit.
It is the temple for their spirit. It’s not an instrument to exact a perfect turn or split. That’s not what bodies are for.
Bodies are to be relished, loved, and paid attention to. Just like how we would pay attention to a baby. That’s what our bodies are to us.
I take them through the journey from expecting our bodies to have flat stomachs, or strong arms, or to do perfect movements, to love the softness of our flesh, or our muscles if we have lots of muscles. Loving that flesh and focusing on enjoying simple movements, such as raising my arms. Arm extensions are so delicious!
Coming to genuinely develop affection for our bodies, just like the way we grow to love another person. Shifting from depending on external validation, such as doing excellent work and receiving awards for that, to knowing on a bodily level that because we exist, we are worthy of love.
How do you hold space for them to love their bodies this way when you are all performing in public while being almost naked?
It comes from how we are relating to each other during the preparation time.
A lot of women tell me they’ve had experience receiving harsher judgments from other women more than from men, parents, or employers. They have felt the most critical reception from their women friends.
In these group workshops, they’re being seen and celebrated by their sisters. So they are beginning to see the love, appreciation, and acknowledgment coming to them from the eyes of these women who they just met.
This reflection starts to take hold and they start to see themselves in that way. By the time we get to the audience of people who we might not know, it’s already growing like a flame within them. When we’re doing it as a group they have the support of the bodies of their sisters near them.
It’s a whole ecology of recapturing the original sense of I AM.
I AM therefore I AM beautiful, because I AM!
Stepping out of our alarmed aloneness with heart-centered connection
How do you embody Gentleness in your personal life?
It is a daily practice. I touch myself a lot by stroking my skin, especially during sheltering-in-place.
When someone shares a compliment with me, I will stop and say to myself, “I’m opening to receive.” I’m using my words as a spell to help me receive it because I am deeply conditioned to be tempted to ignore it, or to return the compliment immediately.
I know the power of letting a genuine compliment nourish me like a bowl of soup or a piece of bread. I am consciously practicing, stopping, and noticing when I might have deflected or let in a compliment.
Someone can give us money, a great job, or a great compliment. It doesn’t matter what comes to our door. Our door may be shut, and all of that stays outside. We are the only ones who can open that door and receive it.
Receiving is like a muscle. We have to go to the ‘receiving’ gym to build up our ‘receiving’ muscles to experience having what we already have.
So my journey with being gentle with myself is taking all the time I need to digest all the beautiful things that I already have. It takes a lot of self-love to receive what we already have.
We need to take the time to take in, instead of complaining that we don’t have enough.
We have enough, but we don’t eat it, we don’t swallow it, we don’t touch it. We hold it at arm’s length, and we don’t even know we’re keeping it at arm’s length.
I learned this term “alarmed aloneness” from Sarah Peyton who wrote Empathy Brain. Our world is in a state of “alarmed aloneness” and this is a state that neuroscientists are have been naming over the last few years.
We are freezing in an alone state so there’s the alarm there’s nobody there. That’s what we’re feeling because there are other people there but we’re not receiving each other. It’s like we’re all in our own silos next to each other. There are many people there who would love to see us but we’re in these frozen boxes. Humans are not meant for that. We are meant to be in relationships and see one another.
It’s chilling, but I think even in this crazy and challenging year, we must learn how to be together with each other. Interestingly, being forced to be alone is triggering this shift.
We need each other. With the challenges of 2020, we can only continue with our lives when we learn to appreciate, see, and be with each other. We need to step out of our alarmed aloneness.
So does Gentleness equal to Heart-centered connection?
Yes! And being gentle on the way to that heart-centered connection. We have to go in increments that feel safe and okay. It’s not something we can force ourselves on a timeline, but we can practice strengthening our Gentleness muscle.
I also think that Vulnerability is like a note in Gentleness, so we can’t force Vulnerability. It has to come at a pace that is possible for each person. This is where Gentleness comes in.
We have to change gently, but we have a lot to change on the planet and as a species. Most of the change that’s going on is because of humans, but we have to shift gently and consistently.
We need a massive amount of Gentleness, but Gentleness will always only express itself as Gentleness. There’s a paradox here.
We need lots of Gentleness, but it can’t pile up and become a push. We need to breathe in the Gentleness and move away from the evangelistic superpowers. We’ve been fed that kind of evangelistic superpower in every corner. We’ve got it through religion, marketing, and medical care. That is the recipe for what is happening now, and clearly, this is not the direction we want.
We can’t make an army of Gentleness, it has to be organic. We have to influence each other with Gentleness.
Bingz: Yes! I allow Gentleness to guide me.
Gentleness and Strength can co-exist, because that’s what I experience in your presence, Bingz! Your Strength and Gentleness feel completely married. I feel safe in your space with you. I feel safe to find my truth and share it with you. So, thank you!
Closing notes
Thank you, Kellita, for your heart-centered chat. I love the way you see what’s going on collectively and how we can evolve in our humanity. Even as I watch the interview again and type this article, I feel your potent healing wisdom.
Here is the entire interview, along with a mini Human Design chart analysis I did to describe Kellita’s energetic gifts.
If you’ve read and watched to the end of this article, I’m sure you’re intrigued to connect with Kellita Maloof further and to experience her magic!
Here’s how you can connect with Kellita Maloof:
- Take the Free Showgirl Archetype Quiz (There are nine archetypes!)
- Facebook page
- Instagram account
