On becoming whole with Alexandra Mandroiu

"The more facets of myself I discover, the more I try to integrate all of those multitudes into my one being so that I can share my gifts and not have to renounce any of them."

This interview is part of a series of conversations with beautiful, courageous people building authentic and meaningful lives for themselves. Lives that are truly theirs and that make their hearts and souls sing, even though it might not always be the easy path. This is the second part of my conversation with a friend from uni, Alexandra Mandroiu. We lost touch when we graduated eight years ago (did I say eight?!), but we had many shared viewpoints and ideas to discuss. Alexandra is working on her Ph.D. in gender and women’s health between Portugal and Brazil; she is currently based in Rio for fieldwork. In the first part of our conversation, we talked about how we can stand with an open heart in the face of all the pain and suffering in the world and around us and how Alex brings this philosophy into her work as a public health researcher. In this second part, we will talk about how we can embrace the multitudes within us and heal our trauma by unlearning the compartmentalization of ourselves and our emotions. I hope you enjoy the read!

Alexandra: Do you know what my mom said to me? I called her, trying to explain how hard it is for me sometimes to stay anchored when reality gets heavy, and the energies feel really dense. How hard it is for me to find peace and comfort when it feels like my spirit is trying to leave my body. In those moments, I feel like running into a temple in the woods and not thinking about it anymore at all. My mom said to me: “It looks like you are two people at the same time.” And that’s exactly how I feel because I'm still living in this duality. But the more facets and layers of myself I discover, the more I try to integrate all of those multitudes into my one being so that I can share my gifts and not have to renounce any of them. I don’t want to be someone during the day and someone else at night because that is tiring and exhausting. It requires compartmentalization, and that is a capacity that I do not always have.

Lieke: From everything you’ve told me, it sounds like you're on the right path. You’re intentionally choosing to move closer to the earth, live more in connection with the land, and bring the different facets of yourself together in your work and research. Sometimes, it’s hard to see our own progress when we’re in the middle of a transition because we don’t feel the shift yet, and we still have that screaming part inside of us that wants to run for the hills. But it's our small choices that will eventually, hopefully, lead us to this union of being, I hope.

Alexandra: Yes, that will help us to look at ourselves with a more holistic vision. When I think about integrated and holistic care, I think about how we separate so much of ourselves into a professional and a personal side. How, during the day, I’m meant to be a fully rational, non-emotional, nonsensitive operational being, working as a robot, depleted of meaning. While in my personal life, I'm a hypersensitive emotional being who cares for others, who needs love and wants to share love, and who lives for authenticity, reciprocity, and connection. But I think there is no way I can keep separating both. I think both of us are doing the work of integration, bringing both sides closer and making them meet. And I think that happens in the heart.

This is also how I see the higher self. When you reach for your heart, you reach for your higher self. When you talk, act, and share from love, when everything you do comes from your heart space, I think you are in full connection with the version of yourself that, in essence, is love. I think that’s where you find your power, your tree. Where you can bear and give fruit because that is inside all of us.

I think we need to unlearn and decondition this compartmentalized reality that we learned to keep up through our education and whatnot. I learned to put myself in so many little boxes, and I reached a point where I realized that this does not make me happy but rather very anxious and depressed. I remember a point when I dissociated from myself, from that version of myself. I was looking at myself in the mirror and in pictures, and it didn’t feel like I was looking at myself. Do you know that feeling?

Lieke: Absolutely.

What just came to my mind is that by shutting out all the suffering in the world because we don't want to feel the grief and the pain, we also shut ourselves out. We block that seed of empathy, love, and care inside of us as well. Is that something you recognize?

Alexandra: I believe 100% that just as we dissociate and hide from the news and the external suffering because it becomes too heavy to carry, we do the same with our own emotions, our trauma, and our individual pain. By doing so, we end up completely separated from ourselves, the world, and our loved ones to the point where nothing makes us sad or joyful anymore because we’re all numbed out. At that point, I started to wonder, why am I alive? If I'm so desensitized towards life itself, what's the meaning of it?

For me, that is where tantra comes in. Tantra is essentially the joy of living in the moment, in full awareness and connection with the present and with an open heart. I think that to reach that point, we first have to process our own pain, which is not like a one-time process where you open the Pandora box, wash away all the dirt, and it’s clean. No, there is more and more and more and more. As we grieve and undo, we also redo and make new stories. It’s a continuous process of washing off pain and trauma at both individual and collective levels so that we can stand with awareness and an open heart in the present moment.

It's a choice that I think is hard to make. Most of us only make it when we've reached rock bottom, when we don't know where we’re headed anymore with this feeling of numbness and emptiness, when we’re depleted of meaning. It’s often at that point that we start to look inside. We start looking for our spark, peeling off the layers and shells we put up to protect ourselves in order to reconnect to our essence.

Lieke: And the first part of that journey is rough, right? You have to go through so much mud and internal pain that sometimes you don't even know where it's coming from. Lately, I've had these cathartic cries, which go really deep, and I don't know why. At first, I was like, this doesn't make sense. I wasn’t sad a minute ago. What happened that I’m now all of a sudden sobbing uncontrollably? But then I thought, well, maybe it's something I cannot mentally understand, but that simply needs to come out.

Alexandra: Yes, I think it's something you have to feel through and surrender into. Sometimes, you can't explain an emotion. It's stored in some part of you, in the physical body, the energetic body, the spiritual body, and you just have to release it. After all the work that I have done, I now understand that trauma is not something that is only stored in the mind. It's not something that we can always rationalize or verbalize.

I wonder to what extent traditional psychotherapy and psychological support can help people actually to heal their trauma. When we look at traditional psychology, where we sit on a couch and talk about our problems, I don’t think that’s going to heal our trauma. Sometimes, by sitting there and talking, we keep feeding the same energy, and we can even become more traumatized, for lack of a better word, without really finding any solutions on how to soften this trauma. I think talking about it can help figure out the problem, but how do you then address the problem? You can find out that the root cause of all your anger is the relationship you had with one of your parents as a kid and that the seed of much of your anger was planted there. But once you find this seed, what do you do with it? How do you let go of it? I think that’s not taught in classical psychological and psychotherapeutic methods.

Lieke: How do you think we can go beyond the mental understanding of trauma into actually healing it and letting go?

Alexandra: Therapies that I have used are yoga, embodiment work, shadow work, constellations work, and different kinds of ceremonies where people are taught to use meditation and transpersonal states of consciousness to release trauma. I think many of those practices are still very much off the beaten path compared to what we generally come to understand about mental healthcare. These practices are only available to those who have the curiosity and the courage to dig deeper and find out more. I think we still have a lot to learn about how to heal emotional pain and trauma and end the over-rationalization of it.

These more alternative practices are something that I work with on a personal level and that I would love to learn more about so that I can share them. I’ve noticed that this is something that you do as well, and I’m very proud that you're doing that. It’s relatively easy to accumulate all this knowledge, but we also have to start sharing it, and I think it’s great that you're sharing your journey and your gifts on a small scale in your women’s circles. You’re doing what you can while navigating your own reality at the same time. But you're doing it, and that's something I'm still working on. There needs to be a moment where I step into my own power and share it.

This year, I’ve been learning a lot about the alternative practices that I use in my personal healing and development, like Temazcal (the Mexican sweat lodges), ice baths, and breathwork. These practices are used to help people reach a transpersonal state of consciousness and release the fear and trauma that are stored in the physical body. By learning more about these practices and connecting with others, I hope that in the future, we can build a community of healing where we share these gifts to help others.

Lieke: That sounds wonderful. As a rational being, it did help me to understand where the seed of my tree was planted and why the tree that grew from it looks the way it does, but at a certain point, I felt as if I was bumping up against a wall. I noticed that my tree was not going to change only by talking about it and cognitively understanding it. Just as you were talking about this, I was reflecting back on when I started doing embodiment and somatic work, and I realized that that's when my relationship with my parents started to change, my capacity to receive love started to change, and even my attachment style started to change. I think that working with my physical and emotional body really changed my tree.

Alexandra: When we talk about healing trauma and mental health work, I think there’s still a lot to learn and integrate into Western medicine practice. We have to integrate body and mind. We have to learn where our emotions are stored and how to release them. We’ve been taught that it’s not OK to scream, to have a tantrum or a breakdown, to have all of this anger or sadness coming out, but that's exactly what you're supposed to do. To heal it, you need to feel it. Talking about it is not going to heal your stored emotions. I think the only way is through, but we were never taught how to go through the pain. Often, we're just like, here's the pain. We can see it, analyze it, rationalize it, break it down, we can. But how do we go through the pain in order to let it go? I think that's what many of us need to learn.

Something that I would also love to incorporate in my work is this idea of the sacred rage. I believe that the only way to release anger is to feel it. So, we need to create safe spaces for people to actually feel the full array of their emotions. We live in a society where so many of us, both men and women, have learned that there’s only a certain range of emotions that are okay to feel and express, and the rest is not socially acceptable. There are a few privileged people who have had the resources, the time, the knowledge, the curiosity, and the social structures that have allowed us to explore methods that go beyond this. And I think that with privilege comes responsibility, and you are taking part of yours, and I think you're doing great in sharing that. Thank you for that.

Lieke: And thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with me today. A lot of what you said feels so true, and I've had a few realizations during our conversation that I'm going to aim to put into practice in the coming weeks. I think that a lot of the work that we're both doing goes against what is expected of us or at least what most other people understand. So, every time expand that part of myself, there comes a phase that I also want to go back or retreat just because it's so out of my comfort zone, and it takes so much courage that it's hard to sustain that pace of diving deep, going forward and going outward. Especially after going through burnout and re-entering work and life this year, I am only slowly getting back to a level of energy where I can share some of it again. But I aim to keep putting one foot in front of the other, one day at a time, to keep doing what feels true and aligned for me, and I hope that you will do the same. Thank you so much for today, for this conversation.

Thank you for sharing your love and attention with us by reading. If Alexandra’s words resonated with you or you have another perspective, please don’t hesitate to share in the comments.