“We are love, we are creativity, we are truth,” says Jakki Smith-Leonardini. And even those words alone are a comfort.
Like many women out there, the onetime stay-at-home mom had dedicated so much time to pleasing others that she’d lost sight of herself. Who was she? What did she want? What brought her joy?
Fortunately, she happened upon energy healing and realized immediately that the answer lay in reconnecting to her authentic self. After years of training and study, today, the California-based clairvoyant, energy healer and certified soul coach works with one-on-one clients and groups using the Indian chakra system to help realign mind, body and soul in pursuit of clarity.
“Ultimately,” she explains, “we all want to live in the ease and the flow that comes when we embody our spiritual divinity.” Here, she explains how we can begin our path back to intuition:
Live The Process: What did your life look like before you began your wellness journey?
Jakki Smith–Leonardini: About 12 years ago, I started my spiritual journey, essentially towards remembering myself. I was a stay-at-home mom working part-time in design; I had three little kids and a husband who traveled. I was on every committee you could possibly imagine. During that time, which I know a lot of women can relate to, I found myself almost exclusively making choices in my life to please others and it became clear that, through doing that for so many years, I had really lost the concept of who I was and how to balance the boundary between self-honor and being of service.
LTP: Can you describe your spiritual awakening?
JSL: My first encounter with the practice of running energy was through a friend of mine, who had been suffering with brain cancer. It was his way back to wellness. In 2011, he invited me to accompany him to visit a healing center. During our time there together, I came to realize that energy medicine was also going to be my path back to wellness.
My spirit had been put aside and denied, and I was rooted in this place of insecurity. I had to decide to step into my authenticity or to hide behind a facade of a person that everyone else wanted me to be. It was in our first energy healing meditation that I was able to take a long, long (it was a six-hour mediation) look at the truth without feeling fear and judgement. I found in the process of tapping into Divine source energy, which is love, truth and creativity, that I was able to activate the courage to embark upon a journey toward transformation.
LTP: When a person—or a group of people—comes to you, what do they experience?
JSL: Energy healing is a spiritual exercise that brings the mind, body and emotions into attune-ment with the soul, restoring balance within the system. Clearing dense energy (fear) and connecting with source energy (love) sharpens our intuition and clarity, so that we may use our own inner guide to answer important questions. Cultivating these tools helps us navigate life and relationships with greater ease and grace.
Energy healing tools provide a portal for us to connect with a deep knowingness and the inner guidance to navigate through life’s ups and downs. In individual and group sessions, I work with clients to uncover their deeper source of wisdom, so they are able to evolve down a path to wellness that brings their thoughts, words and actions into alignment with their soul.
LTP: You mention that intuition is a skill and not a gift. How do you define intuition and how we can all tap into that clarity?
JSL: We are all by definition instinctual beings. Our intuition is that knowing that comes from our higher self—our ethereal, our divine self. At our core, we are divine beings of the light. We are love, we are creativity and we are truth. By my definition, our intuition is the knowing we get when we learn to tap into our divinity. Our instinct is the information we receive when we are attuned to our physical being.
Intuition again is coming from our higher self; it is a knowing that has clarity. It comes from our sixth chakra (or our sixth sense). Now, an extension of these ways of knowing is clairvoyance. Clairvoyance is a practiced skill. It means we actively work to clear away any energy that is limiting our ability to see clearly and expansively—energy that we feel as fear, doubt, confusion. When we know how to actively understand and release these energies, we can achieve clarity and can then make more genuine choices from a place of divine trust.
LTP: What does happiness look like to you?
JSL: Happiness is a state of being that we experience when we tap into the light (effortlessness) of who we are. When we can step into light, love and generosity, and we can share that with the people we love by making the choice to show up. It is about being present in the moment and choosing to relate to our experience and our relationships from a place of divinity (love).
LTP: What does it mean to you to “Live The Process” and how can we all do that more each day?
JSL: In the vocabulary of my practice, to “Live The Process” would be the daily embodiment of being able to think, speak and act from our divinity. I love how the concept of living the process is so attuned to what I see in so many of my clients and in myself—that ultimately, we all want to live in the ease and the flow that comes when we embody our spiritual divinity.
The process of doing that comes from the choice to show up in our lives. So, when we live the process, we step up in honor of who we are and, in doing so, we can step up and be of service to others for people we love, our community and our planet.
