Victoria Marie: Learning to Surrender

Transcript

[Music: Native Lights theme music]

Victoria Marie: Once I had my son, I just knew that I was going to do something that I wasn't experiencing for myself. I didn't have mentors, and I knew I was struggling with a form of depression. Mentally, I wasn't feeling good. I went to the library, went into the self help area, and found meditation.

Cole Premo: Boozhoo. Welcome to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. I'm your host Cole Premo. Today, I'm excited to present Victoria Marie, an enrolled tribal member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate. She's the founder and owner of Indigenous Lotus, a wellness program that combines yoga classes, tribal dance, exercise and meditation with an emphasis on helping people cope with stress and trauma. Those stressors can include PTSD, homelessness, sexual exploitation and poverty. In addition to classes and workshops, Indigenous Lotus has a line of streetwear. Victoria is also a doula, lactation counselor, mother and grandma. So I hope you enjoy our conversation. We, of course, speak on indigenous lotus and her other pursuits. Is a great conversation. So here you go.

Victoria Marie: Hello.

Cole Premo: Boozhoo, Victoria, could you please start by giving us a quick introduction and just letting us know where you're joining us from?

Victoria Marie: My name is Victoria, Wachinhin Maza Winyan, Iron Plume Woman. And I am from Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, and I am joining here in Shakopee, Minnesota.

Cole Premo: So how are you? How's the family doing?

Victoria Marie: Really good. We have a blended family, actually. So never dull moment here. So my partner and I, we've been together for two years now, and he has three 9, 12, and 15, and I have a five-year-old and a now 21-year-old, and so we all live in this house together. We also have a lot of pets that accompany us here, and we have two dogs. We have a rabbit who's running around here right now tearing up anything that's made of cardboard, and then we have three cats as well.

Cole Premo: Wow, that's a lot of activity in the household. Yeah, we also like to ask, you know, as we get the conversation going, like, what's something that you're geeking out about? Shows that you're watching, a book that you're reading?

Victoria Marie: Well, I have so many interests, so actually, what I'm very thrilled about, and it's not always the, I guess, the most exciting thing for people is I just started therapy again before I had attended therapy on a few different occasions, in my later teens, and then again in my 20s, and then again after I had my daughter also dealing with Hashimoto’s. But this time around, I joked with my therapist. I said that, you know, I no longer feel I'm a flight risk in therapy, and you get to all the good stuff, right? Like, all the stuff you just look forward to working on, you know, the deep stuff that this time around. I don't know if it's me coming into like, I'm 38 so I don't know if it's me coming into like, you know, another chapter, another decade of existence, and adding on to my life, but it's been this huge awakening experience for me. I do have these OCD symptoms as well as ADHD, but I'm a constant learner, so I'm always learning, and I found myself on this path to my goal in life. I have realized some years ago that I just want to be just like my grandma, like I want to be a grandma, a present grandma, tell stories and listen to all my grandkids and but how do I get there, right? So I found myself stepping on that path of what that can look like. For me, it has been therapy. Actually for me, I have my own feelings about therapy. I don't think therapy works for everyone. There are definitely different ways to go about healing, as we know, but it's working, and actually they're really consistent, and I leave feeling great and on track and to some challenging things, and it's been so beneficial, and I'm learning so much about myself and in a much more loving and accepting way.

Cole Premo: Thank you for sharing. I mean, therapy is something that I've always kind of flirted with, like getting into, and it's especially something that I'm thinking of now that I'm a new parent, dealing with the frustrations, the challenges that come along with it. So I'm curious, and it might be something that I look into. How do you go about choosing the therapist or the person that you open up to?

Victoria Marie: It was a little bit challenging for me to find somebody that I felt comfortable with, I guess, that didn't know me, like who doesn't know me, but can also understand what I've been through in my life as an Indigenous person, growing up in Native community, living on the reservation for some time, you know, like just these different type of experiences that aren't like your typical norm. I guess, for me, I guess it was just going to see if we work, what are your approaches? So who do I feel most comfortable with? What do I want to talk about? What do I want to address? We obviously don't want to peel off all the band aids at once either, and also seeking a therapist where I don't want to be long term, you know. I don't want this to be something that I rely on for my healing, either. Somebody I can progress with, and somebody who we're just crossing paths with at this moment, and then I'm moving on. So I've been looking at it just as this temporary time with somebody who's helping me sort out some issues that are coming up for me at this time, because I don't want to address everything that I feel needs to be addressed at one time.

Cole Premo: You're listening to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Today, we're speaking with Victoria Marie, an enrolled tribal member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate. Victoria is the founder and owner of Indigenous Lotus, a wellness program with the mission of helping people cope with stress and trauma. I think sometimes you think of a therapist as somebody like you're talking to for years and years and years, and maybe that tends to push some people away from getting into it. But if it's something where you're just getting things right for, you know, a temporary time, I mean, that's good too. So okay, well, let's get into Indigenous Lotus. Can you talk about how that came to be? I see that yoga is a big part of it, but there's much more to it than that.

Victoria Marie: The very beginning of it started back when I was about 17. Dropped out of high school. At the time, I had just given birth to my son, and dropping out of school, I didn't have anything to do, I mean, anything anywhere to go. I was living at Little Earth at the time, and once I had my son, I just knew that I was going to do something that I wasn't experiencing for myself. I didn't have mentors surrounding me at that time that I felt that I was learning from. So I went to the library, and I knew I was struggling with a form of depression, obviously, the hormones are, you know, out of whack, and I didn't know anything about that either. I just knew mentally, I wasn't feeling good, and I was really struggling with being a mom, and I went to the library, went into the self-help area and push my son down there with the stroller from Little Earth, walked all the way over to Lake Street there, and found meditation. Didn't ever practice it. Didn't hear of anybody doing it. But I have always had this sense of learning. So it's like, all right, let me try this and figure out what this is and go from there. So that was just kind of the foundation of what started my healing journey. For me, the further I read within this time that I had spent at the library had been a few months or so, I then found yoga. Didn't know what that was either. I've seen it in like these workout videos, you know, you might find on an old movie or something. And kept it to myself. As I got older, few years into my early 20s, I started working with youth, and I then found that meditation. that like breathing and just being calm—because you work with children, it's a very humbling experience, you know, having to be able to focus on breath and to center and to re-approach something. You know, meditation is very, very significant for me at that time. I then was teaching my son before bed. Let's go ahead and close our eyes. We would practice visual meditation, you know. And he was around eight, nine years old at this time. So I had then, from the time he was born until then, had just been inserting these things. The further along I worked with youth, the more I realized the lack of movement we were doing, just in general. We were having access to learning how to sing, ceremony, pow wow dancing, we had this type of access. But not everybody danced. Movement is so healing. We need that. And so I decided to really look at what was benefiting me and my hard times that I had done alone or had shared with my son. I wanted to further my knowledge in that. How could we start bringing movement beyond running, beyond going to the gym? And then that's I started my journey, enrolled into a 200-hour yoga certification program. Took about 12 months to complete. I just thought to myself, you know what? I'm going to quit everything that I know, all stability that I have here with my seven-to-three job, and I'm going to teach yoga. And so I wrote for a grant with the Tiwahe Foundation, just for yoga mats and supplies, some of which I still actually use and have to this day. I was just going to go teach back in Little Earth. I wanted to teach the youth movement and to have fun with movement. That then became Indigenous Lotus, and I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know what direction I was going to go. I just knew that movement is something that we weren't doing enough of with each other, with our children. Within our practices, we do a lot of talking, a lot talking about what we're going through, conflict resolution, conversations, we do a lot of talking. But it's the doing is what is going to really support that work. When it comes to healing, we need to move our bodies, and it took off a lot faster, actually, than I was expecting. Now it's evolved into a few different kind of areas, from like clothing to like utilizing my artwork or just putting together things and putting that on clothing. Do public speaking about self-healing work from my own experience, other type of workshops, movement related. So it's not always just the focus on yoga. It's just movement in general, with my respect, in the foundations being that of yoga and what yoga is all together.

Cole Premo: So humble beginnings. And it evolved from there. Could you talk more about like, what Indigenous teachings, inspiration, cultural aspects that are being used amongst the programs offered?

Victoria Marie: The name Indigenous Lotus is indigeneity as human beings in general. Yes, I am Indigenous from here in the Midwest. I am Dakota, I am Sisseton and Wahpeton and I am Santee. Part of my ancestry, on my mom's side, is tending to this land. Then there's the ancestry of my father, who is Norwegian, Irish, Swedish descent. That indigeneity is in that land, tending to that land. So when I am talking about any type of cultural teachings, the Indigenous is very broad, because it's a part of like, what makes us who we are? That Indigenous, that indigeneity comes from our ancestry and where we're from, and knowing the stories of the land, knowing how we took care of the land, and what that land has done for us and nurturing us. And then the Lotus piece is that underlying that yoga saved my life, and it's still to this day, is what holds me and keeps me grounded. So the cultural pieces that I tie in because I work with also non-native to this region, non-Indigenous to this region, I keep it as broad as I can in my teachings, but also sharing from my own knowledge as well too. And that's why Indigenous Lotus also has our annual event where we put on a platform Indigenous people to come and share their different types of teaching modalities and their culture and to share that with others.

Cole Premo: Great. You've touched on this already, but could we dive a little bit more into like how yoga, how Indigenous Lotus, helps in trauma recovery and PTSD, the effects of that? How does yoga help that?

Victoria Marie: So yoga is about overall connection, so those 12 limbs after each of those limbs is like unification within our mind/body. When we're working with those who are experiencing PTSD, experiencing traumatic events, walking around with all this baggage, like on our back, our shoulders, right? We're carrying these things around. The point of it is meeting each other where we're at, and that's one of the things that I've been really strong about with the work that I do, is to meet people where they're at. Because we can't always be defined by the mistakes we've made right, or the harm we've even caused, or what has been done to us. When we come together and we have that unification, that connection, when we are moving, when we're breathing, when we're being mindful, when we're being present, we can show up for one another. We can give grace. We can offer a listening ear. With yoga, it's unification and with also that meeting one another where we're at this point in time.

Cole Premo: Thank you. Whatever you're comfortable on sharing, but you recently needed time, or, I'm not sure how recently, needed time to take a step back, to pause Indigenous Lotus. Could you talk about where you are on that journey? What's helped in that recovery?

Victoria Marie: Yeah, so a part of that journey involves a previous story with someone else, so I'll just share briefly on that. So I was in a relationship for 10 years or so. It was challenging. It was also the time that I had started my business. And the challenges that I had experienced were infidelity in this relationship. I carried, even at the time of doing a lot of work that I was doing, I carried a lot of hurt from that, just trying to manage that while being in it. And then Indigenous Lotus just took off at the same time. It took off too fast for me at the time, it was all of a sudden, like going from state to state to state to state. So it was like constantly moving around, constantly talking, constantly addressing all these, like issues or concerns that people wanted to work on, you know? So like workshops would be developed, conversations would be had, while at the same time I was struggling. It felt like I was being a complete hypocrite, and it was really hard for me to continue to do that work while being in such a hurt place. And then I had my daughter and carrying still that hurt with me, just really sad, just really sad, really hurt. Finally had ended that relationship, but just before I had ended it, after I had my daughter in 2020, during the whole thick of COVID and isolation, I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease. And my Hashimoto’s disease was triggered by a vitamin D deficiency, which I had no knowledge of. So I didn't know. I was going to the hospital frequently. This was completely overlooked by my healthcare providers. So that Hashimoto’s plays a significant role in the entire function of the body. From mental clarity to digestive issues. Just it was forcing a depression on me too, on top of already being sad. So on top of like being hurt, being sad, being a mom again, and then feeling like I was missing out on my son, who was a teenager at the time, I felt like I was missing all his games. I was missing, like, high school. While I was still trying to take care of this newborn. Finally, like, after really, really trying to get to the root of why I was struggling with Hashimoto’s and how I could better myself when I started coming out of that and my hormones started balancing out, I was able to think clearer in my thoughts. That's when I ended the relationship that I was previously in. Decided just to move out, move on, and kind of dealt with that transition over a few years. After feeling really great mentally, I felt a lot better physically. I was feeling like I was back home in my body. I had decided to be open to dating after some time, and found a partner who is somebody I'm still with. We’re celebrating our two year. Just being with someone who was so kind and so loving and so sweet and nurturing. It was almost my nervous system was just like, this is really great, but this is also really different. And so I had to take that time to then figure out, what am I doing, and where am I going, and who am I now? Because it was almost like this. I mean, when you're in a relationship with somebody, that's a part of your identity. If you're with somebody for so long. It was just a time where it was like, okay, who am I? What am I doing? Obviously, the amount of work that I had been doing previously was not sustainable. I was a workaholic. All that hurt, all the things that I had done, I had been through. I put everything into my work, and I just didn't stop. I would work 14 hours, 20 hours a day, and barely sleep, and I would just keep it going. And then I would work, work, work, work, work, crash, work, work, work, work, crash. And so that's when it was like, okay, I need some time. So I took the time. My partner, him and I, we learned co -parenting and we learned blending families. We both are in therapy. It was just something I had to really look at like, what am I doing? Where do I want to go? Is this work? I still want to continue, and I've always just wanted to help others. I think that's why I go with that. Like, just meet them where they're at, meet someone where they're at, you know? I meet myself where I'm at every day, because every day is different. I'm still on my cycle changes, you know? So perimenopause hasn't kicked in yet, I don't think so. It was just a break. It was a break to figure out, get back on track in a new way that was also going to be not just helpful for others and supporting others, but also for myself.

Cole Premo: You're listening to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Today, we're speaking with Victoria Marie, an enrolled tribal member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate. Victoria is the founder and owner of Indigenous Lotus, a wellness program with the mission of helping people cope with stress and trauma. So when you jumped back in, how did it inform what you did going forward?

Victoria Marie: After talking about it with my partner, I just felt like I was ready. Part of me felt like I wasn't doing anything for a long time, and that was hard to live with. So I had to wait until these, like the feeling of doom, anxiety, all these things. I had to wait for this. What I felt was like this regulation. I had to wait until that, like subsided, or if it did come up, how was I approaching it? Was I being kind to myself when these like urges of like, oh, I need to work? I have this great idea, because that's what I do. It's like I have all these great ideas, and then I create so much work for myself, and then I'm like, I could do that. I could do it. That workaholic aspect of it, too. So for me, it was being able to regulate myself, and then being able to focus on one thing at a time, especially having a lot of thoughts all the time, like my mind never shuts off, hence why I'm in therapy. That's why I'm loving it, actually. But really it was surrender. I just surrendered, and I just stopped trying to control everything, and it was so hard. And there are times when I cried. I laid in bed one day and I just remembered crying and crying and crying because I felt defeated. I also had to remind myself not to rush through my emotions, not to rush through my feelings. All these things that I've learned and I've shared with others over these years, I was like, this is a time that I'm just going to do that. It was just purely sitting with surrender and allowing for myself to just be until I finally felt the sense of peace with myself, that even when these emotions came up, these feelings came up, that I didn't react. I acknowledged them. I honored that. I looked at possibly why, what time of the month is it? You know, is this being influenced by some other factors here? And then I just waited, and I took my time, and then I did it enough until it became a part of practice, and that's when I had the conversation with my partner. You know what? I think I'm ready to start working again, and I miss the community. It was a sense of I just wasn't a part of it anymore, and it was hard. But I'm always a part of the community, in a sense. You know, I started back with clothing. Art is a form of therapy for me. That's what I started with. And I stayed on that track, clothing, artwork, clothing, artwork. And then once I did that, after two months, I was like, okay, I can go ahead and start doing some of the wellness pieces and the movement and yoga, and let's just see where it goes from there. I have had to say no to contracts. So that was another thing too, is saying no to contracts I have been receiving. I've been doing my best to outsource them to other movement practitioners, wellness practitioners. Letting go control, trying not to control a situation is the scariest but most beneficial thing that I've ever done for myself.

[Music: Native Lights theme music]

Cole Premo: All right. Chi-miigwech to Victoria Marie. So appreciate having such a candid conversation with her, hearing about her work with yoga and how she's utilizing it to help others, along with some of her own personal struggles that she's overcome, and how it's helped steer her path in many ways. I thank her so much for sharing that part of her life with us. There was so much depth to the conversation. I wish her the very best, along with Indigenous Lotus, and look forward to seeing updates on her work. Again, chi-miigwech to Victoria Marie, enrolled tribal member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate. And she's the founder and owner of Indigenous Lotus, a wellness program with the mission of helping people cope with stress and trauma. I'm Cole Premo. Giga-waabamin.

Leah Lemm: You're listening to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.