Meet Mariza Noyama-Zee

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Mariza Noyama-Zee. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Mariza, thank you so much for joining us today. Let’s jump right into something we’re really interested in hearing about from you – being the only one in the room. So many of us find ourselves as the only woman in the room, the only immigrant or the only artist in the room, etc. Can you talk to us about how you have learned to be effective and successful in situations where you are the only one in the room like you?
Being a person of mixed race and having other intersecting identities that often do not reflect the norm, I have found a sense of comfort from being in love with my own unique story and connection by being curious about the stories of others.

I grew up as the only child of artists and often was the only kid in the room. Naturally I stood out as a sort of oddity. I loved to connect to the adults by telling the story of who I was, who my people were, what my family stories said about me and strongly felt a sense of connection to my own identity. I opened the door to connection by learning how to ask people about their art and what interested them. As I grew up I found that this technique works on most people, if you lead with curiosity, then people respond in kind. If you feel comfort with who you are and allow yourself to be open, people find they have many unasked questions they too are curious about.

My mixed race heritage has been an interesting primer for other forms of identity and presentation that I would experience later in life. I am the daughter of a Chinese immigrant mother and a White-passing mixed race American father. My father is actually a descendent of a whole cacophony of ancestors from a Blackfoot grandmother, to decedents of the first Mayflower, and European immigrants who arrived on these shores at each wave of history since then and now. I cherish the stories that I have become the welcomed receptacle of.

I have lovingly tended all the stories of survival, glory, pain, displacement, discovery, love, rejection, and inclusion that have followed my ancestors and paved the path for my own arrival. And in all the colorful global tendrals of history touching so many different continents throughout history, I came to this life and body looking fairly white and ambiguous in race. It is a strange thing to look, not-quite white and not-quite something else. People would often ask me “what are you?” when I was growing up. This is not an uncommon question for a mixed race person, but back then I didn’t know many folks who were mixed race so it is not an experience I got to share. For this reason, I have often led with my difference. I expose and express my mixed heritage with pride. I am the daughter of a Chinese mother, and for anyone with a Chinese mother, you know that means something! Our mothers carry tradition and I was the kind of kid who was primed to receive it.

Nowadays I show up to spaces in my small somewhat liberal town in Oregon this way; as a mixed race, queer, tattooed, mother of three, who does intuitive healing work. There are many ways in which I do not fit the norm, but in belonging to myself first and foremost, being open with my story and curious about others, I often find my way to feeling connected so that people see what I have to contribute has value even if we don’t look alike or come from the same place culturally.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
As the Founder of Full Awakening LLC, I aim to provide heart-centered, intuitive guidance to help people move through the stumbling blocks on their path towards their true mission. I feel extraordinarily grateful for my own connection to the energies that circle me in support, and grateful for the work I have done over the years to be able to help my clients connect to their own Light Council’s as well. I am passionate about our capacity to heal and could ask for no better accomplices in that mission than Spirit and the unseen realms of loving support through which we swim.

Not everyone is on an intentional growth path. But for the folks who do feel called to grow, evolve, and heal it is a life-long journey. There are so many beautiful models, modalities, and practitioners popping up in the field of healing and we need them all! I love working in collaboration with other healers and seeing how we can support a person as they rise.

I believe that we all come to Earth with a hidden desire to simply make an impact. We want to know that our life matters and that we are here doing what we came to do. Often this can look like an external sense of accomplishment, something that our conditioning has trained us to believe is the point. But I believe we are here to become authentic expressions of our core self and it is only through the brave act of healing our conditioning and trauma, that we are able to come into contact with who we really are. It is through loving this inner most part of ourselves that we can grow it to the place of true expression.

I feel so grateful to be able to be a force of loving holding and support as my clients embark on the wild journey to do just that, I feel extremely privileged to have the ability to see the impact I am making with every session I have and each person I get to work with. I am aware that what we do is co-creative and I try not to ever take for granted the gift I have been given to have a seat at that table!

After 20 years of having a private practice as a healer, I am now paying it forward by turning my focus towards teaching the next generation of facilitators. It is with great joy that I have begun training small cohorts in the way that I work with the Elementals and Spirit to anchor and inform their journeys of becoming their most effective version of healers, teachers, and transformational guides. I love seeing the work that I do flow out and ripple through individuals, couples, families, communities, organizations, and the world.

This time in my career has also brought writing to the forefront. As I work on completing a book about my personal journey through lifetimes and the wisdom that has carried forward, I have also devoted myself to regularly reflecting on the themes and lessons coming through my personal and professional healing work through a substack publication named The Well. This is one of the best ways I have found to make the work that I do accessible to all and able to ripple out to the greater community.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
The very first thing that comes to mind is my connection to spirit and the unseen realms. When I was 10 I had my first encounter with Spirit. It was one of those rare moments when something from the unseen realms becomes seen and undeniable. I personally needed something of this magnitude to wake me up from the hardening process my reality had fallen into. The being I saw was 10 feet tall and luminous, projecting light like the headlights of a car had suddenly turned on in my dark house. I froze on the spot and felt both loved and terrified. Since my family and I had no context for this encounter, I had a hard time processing it. Cultural fear and misunderstanding made me close down and reconstruct this moment as a personal mythology. Six years later I found out my mother believed me when I told her what / who I saw because she had actually seen the same being in our house months before me. She had kept it a secret until I had my encounter, at which point she shared what she saw with my step father. When I found this out, the flood gates flew open. What I like to say is, when our curiosity becomes greater than our fear, then we can begin to explore spirit.

So the next quality that had tremendous value on my journey was cautious curiosity. For the next 10 years I studied, read every shamanic initiation memoir I could find, and explored. I did not feel called to any specific “way” of connecting to Spirit, but I stayed privately open, curious, and investigatory. It wasn’t until 10 years later when I had already opened a healing practice in bodywork, that I became aware I needed deeper and more specific training from a teacher. I was aware I was being called to a type of healing that I had not been prepared for in school. That is when I moved to Portland, Oregon from NYC in search of my teacher. Fortunately, I met her 6 months later.

The last quality that comes to mind is discernment. I had already begun practicing body-based discernment on my own many years previous. I would take myself on these discernment walks where I would ask myself at each street corner which way to go. But it wasn’t until I began working with my teacher that I understood that I could discern and choose the energies and frequencies I was in connection with. This was a game-changer for me! Up until that point, my curiosity had opened me to all manner of non-physical realities and some were less helpful than others. I didn’t know that it was not only my right, but also my responsibility, to decide who was allowed to stay in connection and who had to go!

How can folks who want to work with you connect?
I believe collaboration is the wave of the future! I have a dream of working with a network of practitioners of all kinds who are heart-centered, open, and constantly growing in their field to support folks in a full spectrum way. I have had visions of offering clients a self-evolution assessment series to determine the levels of support needed and then to hook them up with practitioners who can work with them in a collaborative, team-model way.

There are many different layers to the human experience, starting from energy to form. I would be interested in continuing to gather and cultivate relationships with folks who specialize in the a variety of deeply impactful areas. These are the areas I see people needing comprehensive assistance navigating; money, vocational-alignment, relationships, conflict, boundaries, nervous system regulation, embodiment, inner relationships (IFS), connection to the divine.

My work touches many, but not all, of these areas and so collaborations are often fun and super beneficial. I find that transformational healing always contains an element of re-parenting and while the bulk of that power is anchored in the inner relationship someone cultivates with themselves, it is so helpful to have models and guides in our outer world to help show us the way. We need each other!

Contact Info:

Image Credits
These are all my personal photos. If anything, the one on the beach could be credited to a Lee Harris Soul Magic retreat that I was working.

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