Suzanne White’s Stories, Lessons & Insights

We recently had the chance to connect with Suzanne White and have shared our conversation below.

Suzanne, really appreciate you sharing your stories and insights with us. The world would have so much more understanding and empathy if we all were a bit more open about our stories and how they have helped shaped our journey and worldview. Let’s jump in with a fun one: Would YOU hire you? Why or why not?
I would most definitely hire myself first and foremost because I would know that I have an honest employee who takes responsibility for accomplishments as well as mistakes, who tries to connect with the customer by remembering to listen, and who has an abundance of creative ideas.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
Hey there, and thanks very much for reading! I am named after my mother’s best friend, Suzanne, and my grandmother’s middle name, Ruth. I grew up in various states in the US, but now I have spent half my life in Granada, Spain. I came here as a student from Northern Arizona University in 1998, one hundred years after Lorca was born. I received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Spanish after deciding against studying Ceramics, which I would inevitably do about twenty years later when I entered the Escuela de Arte de Granada in 2018. I have taught ESL for all ages here and in other countries since 2001.

These days, I am building a small business with my daughter which combines my love for making art and teaching English. I believe in the power of the process of making art with your hands to relax and boost confidence, as well as to fast-track language acquisition in a natural and pleasant way. I am very happy to provide weekly crafting sessions for kids aged 2-12 in English because they enjoy themselves so much while they familiarize themselves with listening and speaking and assimilate it from an early age. My desire for the future is to provide a large, well-lit space for everyone who wants to make art and practice different languages.

Great, so let’s dive into your journey a bit more. Who were you before the world told you who you had to be?
I was who we all are before we are conditioned by everything. Every look, facial expression, said aloud or whispered comment that we may have overheard while at school, home, or the grocery store, for instance, contributed to how we judge the world around us and ourselves. Before this process sometimes-nefarious process started shaping our fledgling personalities, I believe we were living each moment in wonder, and curiosity. We were unburdened by having to live up to perceived expectations, and therefore free of all guilt. It is this guilt that as adults we must eradicate in ourselves through forgiveness of the very world that created it in us in the first place. I think this is our spiritual path. We encounter it when we have suffered so much that we desperately surrender to there being another way; to knowing that our conditioning is not us, and to living free from doubt, like we did as children.

What did suffering teach you that success never could?
Success is defined differently for each person, but suffering is the same. The times in my life when I thought that I had reached a perceived level of success, the feelings of happiness or peace that I expected were supposed to come with it didn’t last long or just weren’t there. I didn’t agree with that definition anymore and would constantly replay slivers of memories of when I could’ve said or done something better. In that way perhaps the success was actually suffering. On the contrary, the times I really suffered felt so intense and razor-sharp, relentless, and all consuming, that I had nowhere to go but inside my mind and heart by giving up the thoughts and feelings that I thought were true. I learned to meditate during my suffering. I started to stop each thought I had and really look at it to see if it were true. I learned that most of them are false because they are almost always about the past, which is only remembered, like a dream, and always only from our own perspective, or about the future, which we can never know. I began relaxing into the goodness that I want to see everywhere, because I started regarding that constant stream of judgmental thoughts as simple annoyances, not to be believed in or identified with. May every occurrence or encounter, every ‘failure’ or ‘success’ drive us towards this realization: We are not the thoughts appearing in our minds, but the one who can observe them, and choose to let them go in this instant.

I think our readers would appreciate hearing more about your values and what you think matters in life and career, etc. So our next question is along those lines. What do you believe is true but cannot prove?
I know that there is a pure gentleness/love/peace that can be felt which is beyond this perceived physical reality. It is what people have named ‘God’, but I sometimes experience it as an identity, or a natural state. These understandings have only lasted a few seconds, and seem almost insignificant afterwards, but more and more, I pause to come back to that feeling of absolute peace and security when I have worry and doubt. The present moment is the only place it can be found, and I cannot prove it. Thank Goodness!

Before we go, we’d love to hear your thoughts on some longer-run, legacy type questions. What do you understand deeply that most people don’t?
I think a lot of people do not live from a place of understanding that we know so much less about the entire universe than we think. Many people know and love quantum mechanics like I do, however, what do we do with this knowledge? It is unbelievable, so we forget it. Yet, the kinship to spiritual thought is undeniable. Remembering quantum laws can lead us to spiritual truths, that if dared to be understood in every moment, could cause revelations of oneness. I want this deep understanding of unity. I try to cultivate it every day by going into the present instant and trying to stay there by having no mental activity about it, just hearing, smelling, feeling…being, until a few seconds later when a distractive thought pulls me back into my separate self. More and more people are finding their own practice towards an evolution of Consciousness, and I think making any type of art can be an invitation to a physical state of openness to a new way.

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