Be authentic. The more you authentically express yourself, the more connected you’ll feel to yourself and others and the more you’ll love the life you create. The less authentic you are the more stressed and less connected you’ll feel to yourself, others, and life. Spare yourself from the stress of repressing your truth and just live it.
Today, more than ever, wellness is at the forefront of societal discussions. From mental health to physical well-being, women are making significant strides in bringing about change, introducing innovative solutions, and setting new standards. Despite facing unique challenges, they break barriers, inspire communities, and are reshaping the very definition of health and wellness. In this series called women in wellness we are talking to women doctors, nurses, nutritionists, therapists, fitness trainers, researchers, health experts, coaches, and other wellness professionals to share their stories and insights. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Emma Soleil.
Emma Soleil is a private equity investor turned wellness coach on a mission to bring PSYCH-K®, a subconscious reprogramming modality, to the world. In addition to raising awareness of the PSYCH-K® and facilitating PSYCH-K® workshops, she provides private coaching and PSYCH-K® sessions to executives, entrepreneurs, industry leaders, elites, and other seekers, helping them create lives that they love. Emma lives in both New York City and Bermuda, but works with people globally virtually and in select cases will travel to meet with clients.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
Sure thing! I am a first generation American and native New Yorker who grew up with chronically stressed parents. I felt personally responsible for making them happy and believed that if I did well enough they would be. So I felt extreme pressure to perform, pushing myself to collect external measures of success including a physics degree from an Ivy League university and coveted positions in finance. I was succeeding on paper, but I was living in a constant state of fear, depression, and anxiety. I believed I was inherently unworthy of love and life and that I had to do “impressive” things to earn acceptance. Yet no matter what I accomplished, I never felt good enough.
In 2018, I broke down under my own internal criticism while I was in mergers & acquisitions and working about 100 hours a week. I was burnt out, lonely, and physically ill and yet I was still unwilling to yield. Out of concern, my mother suggested I try Transcendental Meditation™ — that practice was my first step in the direction of truly caring for myself. Then in 2019, I phonetically received “sikedeliks” repeatedly while meditating — I wasn’t previously aware of that word so I attempted spelling it in google and retrieved a list of them. Since the message I received failed to specify which to try, in June 2019 went on back-to-back retreats to experience a number of them: holotropic breathwork, psilocybin, hapé, kambo, ayahuasca, and sapo (5meo-DMT) (in that order). That month warrants its own story, but the TL;DR is that it opened my eyes so wide to my inner reality, my truth, that remaining in private equity was no longer a path I could pursue with any kind of enthusiasm. In 2021, I finally stepped away from the industry.
For someone who was addicted to my illusion (or more accurately delusion) of control, the decision to leave finance without a plan was a terrifying leap for me to make. However, surrendering and opening myself to a reality beyond what I could imagine has been one of my greatest lessons: if I allow it, the universe surprises and delights me. At that time, I had no idea I would be contributing to the world as I do now: helping people reprogram themselves to relieve emotional turmoil, create inner peace, rediscover themselves, and unleash their full potential. This work gives me a profound sense of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment and it’s everything I didn’t know I wanted.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?
During the pandemic, spurred by the fear that grocery stores might run out of food, I learned to hunt / fish, forage, camp, and drive (which as a native New Yorker I’d never needed to do previously). Then I traveled into Grand Escalante National Monument by myself without access to phone or any other form of communication to put what I learned to the test. I spent a week in that desert without encountering anyone and loved it. I felt much more peaceful out there surviving by myself then I ever had felt in NYC. At that point I realized that in the city I must also be operating in survival mode.
I decided that if I were to live the rest of my life in survival mode, I may as well do it out in the desert where I actually enjoyed it. However, in my view there should be more to life than just surviving since no matter what I do at some point I’m going to die anyway. So then I thought: what would make the journey to death worth living? And what came to me was creation. The act of creating was what would make life worthwhile for me and that to me meant making art, building things, cultivating community and relationships, and procreating. So I decided that when I emerged from the desert that any energy I expend would be used for creation. I knew then that I needed to leave private equity because I perceived it as stifling my creative self expression.
That whole experience was pretty extreme and I don’t think it’s necessary to go to such lengths to discover / work through fears that are unconsciously running our lives. Just imagining the worst case scenario and coming to peace with it can make the seemingly risky decisions to pursue dreams much less stressful and the journey much more enjoyable.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about a mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
When I first left the corporate world, I immediately set off on my mission to create by beginning to build a startup clothing brand. I traveled to El Salvador and set up a supply chain but when it came time to actually execute contracts I backed off from the venture. I noticed I was resisting the process of building the company, even though I had already spent a significant amount of time and money on it. I realized my true motivation behind the brand was the desire to say that I had started a company but that actually building it wasn’t fulfilling. My mistake was that I was unconsciously looking for the next most impressive thing to prove to myself my worthiness. When I became aware that I was creating another hoop for myself to jump through, I dropped the brand and delved deep into personal development. Previously unfamiliar with the field, I became absolutely enamored with it and that pivot ultimately led to the work I do now: supporting people through coaching and subconscious reprogramming. This experience showed me the importance of getting to truly know myself and then honoring / following my inspiration.
Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?
In a nutshell, what I do is help people cultivate inner peace, fulfillment, and joy by facilitating their self discovery and authentic self expression. I have a theory that the more peace is experienced internally, the more peace will be created externally and I feel passionately about creating greater collective harmony. While I work 1:1 with clients, I believe the most impactful work I do is facilitate workshops for others to learn PSYCH-K®. Private clients light my fire because I love connecting with them on a profound level and helping them self realize, self actualize, and then eventually self transcend. That said, workshops are like giving people a fishing rod to fish for themselves (as well as others) and so facilitating them seems to have more potential for a positive network effect.
Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing?
1 . Get to know your mind. Cultivating self awareness is key to personal development and liberation. A couple of methods I use to get to know myself are meditation and journaling. They help me identify patterns in my life and reflect on how I may be unconsciously creating my current reality through my beliefs (subconscious or conscious) and actions. I have found that the more self aware I am, the better able I am to consciously create my preferred reality.
2 . Feel your feelings. Allowing feelings to be felt and expressing them in healthy ways, be that crying, vocalizing, what have you increases lightness and presence. When emotions are suppressed or repressed they are burdensome and come out in pathological ways and may even manifest as physical illness. Personally I have found PSYCH-K® to be a major help in transforming my beliefs and perceptions to better regulate, integrate, and express my emotions.
3 . Take care of your temple. Just as mind can influence matter, matter can influence mind. Getting daily movement, nourishment from whole organic foods, proper hydration, and eight hours of solid sleep are basic building blocks of overall wellness. Note that hydration can be tricky because sometimes drinking water isn’t enough — it can be beneficial to add minerals to it and/or to supplement with coconut water, aloe juice, celery juice, watermelon, and/or cucumbers. For produce, make sure to wash it thoroughly to get any pesticides or other chemicals off of it. And then for sleep I wear an eye mask to block out as much light as possible.
4 . Serve your spirit. In my experience, the soul feels most alive when it is living for more than just itself. Giving where the act of giving feels satisfying within itself, regardless of the outcome, creates an energetic flywheel.
5 . Do all four of the above steps simultaneously. Although each pillar (mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual) are conceptualized as separate, they are inseparably intertwined. An imbalance in any one aspect will affect the whole system. Wellness is optimized when all four are simultaneously addressed.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
The movement I am starting which will bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people is raising awareness of PSYCH-K®. PSYCH-K® is set of simple and effective processes that enable people to quickly process triggers and emotional turmoil and reprogram their subconscious beliefs. Understanding how to program the subconscious to support conscious aspirations is key to creating a better reality. I have also known PSYCH-K® to dramatically improve mental and emotional well being by facilitating emotional regulation. And better emotional regulation can correlate with better health and more harmonious relationships.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
- Reality is created at the intersection of thoughts, feelings, and actions. Whatever you’re experiencing right now was co-created through your thoughts, feelings, and actions. If you’d like to experience something different, you’ll need to shift at least one of those three pillars for yourself, but most likely all of them. Decide what you’d prefer to create, trust that you can create it, and then actually take action to create it.
- Be curious about your fears and pains. If you’re feeling stuck in any situation / condition, answer what would you lose if this situation / condition were to change as you think you would prefer. Also answer what you gain by the situation / condition remaining as is. Finally, answer what is the feeling you’d like to experience. Your responses to these questions will reveal what unconscious beliefs are keeping you stuck. That awareness can help you make the shifts necessary to align with what you’d prefer, making it much easier to create.
- Be authentic. The more you authentically express yourself, the more connected you’ll feel to yourself and others and the more you’ll love the life you create. The less authentic you are the more stressed and less connected you’ll feel to yourself, others, and life. Spare yourself from the stress of repressing your truth and just live it.
- Manifesting is about becoming. If you have an idea of the life you’d like to create, define for yourself who you would be in that reality, how you would feel, and what you would do. Then begin to embody those qualities, take those actions, and give yourself those thoughts and feelings now, even before you get whatever it is you’d like to experience. It may take some time for the external circumstances to transform, but assuming full accountability and living with intention right now is extremely empowering.
- Work with PSYCH-K®. If you’re finding any of the previously mentioned steps difficult, your subconscious is likely resisting change and reprogramming a number of its beliefs can make things easier. The subconscious is estimated to be a million times more powerful than the conscious mind and so it runs our lives. After the age of seven, the subconscious can only be reprogrammed through a handful of ways including trauma, repetition, hypnosis, and PSYCH-K®. Of these methods, PSYCH-K® is the least invasive, most efficient way to remove any unconsciously self imposed limiting beliefs and perceptions. Once your subconscious beliefs are transformed to align with the life you’d like to experience, it becomes much easier to create that life. You can have someone facilitate PSYCH-K® with you or you can learn it and facilitate for yourself.
Had I known these five things earlier, I would have dreamed much bigger, much sooner and set about creating those dreams. Since living these pillars I’ve felt more inspired, joyful, and fulfilled than ever before and I hope they do the same for you. You too are worthy of a beautiful life.
Sustainability, veganism, mental health, and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?
Given my personal history and how I help people now, mental health is the cause dearest to me. As I mentioned earlier, I believe that cultivating inner peace leads to greater peace externally as well, even on the collective level.
What is the best way for our readers to further follow your work online?
Book 1:1 PSYCH-K® sessions with me or join my workshops to learn PSYCH-K®. Or check out the insights I sprinkle all over the internet including my blog, LinkedIn, and instagram — professional @emmasoleilgarcia & personal @emmasoleil_. I also sometimes post on twitter and pinterest.
Thank you for these fantastic insights! We wish you continued success and good health.
About the Interviewer: Wanda Malhotra is a wellness entrepreneur, lifestyle journalist, and the CEO of Crunchy Mama Box, a mission-driven platform promoting conscious living. CMB empowers individuals with educational resources and vetted products to help them make informed choices. Passionate about social causes like environmental preservation and animal welfare, Wanda writes about clean beauty, wellness, nutrition, social impact and sustainability, simplifying wellness with curated resources. Join Wanda and the Crunchy Mama Box community in embracing a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle at CrunchyMamaBox.com.
