Transforming Inner Darkness into Creative Light: A Journey with Miranda Mitchell

What if your trauma wasn't something to overcome but a gift that enables you to help others? This perspective-shifting conversation with Miranda Michelle, embodied leadership guide and energy alchemist, explores how dancing with our shadows can transform our inner darkness into creative light.

Miranda shares how Ashtanga Yoga became her portal to self-discovery, teaching her to surrender consistently and find the stillness needed to truly hear her inner guidance. Through this practice, she learned to release trauma stored in her body—transforming experiences that could have kept her stuck into powerful tools for supporting others.

We explore the body as a sacred truth-teller, with Miranda explaining how Human Design guides us back to trusting our physical intuition over logical thinking. Those gut feelings, goosebumps, and energetic responses aren't coincidental—they're wisdom speaking through our bodies that society has conditioned us to ignore. By reconnecting with this embodied knowing, we begin to untangle who we truly are from who we've been told to be.

Perhaps most revolutionary is Miranda's perspective on pleasure as essential to healing: "You don't always need to be in the darkness to do the work. You can be in joy, you can be in pleasure." When we reclaim pleasure as sacred rather than something we must earn, everything changes. For anyone feeling disconnected from their creativity or authentic expression, Miranda offers a beautiful starting point: remember a moment in childhood when you felt most alive and free, and reconnect with that feeling of pure presence.

Dive into this illuminating conversation and discover how getting comfortable with discomfort might be the very thing that sets you free. Your shadows aren't something to fear—they're your greatest teachers waiting to reveal your light.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Miranda Michelle
• 2:30 Ashtanga Yoga as a Transformational Portal
• 5:57 The Body as a Sacred Truth Teller
• 9:19 Deconditioning from Society's Boxes
• 12:12 Embracing Pleasure as Sacred Work
• 15:44 Finding Your Inner Compass in Noise
• 19:05 Episode Closing and Contact Information

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Welcome back to another episode of Pleasure Principles, the podcast where we go deep, dive into the delicious complexity of what it means to be fully alive, embodied and lit up from the inside out. I'm your host, Avik, and today's episode it's not just a conversation, it's a pilgrimage. I would say yeah. So we are diving into something powerful, vulnerable and widely creative, Dancing with the shadows and transforming inner darkness into the creative light. Yeah, and to help us explore this sacred terrain, I'm joined by another than the radiant and real Miranda Michelle. So welcome to the show, Miranda.

Speaker 2: 0:55

Thank you so grateful for being here. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1: 0:57

Lovely, lovely. So, miranda, like before we start, I'll quickly left. Introduce you to all of our listeners. We start, I'll quickly left. Introduce you to all of our listeners. Dear listeners, uh miranda is embodied leadership guide, energy alchemist and creative priestess of transformation. So she doesn't just talk about uh going into the shadows, but she dances with them and in in doing so, she lights up the path for others to reclaim their own truth, voice and the inner alignment. So, from astral yoga to human design, the genie keys and the celestial wisdom of astrology, her journey is a masterclass in turning pain into power and reclaiming the soul's voice through the radical authenticity. So, dear listeners, I'll not take much of your time and I'll quickly get deep dive into this topic today with one and only miranda myself. So welcome to the show again thank you, thank you.

Speaker 2: 2:01

I love all of that. That was like very powerful yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:07

So miranda, like I mean, yeah, ashtanga yoga I mean, which is very, very famous in india as well, and uh, so you said that the practice was, uh, your kind of portal involved. So what did it? Show you about yourself that that you hadn't seen before.

Speaker 2: 2:30

Yeah, ashtanga Yoga has a deep, deep. I always go back to the yoga and Eastern philosophies of what I learned in the practice. I studied and did numerous years probably about six or seven years of going into the practice and making sure that I was practicing my SOAR. I was also teaching it and I made sure that I was consistently making myself do the hard work. Because I also know I'm very determined and very strong and that if I don't want to do something that I will say, oh, I don't need to do that. So I always chose teachers that would push me because I knew that's what I needed.

Speaker 2: 3:09

So Ashtanga Yoga gave me first of all, the consistency and discipline of constantly surrendering, constantly surrendering Okay, surrendering to a teacher, surrendering to a practice having a consistent energy or a consistent practice where sometimes I didn't want to do it but I would choose to do it anyway. So it kind of moved me through my own blockages of resistance and I was able to have beautiful teachers that helped support me in that. And then within that I found the space of peace. I found the space, I like to say the space in between the actions or the space in between the words. It gave me the stillness that I needed, that I didn't have previously, to really truly listen to my inner guidance, rather than external desires or things that pull at you in society.

Speaker 1: 4:15

Okay, and so, like I mean, how did that inner shift influence your relationship with the creativity and your own body wisdom?

Speaker 2: 4:29

well. It helped release a lot of traumas, a lot of experiences that I held on to, a lot of beliefs that I had because of these experience. It even gave me the opportunity to understand that I am not these experiences and I'm able to move through them and release them. And through the Ashtanga practice I was able to release them through the physical body which we carry all of this in the body, which I was unaware of that before. So when I was going into the deep backbends and then coming up crying and all of these emotions coming out or these memories showing up, it gave me the opportunity to make a deep connection to my body which I had not had previously. And then from there it moved me into wanting more. So I realized that if this could do this for me, that I needed to, it's my. I mean, we're all here to be of service in some way.

Speaker 2: 5:26

And in my entire life I've known I've always been very strong, very independent, very courageous. I've lived on my own since I was 14. I've I've been doing all of this aloneness right. So I know I had. I knew I had the strength to do it and I knew that that was part of my purpose. It was. Every experience and trauma that I experienced was for the awareness of then being able to help others. So I saw them all as gifts rather than being the victim. I've never been a victim with any of it, like with domestic violence. There's been so many things that I'm so appreciative for because I'm able to support others. So from there I knew that I was here to do something, and so I continued to listen to my inner knowing and followed steps that showed up for me, like going to get trained in NLP, following human design, teaching my sword and wanting to go deeper. Like I followed those, those things that showed up for me without logically letting myself get stuck out of fear.

Speaker 1: 6:39

Yeah, understood, perfect, and I mean it's so profound. I mean to think of the body as a sacred truth teller, right? So it's where our pleasure and our pain live, and too often we are taught to numb instead to listen. So, yeah, what do you say on this?

Speaker 2: 7:01

What was the question?

Speaker 1: 7:06

what was the question? I was just saying I mean, uh, it is so profound to think that, um, uh, of the body as a sacred truth teller.

Speaker 2: 7:11

So I was just mentioning that, yeah yeah, um, I don't know if you know about human design, but human design guides us back to connecting with our body as the sacred vessel that that knows more than our mind at times. Our mind is logical. We plant, we're taught to plan everything out, to have everything like to make those steps that are logical. But when you tune into the body and you have that gut feeling that something is like pulling you towards something, but you're not quite sure what it is, it's learning to trust that and take action rather than logically think, oh well, that doesn't make sense. Or how does that even connect with what I'm trying to be in the world? You know, if you think about it, our body we react with like goosebumps. Our hair stands on edge. We have these gut feelings, we can feel energy when we walk into a room, but we're all conditioned not to think of it. It's nothing. But the truth of it is. It is something.

Speaker 2: 8:21

Our body is very intuitive and if you start to listen to your body and not I'm not saying like don't listen to the mind, but it's like for me, what I do is I listen to the body, I see I recognize that, that it, that gut response or whatever shows up for me, then I let it go to the logical. I find myself stuck there sometimes and then I can reconnect to the logical. I find myself stuck there sometimes and then I reconnect to the body. It was like what was my initial feeling? I'm doing that, so it's more the awareness of like trusting the body is going to guide you and support you.

Speaker 1: 8:57

Exactly, very true, yeah. And also, like you, have spoken about how society boxes us into who we think we should be and how do we begin to untangle that?

Speaker 2: 9:12

conditioning what do you say here? To learn in different ways, just like some modalities stick out or feel like a connection to someone more so than the other. For me it was the Ashtanga being able to understand that first, and then, because of that, releasing, being able to follow my gut instinct. It is all about deconditioning, which is a huge thing of what I focus on, and I use the modalities of stillness, uh, human design, because human design takes in the modalities of the chinese yi qing, astrology, quantum mechanics, the chakra system, like it combines all of these modern and traditional modalities, which is why I fell in love with it, because I feel like we need tradition, but also we do need to evolve for people to connect with it. So I use human design and I use the gene keys, because the gene keys go into a deeper level of the gates in human design. It supports us in the shadow frequencies, the gift frequencies and the city frequencies, which is the highest. So by learning through your astrology aspects of, like your sun, your earth, your mercury, you understand what the shadow shows up like and you're able to witness it and accept it and love it and understand that this is not something you want to shame or get rid of the shadow is a gift. Every time the shadow shows up, it's a gift for you to take an opportunity to do something different, to be able to step into something different, rather than letting the shadow keep you stuck. So by using these modalities, you're able to recognize where you've been conditioned, where you've been trying to fit in, where you've been Like.

Speaker 2: 11:14

For me, my voice was a huge thing. I was told I was too much, I talked too intensely, that the darkness and the deepness not everyone can deal with that, so you don't want to talk about it. But when I go into my chart and it's in my Mercury's, in Scorpio, and it's like, no, that's what I'm supposed to do, I'm suppressing my individuality because of what other people are telling me I should be. So then it's like stepping into that and let me tell you it's exciting because those things that you suppress, you know they're there and as soon as you give yourself permission to be that, it is exciting to be able to embody it.

Speaker 1: 11:58

Exactly Amazing. So and also like and what role does pleasure in its purest form play in the deconditioning?

Speaker 2: 12:12

well, you know, I feel like for me personally, um, within, when I first learned you could like going into healing myself, I was always in the depth and the darkness and I always told myself that if you're not in that darkness, that you're not doing your work and you need to do your work. And then when I found human design and gene keys, it was like you don't always need to be in the darkness to do the work. You can be in joy, you can be in pleasure, you can be at excitement. Like that is just as much doing the work as going into the darkness. So it's understanding that we all are here designed to do our work within the fluctuations of the depth as well as the excitement as well as pleasure, like when you are able to do some of that heavier work and then step into the pleasure of supporting others. Or like movement.

Speaker 2: 13:10

I love dance. That's why, like I dance with shadows and stillness. That is where I'm free, that is where I'm not thinking, I'm just in pure pleasure. And when you're in that pure pleasure, you also receive so many insights and the body wakes up. You feel the most alive. And most people feel like I can't get there until I am fixed. That's not the truth. We're already whole, we're already fixed. It's letting yourself be in that moment, each, in the present moment, at each time.

Speaker 1: 13:45

Exactly, exactly, true, and I have to I mean say this that the moment we reclaim pleasure as something sacred, not shameful it changes everything.

Speaker 2: 14:00

I mean, that's an amazing part of it. Yeah, mm-hmm. And why do we? Why are we so afraid of pleasure? Why does it feel like we have to earn the right to be in pleasure?

Speaker 1: 14:11

Right, that's a great question, yeah.

Speaker 2: 14:17

I'd say that's a great question. Yeah, and I feel like that's conditioning.

Speaker 2: 14:28

We're conditioned that we have to be something, we have to know who we are, and usually this is through external validation of other people, but the truth, that is, it's letting ourself be authentic. We don't have to earn the right to be in pleasure. We get to be in pleasure every moment, whether it's uh and I don't like to say negative but whether it's the heaviness of the shadow or the lightness of being in like ecstatic, you can be in pleasure in all aspects. It's not anything we have to earn exactly, exactly true, so Exactly true.

Speaker 1: 15:04

So for someone who is listening, who feels disconnected from their creativity, maybe even afraid of it. So where do they begin?

Speaker 2: 15:14

I live in Florida.

Speaker 1: 15:16

Okay.

Speaker 2: 15:17

I'm sorry, is that the question?

Speaker 1: 15:29

that the question, no, so so I was just saying like, um, where can this start? I mean, uh, the one with the field disconnected from this creativity, uh, or maybe they're afraid also, so where they can start?

Speaker 2: 15:37

oh, you know where I truly connected with who I was, without diving into like all of the aspects of astrology and all that stuff. All I had to do was remember a point in time when I was a kid, when I felt like the most alive, the most free, and envision what that experience is and remember what you were doing and who you were being and connect with that feeling. And that is the first step, is remembering who it is that you truly are, when you felt the most alive and we all connected with that when we were a child, you got it and um like uh.

Speaker 1: 16:35

And how can someone uh find their own guiding principle in a world full of noise?

Speaker 2: 16:41

well, I mean there's, I feel like there's stillness for sure, uh, meditation for sure. I feel like knowing aspects of human design and how energy how we take in other people's energy and think it's us that a lot of time it's truly finding the joy of being in your own energy. That is where you can truly connect with yourself, and so many people don't like to be in their own energy. So my question is for all of you, like, if you don't like being in your own energy and you always have to fill up your space with other people, what is that? Because once you can love being in your own energy and who you are, that is the first step in reconnecting to yourself. Then you can go into all the learning aspects.

Speaker 2: 17:36

Like so many people, for me personally, I did yoga and meditation, but I always question, like, how do I know if I'm not making this up?

Speaker 2: 17:47

That's what I was like, and then that's when I found NLP and that's when I found human design and that's when I found the gene keys. It helped support me and, ok, you need this, miranda, here's this Like everything that you're feeling, everything that you're knowing right now is true, but if you need that, here's this, like everything that you're feeling. Everything that you're knowing right now is true, but if you need that, here's this to show you. So it's finding what modalities resonate with you, what feels good to you, what pushes you and makes you uncomfortable Huge, just like the yoga practice. One of my favorite things about Ashtanga Yoga is you go into these uncomfortable poses and you have to learn to breathe and become comfortable in those uncomfortable poses, and that's one of the biggest gifts that I received is learning how to be comfortable in the uncomfortable over and over and over again, because once you can do that, you can continue to grow and evolve and shift and change and decondition from society and the norms that we think we are.

Speaker 1: 18:51

True, exactly. So that's amazing. I mean, we all have this inner compass and when we learn to trust it, the magic really begins. So that's amazing. Yeah, so, miranda, thank you so much for bringing your soul, your wisdom and your realness to this space today. I mean, um, you have reminded us that dancing with our shadows isn't just brave, but it's a liberating thing, and that pleasure isn't about the perfection, it's all about the presence, permission and play as well. So thank you so much. And for all the listeners yeah, and for all the listeners, like, if something in today's conversation lit you up or maybe cracked you open, then take that spark and follow it, journal about it, sign it out and dance with it, because your creativity, your voice, your pleasure, they are not the extra, they are essential. So follow miranda's um, follow miranda and her powerful offerings, and I'll mention all the links in the show notes for easy reference. But but before we do that, I'd love to ask Miranda where people can find you easily.

Speaker 2: 20:09

There's my website, which is Miranda-Mitchellcom. You can get your free human design chart there, so you can click on that button. You will need your birth date, your birth time and your birthplace and you get it right away and you can download it. And then I also love to be on Instagram, so Miranda J Mitchell on Instagram as well, and I talk a lot about deconditioning and all of the all the goodness there.

Speaker 1: 20:35

Lovely, that's amazing. So, dear listeners, with this hope, until next time, keep dancing in your light and stay focused, stay healthy and stay mindful. Thank you so much thank you.