Healing the Creative Impulse and Connecting with the Inner Child with Xenia Viray

In this episode, depth + somatic psychotherapist, and The Whole Paradox Host, Molly Mitchell-Hardt interviews healer, frequency artist, and creativity catalyst, Xenia Viray. They talk about:

• sensitivity
• creativity
• the messiness of the entrepreneurial space
• creating with no map
• self-expression
• love of learning and curiosity 
• genius and states of play
• connection to innocence and the inner child
• navigating the transitional space of our time
• business as creative expression 
• intuitive sense of 2025
• and much more...

Follow us @mollymitchellhardt and @thewholeparadox

Molly's Offerings:
To inquire about 1:1 work or about Molly's Sacred Motherhood Online Support Group, schedule a free consultation or email mollymitchellhardt@gmail.com

Find Xenia Viray:
Follow Xenia on instagram
Visit Xenia's website

This podcast was produced in association with Channel the Sun by Kevin Joseph Grossmann.  Musical stylings by Kevin Joseph Grossmann.

Follow us @mollymitchellhardt and @thewholeparadox

Check out Vessel Psychotherapy and Healing Collective for psychotherapy support throughout California

This podcast was produced in association with Channel the Sun by Kevin Joseph Grossmann.  Musical stylings by Kevin Joseph Grossmann.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Molly: Welcome to the Whole Paradox podcast, where we explore timeless wisdom in the modern age to cultivate a greater sense of meaning and belonging to ourselves, our world, and one another. We will integrate the sacred, mythic, somatic,
creative, and poetic to expand our meaning of truth and our capacity for complexity and nuance. 

On The Creative Impulse, I am regularly astounded when I watch my son make art. There is no hesitation. He does not fear a blank page like I do.
It is as though he is so in touch with the creative impulse that he needs merely
to place a page in front of him for things to begin to pour out. 

Not me. I balk at the sight of a blank page. I argue with it have a few tantrums leave and come back start and stop leave and come back Only when I am struck by inspiration does it flow Is my son in a constant state of inspiration? I wouldn't doubt it. I Recognize how much I have to unlearn How many worn -out
straight jackets I have to disrobe in order to get back in touch with that
wellspring? Despite this efforting, the spring is always there, bubbling and gurgling, endlessly flowing. 

My guest today is Xenia Marie Ross Viray. Xenia is an imagination healer, frequency artist and creativity catalyst with a focus on experiential learning containers and writing. She is the eldest of three sisters and her name means kindness to strangers. Born as a brick -and -mortar fashion business, Myths of Creation, the name of Xenia's collective body of work, is a container for experiments, art, writing, and gatherings at the intersection of creativity, spirituality, and meaning -making. Xenia's work reconnects communities, ideas, and art forms that are traditionally siloed in order to enrich the pool of imaginal possibility.

So welcome. I'm really glad to have you here today. Thank you so much for having
me. I'm happy to be here. Yes. So I'd love to start here.

I really appreciate your revelation to be who you are for a living, which is
certainly a rebellious act in our world. I'd love to hear more about this and how
you were able to arrive in this place and what it kind of took for you to step
into it. 

Xenia: Yeah, I love this Um, you know, ever since I was a very small kid, my mom was really concerned about the level of
sensitivity I had. And I think that she thought it was a sort of unlivable setting
that I was born with of just always wanting to understand everything in beyond 3D
in its complication, to know how everyone's feeling about everything, to talk things
through. And also, I think she found my natural state of hopefulness and optimism
equally concerning. And essentially, I think that what I learned early on was that to move through the world in the ways that I'm expected to, I should expect to be disappointed or not expect too much. And that was a sort of impossible thing for me to adjust to. And luckily, I came to college in New York City and was surrounded by other people with sort of similar settings in terms of being big dreamers and being deeply optimistic and sort of trusting in magic even though I don't think that's how any of us would have put it at the time and
I kind of found myself at every fork in the road choosing between something that
felt stable or something that felt potentially like a path towards something unexpected, always choosing the unexpected path. And that really wasn't like an ethos I had or a value of mine. it's just, it was just my nature. And I did that so many times that I started to see in working for so many small businesses, including people who open bars and restaurants with their partner or people in their 20s who founded clothing stores that most people are just making things up in the entrepreneurial space. And because I got the privilege of seeing how messy and how innovative and how innately creative entrepreneurial paths are,
it felt really possible that I could also try and do my own thing and create my
own thing. And so once I started really trusting and believing in that possibility,
the next leg of that journey was undoing the assumption that anything I had to do
had to be in a form that already existed. And that was a little bit of a harder
pill to swallow because it's harder to create something with no map.
It's harder to put one foot in front of the other if you don't know exactly what
you're building. And eventually I started to see that everything we're interested in and we start with shows us where we need to expand sort of beyond it's the shape of its container, and that everything we touch and everything we learn, we change just by engaging with it. And then if you do that enough, eventually you start to sort of abstractly feel the shape of yourself, and that when you start to express that
shape, even when you're not entirely sure what it is, other people start to be able
to respond to you and to show up and engage with you. And it was through my own experimentation of expressing who I am and what I like to do that I invited other people to surprise me and say, there are people who could benefit from this,
which is just, again, a hope and a gamble. So, so long in the short of how I got myself into this imagination healing world I created. 

Molly: Yeah. Oh, there's so much richness there.
I'm just thinking about like the layers, the initial layers of sensitivity and
hopefulness and that concern of your parents and then always kind of choosing the unexpected path because that was just, like you said, your nature and the messy creativity that you got to be witness to that and maybe that emboldened you a little bit.
And I love that piece about anything that we're learning or taking in, we're
changing.

We need more of that. And it just makes me think about too,
it gives me a lot to think about as far as myself, like what I'm interested in
and how I can actually a little bit more of the edges of that. 

Xenia: Yeah, it's interesting being human and it's funny 'cause I actually have a therapist who I can talk to in such honest ways where I can say things to her like. I just really don't feel native all the time to this plane of reality. Things are confusing for me on in the sort of rules of time and the rules of culture and something that I always try to remind myself is that for everything that's really challenging for me there's something that's really easy for me like they're two sides of the same coin or the same spear and so when you're somebody who's always trying to see as much meaning or possibility in everything, it can be really difficult to say, make small decisions. But it makes it really easy to see open runways where other people see stop signs or dead ends. And I think that what's so fun about being human is we have all these bodies of knowledge or schools of thought to play with that are there from all the people who came before us and all the people that work alongside of us. I think that the fundamental thing that shifted for me when I started to feel a little bit more freedom is that I started to relate to those bodies of knowledge as creative building blocks or templates for me to bounce against and build upon and play with. And I think I was trained in high school when I was choosing a major as most of us are to think what we're actually looking for is a sort of like church or religion to just become an expert in. And I think for a lot of us,
it's so exciting to find something like for me, there was a long time I studied
for human design where we start to feel like this is it. Maybe this is the thing
that I can do. I finally found it. And I think that I wish that I had known
before that if I could relate to everything I loved or was interested in as a
creative building block instead of a potential diagnosis from a career counselor that I could actually have a good time knowing that there was no pressure to marry any one form or way of being. And I kind of feel like we're shifting into a world where that's going to be more normal. It just kind of feels that way. But those of us who are bridging this time in culture, or work life, I think we have kind of
an awkward time of translating these things. 

Molly: Yeah.  I mean, I, it makes me think that you really learned how to almost reconnect because I'm thinking like you learned how to learn. But on some level, we, we always intrinsically, we are intrinsically experimenters and creators,
like I just watched my son, like he's just constantly, 'cause we don't like, I
mean, he hasn't gone to traditional school yet. And so he's just like all day long
without end playing and experimenting and creating. Like one day he's just like,
I wanna make a Christmas tree. I'm like, Okay, good luck with that. And then he
turns up with like this Christmas tree he made out of paper and a paper plate, you
know, and I'm like, amazing, you know, that is very cool. You know, he just thought about it and was like, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna create this. And now we can really get trained out of that through kind of traditional learning settings and how on sort of sadly, we have to like read, at least for myself, I'll speak for myself, like I had to find my love of curiosity and learning again, because traditional education absolutely stifled it.

Xenia: Yeah, it's really funny that this is coming up because for whatever and I find that my social media algorithms will totally feed me things that like will come up later, like, and in a really metaphysically strange, synchronistic way, like way beyond the computer's intelligence or something. But I was, I've been coming across all this different information about genius and states of play. And I've been coming across articles about some of the most famous scientists in the world, Darwin being one, and how they only worked like three hours a day because they spent most of the time being inspired by the thing that they loved, in his case, nature. And I've been reading a lot about how childhood relationships are
so deep because there's no agenda and sort of this expanse of time.
And so kids tend to invent whole worlds like secret languages and like,
you know, they experiment with creating meaning that is also part of how they create relationships because they're still negotiating all of those things. And there's not this sort of heaviness of expectation on themselves or other people yet,
because they don't know what's expected of them quite yet. And I feel like there's
something about that relationship to ourselves and our relationship to our creativity and to each other that's all connected. Because there's something about what you describe with your son, that's so immediate. Like, I want to create this, I'm just going to do it. What does that mean about me? What does it mean about me if I do something differently than my friend? All these little weird kind of neural pathways that most of us have traveled for whatever reason, he hasn't come across them. Yeah, maybe because he's so young. But I love the idea that
none of those pathways are set, you know, like, and I actually kind of love the
fact that we were born in this generation that might be the last generation who was educated in this way. Because I think it's really magical to have a soul,
this is a lot of my own conjecture about what I believe is, what I believe it
means to be human, but I feel like we come into the human body to learn.
And for our soul to choose a lifetime where we would be trusted to sort of lose
ourselves to this degree, or be so trained out of our creativity, and still find
our way back to it, and still find each other, and connect to each other in the
process, is kind of bad. 

Molly: It's like, made me feel tearful, you saying that. Like, we must have trusted ourselves so much, you know, to choose this life.

Xenia: And I feel like instead of, this is what I've been playing with,
like, what if nothing's wrong with me? I've just been playing with this thought,
like, what would shift in my life if just for like a week, I just assume nothing
is wrong with me? 'Cause I think those of us with a lot of sensitivity and
personal responsibility always wanna know what our part is or how we could be doing better. Nothing wrong with that, but just sort of what could happen if that wasn't the first assumption. And I feel like when we talk about creating anything,
Christmas tree, or an offering for the public or whatever, there's this ability to,
when you can actually enjoy the immediate discovery process of taking the steps
towards building the thing and assuming it's supposed to be enjoyable for you and
there's nothing wrong with it, the whole kind of experience changes. You know what I mean? 

Molly: Oh yeah. I don't know that I've had many experiences of creating public
offering, because that's like just so edgy for me, where it's like fully enjoyable.
So that's, you know, I'm like, okay, let me integrate that. And that's,
that's my work. 

Xenia: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, because I scare people sometimes when I collaborate with them, because I'm like a puppy, I get way too excited,
way too fast. I have no chill. I show all of it right away. And some people are
like, "Yeah, okay, let's go." And some people are like, "I can feel the overwhelm
and that they kind of feel like they need a second to process just whatever this
being is that I am." And I share that because I think that puppy part of me,
sometimes overrides the part of me that is so worried about it,
all of it, and wants to do it well and wants people to get it. And wants my mom
to get it, you know, to make it legible for everyone. And I think the puppy aspect
of us is like the kid who doesn't really know why they're so excited.
And I do think everyone has that. I don't think it's all manifest the same way or
is about the same thing, obviously, but I do feel like we all have this
really unbounded excitement somewhere. And I think that a lot shifted for me in my creative process when I started letting that kind of messy puppy energy come to the front. And I don't know how other people feel, but at some point with my creativity, it started to become more compulsive then it was disciplined. And I don't always know how to feel about that. But I just wanted to share that because it is, it is just a sort of interesting, feral way of moving through the creative,

Molly: Yeah, the creative process. that's really interesting like when you were describing that puppy part of you and the like overwhelm of you know some other people and then also like the excitement of other people are like oh there's resonance and like how they create it's like describing my husband and he he's always could describe himself as this like golden retriever you know with creativity and like this he really felt that too like some some people are like, "Yes, let's do this." And then other people, it can almost be a repellent or just like, "Yeah, overwhelm." That's really the word. 

Xenia: Yeah, and it's tough because there's no right way to be, I guess, right? And it can feel scary when you're so naked in your expression of yourself and you're like, "Hope people are okay with this because I'm just going to put all the cards on the table." But you do weirdly get used to it if you do it enough times, at least in my experience. 

Molly: Yeah. I would always have this image that I'm like, "It just feels like you're constantly putting your neck out." You know? Like so vulnerable. Like your neck is just always out.

Um, so we kind of touched on this, but just to see if anything else kind of comes
up around it, um, kind of holding this idea that we're always in some kind of
inner process, whether conscious or unconscious, do you have a sense of something brewing inside. And if so, kind of where are you with that process? You kind of mentioned the algorithm and how it's sort of synchronistically showing up.

Xenia: I think that what's really interesting is like, I've been starting to think about
putting out offerings for people who want to create their own business.
And that was kind of a shock to me because that's definitely not where I thought I
was gonna go for 2025. But this interesting thing happened where as soon as I
started to really play with this idea of wanting to help other people essentially be
themselves for a living, then maybe like two or three weeks,
someone with a mystical business podcast reached out to me,
someone else who is teaching energetics for business reached out to me to guest
teach. And it was like, the universe was like, okay, she's plugged into this
program. She she chooses this, she she selects this, let's start to reflect back to
her what that could look like or what different avenues are already here. And it
was such an affirmative set of events that unfolded that I started to just move
into this process of creation probably three times more quickly than the last time I
had an idea and wanted to put it out in the world. And what you were saying about
sticking your neck out, I've been talking to my clients a lot about that because
there is this kickback of doubt and paralysis that happens to me when I'm doing big expansive things because there's always a part of me that is like are you sure like you're moving very quickly I don't know if you did all your safety checks And I
like to tell my clients, like this is a good sign when you have this feeling as
long as it's not so overwhelming that you start to like physically shut down, all
it means is that you are in new territory. And everything we do is sort of like a
fractal energetic pattern. So Whatever we are experiencing internally,
we experience externally, whatever we experience, say in the positive upward direction also has to go in a downward spiral direction. The growth goes in all directions. And so the good news about that is that instead of being overwhelmed about where to start, you start to realize that every single thing is present in every other single thing, meaning in the step where you write down your business plan, all of those things about your worries about being seen or your creative process, they're all there. Like you can't, kind of can't make a wrong step because wherever you go, the pattern you're trying to work through or the thing you're trying to expand will find a way to fill itself in so you can learn that thing.
And yeah, that is something that I realized just kind of applies to anything.
So why not business? Someone else could probably teach the same thing and be
teaching other people about dream interpretation or something. It's like the same
mechanism. And I think that with creativity, a lot of what we're doing is really translation and that if we could open up to all the way, all the languages, all being valid and all the paths, all being essentially the same with different energetic translations, then maybe we could, I don't know feel more permission to just go after the thing. That's exciting us.

Molly: Yeah That's really beautiful
I'm wondering what about Like what about business, you know as far as like a version of creativity.

Xenia: Yeah, I feel like business is just an art form of energetic exchange.
I think a lot about how at the end of the day, we're really just creating experiences. And the experiences we create can be in any canvas. And I sort of realized that if you wanna create experiences for people that are very almost poetic and artistic, but energetically catalyzing in nature, it's just as easy to do that, or it's just as natural to do that in a business as it would be to do it as a playwright or as a performance artist or as a musician or as a painter. Like it's really just the same energetics of the collage that you're putting out in the world. The thing I enjoy about business is it's so meta in its creativity. Like it's not just what you're creating that you can be innovative with, you can be innovative about how you format it,
how you price it, how you work with other people, what new technological platform you use. Like everything about it is negotiable in this way. And it's really
strange, you would think with art, you would be more free, and I'm not a visual or
fine artist, so I don't know, but I almost feel like more freedom in the world of
creating one's business than there might be if I felt compelled to do some kind of
fine art. And I don't know why that is. I think just because there's so much, perhaps because there's so much new territory in this world of this, so there's not really set rules yet in maybe some good ways and some bad ways.
But what I like about the sort of free exchange of business is that you can find a way to help people doing the things you love and
you can create beauty in the process.

Molly: Yeah. Centering the creating of beauty. Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah, I appreciate that because I think, I don't know, like things like business and capitalism and, you know, can kind of get a bad rap. That's not even really what I'm trying to say, but
can have maybe a tinge of, I don't know, but it's all the lens that you look
through and sort of how you conceptualize what you're doing. And I love this idea
that as sort of business as a canvas and then creative expression. 

Xenia: Yeah, I know what you mean though. There's something about business. I feel like you start to think about like forms that you have to fill out or like accounts that you have to set up and you sort of stop breathing and you're like, "Did I do it right?" You know, it starts to feel like if I don't get this right, I'm going to prison.
But then you forget like, I think what's so beautiful about it,
this kind of goes back to what we were saying before about education is like, there
is this education gap that our poorly designed schooling, and I'll just speak for some of us like created. And so those of us who were
hungry for this, like curriculum of our soul had to just like make it up for
ourselves and then we could share it. And I think that part is really exciting
because the reality with that is like, people will let you know if what you're
creating isn't helpful because they won't show up and that's okay,
that's useful, you know. And I feel like that just for me what really helps me is
remembering all the things that people have ever created that have helped me that have just essentially been pockets of time where they opened up a space to share their experience and what they see and how they perceive, and that was really it.

And we all have that. So yeah, I think at the basis for me, business is
essentially the heart or the core of it is that.

Molly: Yeah, I love that. It kind of leads me to my question around mythology, I know for me the integration of mythology into my personal cosmology was really expansive and really shifted my psychic landscape and obviously your body of work is called myth of creation so it points to appreciation of myth and I'm wondering kind of how you play with this, how you kind of see mythology as vital or a part of the puzzle? 

Xenia: So this is actually kind of a funny, unexpected story. So when I was
in my late 20s, I remember hearing some story about a tech company.
And in this article, they were talking about how sometimes companies create myths around their origins that aren't actually true. And I would go on to open my own brick and mortar store. It actually started as a website, and then it was a brick and mortar store, and it was all focused on affordable clothing in my neighborhood, but really the backbone of it was like a creative, inclusive experience. And the name Myths of Creation sort of just like popped directly into my head. I often get the names of things first, and it was kind of a joke, like a
metaphysical joke of like, I'm just going to tell you the truth about what these
things are and where these things are made. And I'm not going to tell you some
story to give you a false understanding of how reality works.
It's essentially because this is a plane in which people worship money and worship
business when we tell fake stories about how people got somewhere. There are actually really damaging implications. Yeah. Yeah, like besides even the ethics of the shareholders and the consumers, you are telling people the world works in a way that it does not actually work. And you're giving people bad maps for reality.
So when I shifted away from running the brick and mortar business, where by the
way, I had this kind of wild spiritual awakening while I had that shop open.
And so I started having astrologers there and we had workshops for empaths there. And we had all kinds of different offerings there in an environment where a lot of people started to get exposed to something they probably wouldn't have seen if they hadn't come across the shop. And I was really lucky because I think that was like a gift from my soul or something when I named my business that because at the heart everything was about we create everything like everything in our lives is an invention of our imagination and those inventions go back to the way meaning and meaning is made either through what you read in a magazine that ends up being the invention of some PR company or from really timeless, eternal, sort of psychic archetypes that live in our psychology because of our ancestry and because of who knows what we share as a collective
energetically. And - I feel like creativity is such a central part of my life because when I think about the main myth that helps me feel like myself or feel excited about life or feel empowered, it's the feeling that the one thing that the creator,
let's call this being this source or spirit gave all of us was the instinct to
create or the ability to create the world. And so a lot of times with mythology,
I approach it a lot more with us as the writers and creators of whatever that myth
is. And that allows us to be playful and experimental about when we shift this meaning in our experience or when we create this new meaning how does that change the way we behave? So for me it's probably less informed by the great mythologies of the world though I love them they don't tend to fully stick my brain.
It's just - Yeah, it's just something that dropped in and continues to give me more
and more of its own meaning.

Molly: Mm -hmm, I love that. I love thinking about, you know, as you kind of shift the way that you're seeing or interpreting over here, how the whole meaning changes and how powerful that can be, you know, just through the process of kind of insight and awareness and reflection.

Xenia: Yeah, I mean, it's really change your life. Isn't it wild when you have someone like say something to you? Are you read a fact about how the brain works or like an ancient mythology from your culture and like your whole life changes in a split second? 

Molly:  I know it's a little bit trite to say at this point, but it does feel like when that happens and there's such a deepresonance that it is like a remembering, it's like, oh my God, that's like this missing puzzle piece that I've been sort of consciously unconsciously searching for this whole time, you know. 

Xenia: Yeah. No, I totally resonate with that. I feel like, yeah, it's sort of like, if part of the game of being human is forgetting things, are there these moments where we suddenly just like, remember? And yeah, that's such a real felt experience for me too. 

Molly: What do you make of, and you know, we kind of touch on this, but what do you make of the awareness of patterns of behavior and themes showing up in one's life? Do you work with that with people? 

Xenia: Yeah, totally. I think a lot about patterns as what we come to inhabit or experience so that we can experience freedom. Because I think that we sort of live in a reality where we learn by contrast. So if we don't have the experience of a pattern, it's hard to know what it's like to experience its opposite. You know what I mean? So for example, I think that incarnation is again very funny to me.
I have the most literal mom. My mom is the most literal person I've ever met.
Like it blows my mind and I think that I had to almost inherit this fear of doing
things wrong or this pattern of wanting to know how to do things exactly right to
keep myself safe in order to become someone obsessed with breaking free from the limitations of fear and the main fear being other people are going to think I'm
stupid or I'm wrong or I don't know what I'm doing. And that has informed so much of what I navigated in my life, who I've given my power away to, who I've decided to be in romantic relationships with like it keeps showing up over and over and over again. And those maps I made out of those thought loops have become maps for me to give to my clients and to turn into offerings. And I also kind of think that there's this interesting conversation around neurodivergence. not an expert in what makes something neurodivergent or not, but so many of my clients talk to me about their neurodivergence. And when you think about the brain like sort of lighting up different thought loops, I think of neurodivergence as the electricity being like, I'm not taking that path, I'm taking a different path, like I'm not going to stay in your map. And Maybe that makes some things harder for us, but maybe it means that we're always trying to find the edge of where consciousness wants to go and it relates to like this feeling of sticking
your neck out all the time. Being in this place in the mind where there's no map
yet, and you're like, "I don't know if I should be here." "Is this safe? Is this
okay?" And I feel like if we didn't have these patterns that we shared with each
other, or like our lineage, not to romanticize the suffering that can come from
them, but I don't know if we could really learn how to be human and then further
evolve human consciousness, because I think it's just part of it. 

Molly: It's really powerful. I'm kind of, we've been sort of circling around personal cosmology and kind of the lenses through which we look. And I just appreciate the stance of seeing how our psyches compensate, you know, like, okay, I'm having this one experience externally, but I have to kind of have this other experience, or maybe, you know, if I'm going up, I have to go down internally and in the growth in all directions and that kind of as above so below kind of view. 

Xenia: One of the biggest shifts in my life and I feel like in all of the lives of the people that I'm close to or I work with where we're starting to embrace this idea that each one of us has this personal cosmology and that nobody can fully give us a fully formed picture of the universe that's gonna help us navigate our lives or whatever our souls came here to do and I kind of feel like when we start to share what's really true for us. And when we start to read the research that really connects with us or the myths that really connect with us, we start to make it like more normal to be your own personal mythologist or cosmologist. And what I've been noodling on a lot is like how that changes relationships. Because we're used to sort of organizing by hierarchy. And I don't think that we mean to do that. It's just sort of how things work. And I think that even when we're trying to do personal development, there's a lot of like, well, a good partner does this, a good friend does that. But when we're all really living from our own cosmology or myth,
there's really, we have to define that in real time with each other all the time.
And I think it's beautiful, also a lot of work. And, you know, scary, sometimes. But I feel like that the basis of being someone who wants to have their own personal cosmology is the assumption that you don't really know what you're
process of discovering it, which means yes, lots of freedom, but also like a little
compassion for yourself and the other person, like give yourself a little break, be
a little easier on the other two, because you're both kind of fumbling around in
the dark writing the writing the dance as you're doing the dance, you know, and
it's it's very vulnerable to be alive.

Molly: Yeah, I'm just aware of, you know, from many of the different things
that you said, how much courage and bravery it takes to kind of stay in that,
I don't know exactly how to name it expansive or uncomfortable,
mapless, uncharted territory type of space, and how, like you said,
how to ride that edge of, OK, this might be uncomfortable, but is it like making
my whole system shut down, or is it kind of activating in a really alive way?
and how to really like, yeah, be navigating that. And I love this piece of having
sort of compassion for self and other through that process.

Xenia: It's like, I realized today, 'cause I had a little bit of anxiety today because I
had time, and I usually don't really have like these big empty spaces of time.
And I was like, Like, okay, I sometimes need to create because that's the only way I know how to transmute this massive creative energy I feel from like anything is possible and expansive boundlessness into like being a human on earth. It's kind of like how I recalibrate myself to just being like a finite being. Like you have this much time, you have this much empty space on the page, and here's some parameters. And in a weird way, it's myself soothing. I think that's
why I do it so compulsively because it's for me, like every message I've ever
written was because I asked myself a question and was like, what do you think about that? Like whatever voice is back there, what do you think about that? And I feel like the creativity helps me ground myself. And I think that when I think about it that way, I don't put as much pressure on the outcome because in the process, I'm just trying to ground myself. But I will say this, as soon as you said that, um, that reflection about being in this mapless space, I was thinking about how last
year I was in Italy with my friends and they had to help me with everything
because I'm so abstract and I'm so metaphysical that sometimes like choosing the
cheese at the place where everything's in Italian, it's just like too much for me,
you know, and I left there being like, I am not helping my friends at all.
I am really not contributing. This is not like the best place for me to be a
contributor. And, you know, my friends know me well. So they were like, you have
other gifts and talents. It's totally fine. Just let us do the things that are
easier for us. But it does come with this, this, this zooming all the way out.
Sometimes you do need to learn how to zoom back in. And sometimes you do need to learn how to really appreciate the people who just see what's there, and love and ground into that way too. And I feel like I'm glad I don't have to depend on just myself and live all alone in this world. That would be very weird and scary.
Yeah, there's a flip side to that expansion. And finding that balance so I can be
grounded is, it's an ongoing process and it does require effort for me.

Molly: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I really appreciate that sort of the creative impulse as being the way you ground into being human. That really resonates for me. And kind of leads me into my next question, which doesn't start as a question,
so bear with me. So I live to have my mind blown. To break apart the internal concepts I've fashioned my world out of, always altering and adding new pieces, sort of the masterpiece of my life, an ongoing process of letting go of outmoded ways of seeing and being and integrating something more specific and perhaps more expansive at the same time. And like again, we've kind of touched on this, but maybe to land it a little bit more. Do you have a sense of what some pillars are of your personal cosmology and yeah, how this kind of informs like how to be, how you be human?

Xenia: Yeah, I love this question. I love this question. I think like the first pillar is
around what we were describing before, which is that like, I think tension and
duality or polarizing things are here to be alchemized.

And I think that when we start to see how they can work together or what it is
they both want, if they could have a common goal say there's a part of me that's
like really strategic and loves to have everything planned in an almost computer
program like way because that's true for me. But there's another part of me that
absolutely laughs in the face of all plans I make and does everything opposite And
is there something they're both trying to get at? And I find that, yeah, if you can just assume that two parts of you that feel like enemies are actually trying to get at the same thing, but from different angles or priorities, I think that that helps you be more human. I think that helps you stay creative instead of feeling paralyzed.
The second thing I think is something that's just a belief I've chosen to be true
because without it, I don't know what I would do. And that is the idea that each
one of us being our individuated self somehow serves the whole, that the collective highest good and the individual's highest good are somehow one and the same. And I always think about nature and how everything has a different need or a different want, but the way it fits together serves a picture much bigger than any single being.
And then, You know, this next thing is a surprise to me that it's coming up,
but it's like, I actually feel like human beings are here to learn from emotions
and feelings and I have this sense that we are just at the tip of the iceberg of
understanding like what that really means. Why are we so uncomfortable when we have bodily sensations like so weird when you sort of zoom out and think about the feeling of like fear or anxiety or something. And what is it? Actually, it's like,
oh, there's some gurgling in my heart space and my belly, but it's so much more
than that. And I kind of think But if you learn how to move with, create with, feel or express your feelings, there will always be some kind of alchemical gem in there. I don't, you know, something to be found. And I guess the last pillar for me would be that I think the imaginal space is like a real space. And I think that when we create, we're co -creating with this preform imaginal realm. We're volunteering to bring different consciousnesses or energies into form. And I think that for some people, this appears like seeing auras. And for others, it's like really specific ways of looking at dimensions. Maybe for some people it's aliens, but I think it's like kind of the doorway to all the same things. And I kind of feel like somehow becoming more acquainted with our imagination teaches us how to free ourselves and free each other. But I think it's also a mystery and I don't know exactly how it unravels.
Yeah, I think those are kind of like the four. 

Molly: Oh, I love that. I really appreciate that. I'm such a fan of, I think,
you know, not to, you know, overly twin, but I too am very kind of like intuitive
and feeling. I mean, that's how I'm categorizing it, not to put us label us.
But so to land stuff in kind of more, not a concrete form, but just have something for that energy to spin around, whether it's like a word or a concept or something that helps ground the energetics of what I'm experiencing in my inner world is like so relieving to me because otherwise it just feels so ephemeral and so kind of nebulous and hard to, like I could kind of live there all the time, you know, just in this really like nebulous floating space. And so I just love, I love kind of naming the cosmological framework of, you know, totally land things in your reality.

Xenia: Yeah, like, I think about, like, you know, when you see graphs, or,
like, pictorial visual representations of a system, like, maybe it's just colors, and the opposite, or maybe it's like the signs of the zodiac, and like, I can't fully imagine what it would be like to live in the universe before somebody created the graph to organize the things to help me understand how they orient because people lived without that for thousands of years and to try to talk to somebody else about like the constellation Sagittarius without like the words or the chart or the myth is so hard to imagine. I mean, maybe they just kind of found some other more immediate way to channel that archetype or unconscious who knows. But I do think there's a very satisfying beauty to having one part of your brain sort of translate into the other part of your brain and for them to see each other and be like, "Ah, you're me. I'm you, I'm not alone. Orient, you know, okay, like this is my reality. 

Molly: I know, I think about just, you know, the astrological system, you know, every religious system, you know, if we're ever kind of down on ourselves,
'cause like, you know, people say like, "Oh, I'm not creative." It's like people are
humans, are so unbelievably creative, you know, just like thinking about all the,
you know, incredible religious texts and, um, you know, mythology. It's like, it's just incredible how creative. And I'm also like riffing on the imaginal realm as a real realm. I've been reading this, this wonderful series of books. It's very sort of, uh, books, they say books. It's very Woldorfian and it's all about these gnomes and Limindoor Woods and this little boy and little girl who enter Limindoor Woods and they shrink in size and they, you know, have basically like gnome friends and adventures. They're just so glorious and sweet and but my son's always like, "Limindoor Woods isn't real," right? And I'm like, Well, it kind of is, you know,
but it's hard to explain to him because he's like, well, but I want to go there,
you know, and right. So it's really interesting for someone who, you know, is young and has such access to sort of this creative space. And then, you know, he's also simultaneously having these very dreams, you know, with where I turned into a witch or, you know, he's, um, there's monsters and stuff. And you know, that balance between holding like, um, that is real on one level and that which isn't going to hurt you actually on another level, like on the physical realm level. 

Xenia: Yeah. That's so interesting because it's like, how do you even explain the concept of reality? Like, how do you even talk about it to even somebody your own age, let alone somebody who's really forming their understanding of the universe, mostly based on you and what you tell them, you know, it's really, it's really tough. You made me think about this thing my niece said, "I have a niece who's about to turn four." And when she was around three and a half, she told my sister, she asked my sister, "Mom, is space real?" My sister was like, "Yeah, it's real." And she was like, "Okay, so there's aliens." And my sister was like, "We don't know, but that makes sense." But like for them at the age where things are so literal, like is this thing real or not real? It is so hard to like acknowledge the imaginal while explaining the difference between the material and the imaginal. And I think we have a hard time with it too sometimes.

Molly: Absolutely. I know and, you know, I'm thinking about sort of the depth
orientation around like how you're supposed to work with young people versus,
you know, adults. And so much of the first half of life and, you know, how you're supposed to work with younger people supposed to is it's actually ego building, you know, You want to give them structure and really something solid to orient to so that they have a strong enough ego to then be able to have a relationship with the unconscious without being overwhelmed by it. It is hard to be on one level then are you supposed to be like, "Well, this is real and and this is not real, you know, like make it really clear or what I do is I'm just like, maybe, you know, because no, is it real? Is it real? I'm like, I think it is, you know, is it real? Maybe.

Xenia: That's so interesting about that structure that you were explaining, the ego building or containment, because it is like, it reminds me of what you said earlier, feeling like you could live in that ethereal place. And I feel like I read when kids are
really, really little like infants, they see trails, and they hear echoes because
it's culture that teaches them what to leave out that the echoes and trails are
real, but they're not useful for survival, or for being acculturated.
And so what you're describing is almost like, if somebody's living in the ethereal
all the time 'cause they're a kid and you're trying to teach them how to live
here, you almost have to present things in this grounded way that's non -native to
their soul so they can be like, okay, that's how that works here. Even though
you're like, but also not. 

Molly: Yes, exactly, I mean, that's like this really funny dance, you know? And what I've been told too is like how important it is to read them like myths and fairy tales when they're young because it gives them like somewhere to ground that really kind of like primal and sometimes really intense energy that they hold 'cause they're like talking about emotions before, like they have such big and raw emotions, at least my son does, maybe not everybody has them as big and raw, but maybe unfiltered, let's say, to kind of land them somewhere so that they can be more objective and they can kind of have a conversation with each other, you know, like the witch and the little boy versus, you know, this really intense, big energy in me. 

Xenia: Wow, that is amazing. I never heard that, but that makes so much sense. It's like expressing the vastness of the internal world through a story. So there's something to hold onto or fill up with their ephemeral emotions so they
can better understand them. That's so cool. I did not know that. 

Molly: Yeah, I love the way that you just reflected that. You have a wonderful way with words. And then when you were you were describing like the learning through emotions, I was like, ah, yes, I love that you said that I love that that came through for you. Because I've spent the last four or five years really deep in the somatic world. And in my personal experience, it's so deeply like for lack of a better term, maybe I shouldn't even term it anything, but like for instance, I had this experience where, you know, I'm in session, I'm chatting, okay, what are you noticing in your body? And I'm like, well, I'm actually like pretty heavy in my chest. And then she's like, okay, maybe allow yourself to register that. And then it was like, oh, I'm like really heavy. And then I'm there for a while and she's like, I'm
aware you could turn into stone. And I was like, I'm a stone. And then she kind of offered, 'cause I was kind of in a pretty deep frozen state. And that was just there right underneath the surface of all the chit chat, you know, like at the beginning, and she came over and, you know, offered a little bit of touch or just proximity. And you know, when you're in that state, you don't really want to let someone stay
there forever. And so she was like, maybe just come out like 5%, you know, and I came out that 5 % and right there is like, I hit this little like node internally. And I just started bawling my eyes out. And it was like, you know, the crying that I experienced in somatic work is not like, there's no, there's no story attached to it. There's no thought attached to it. It is like exorcism crying, you know, it's like something like roiled out of the depths, like, I don't know if it's mine or someone else's or what, but there's just such a deep and intense clearing. And had I just kept chit chatting, you know, about, oh yeah, and then this happened, then oh, like parking or whatever, you know, that would have never had a chance to be witnessed, to be felt, move out, move through, you know. So I just, I'm appreciating that kind of call to learning through emotion and how emotions really live in our bodies. 

Xenia: Yeah, that's so interesting too, because I feel like it goes back to where we began with the feeling of education or sitting still in a chair and how like all kids
before they're in first grade are like, and even after, are pretty wiggly, right? Like they don't really sit still when they're mad or like really ever, like unless they're exhausted, they just move everything through them. And I have found that it's really hard for me to get into my body because I feel like there's so much stored there that I have to still process. And I think that I don't know there's just some beautiful connection between childhood and creativity and the imaginal realm and the emotional realm and just like it's so uniting because we were all kids and kids everywhere Have that unfiltered crying and wiggling and playing. Yeah, and I feel like that's ultimately what we're all trying to bring back into the world so that we can make a world that honors kids and also like us and that part of us that's always there and I maybe it's like embarrassment that prevents us from being in touch with it. 'Cause I mean, you know, I don't know if I'd want to act the way I did when I was four at a restaurant with a new acquaintance. I don't know, maybe it would be fine. But it's like that awareness of like, if I do this, so and so will think that, which is also just fake, 'cause I don't know what people think.
But I do feel like it's that interloper of that need to interpret everything from
outside of us that we're so we're so exposed to in our adolescence that you know I
always say this thing like if nobody likes this why are we doing it? Like there's
so many things where I'm like, nobody wants to do this. It's not one person. And
it's, yeah, it's simple, right? Like, we're all adhering to these bizarre rules that most people are really inconvenienced by and like find really itchy. But yeah, that is so beautiful what you said about the somatic work you do because I think that I experience a lot of emotions witnessing other people's creativity and
it's weird how we have these like siloed fenced in gated environments where like you can cry here and if you want you and cry over there, and you can get really happy or loud. And in this circumstance here, you maybe don't wanna wear too much color, don't move too much. And it's very, when you think about the fact that we all started as children, it's so jarring. Like how many more sets of rules could we possibly learn? Like it's getting out of control. And I kind of feel like that, all these rules are taking up space in us that's supposed to be like where we have, where we feel the stone and come out of the stone or where we have a relationship with our creativity or the mythology that lives in us. But these kind of like weird programs are using so much energy to just to just remember.

Molly: Oh, so true. Yeah, it's like we stored it in there, but it takes effort to kind
of, you know, hold ourselves to this, you know, standard and way of being.

Maybe I'll go here and we'll just see what comes up. So I love your work
and what I see that you put out. and I appreciate your attunement to astrology and
kind of your own intuitive, clear, cognizant channel. And I'm wondering if you have
sort of a take on the current state of the world. I know that's kind of a big
question. 

Xenia: Well, I love, I love a big question.
I am consistently getting the sense from myself and the people I tune into that I
trust that 2025 is the theme, all bets are off. That's the phrase I keep hearing. And I know there's a lot of outer planets moving next year, which means there's a lot of collective shifts occurring all at once that have not happened for a very long time. And I think that a lot of us are going to be confronting where we have outdated belief systems, binaries and pictures where we've made assumptions that Because A is good, B is bad, and I think that a lot of us are going to have to learn how to
navigate an uncertain world just the same way we all were forced to in 2020,
where you did not really have a choice but to start to tune into what was right
for you because all the information saying different things. And so I think that really surprising things could happen that are shocking, but I also think really surprising things could happen that are really, really positive and sort of outside the normal trajectory that our history has been in for the last 50 years or so. Having said that, I think when people are swimming in uncertainty, they tend towards extremism and assumption because it's so scary to just admit we don't know what's going on, that we'd rather hold on to a life raft that
oversimplifies everything than grapple with uncertainty. And so, I think will all be stretched on the level of compassion we can have for ourselves, but especially for other people who are trying to cope in ways that are not super healthy, 'cause we've all done that. But I think that there will be some extreme  versions of this. I've already been seeing it for a pretty long time now, but I feel like people could surprise us. I feel like it's a year of really noticing where you do have agency and playing in that zone as much as you can, 'cause if you are filled up, you have more to give. So that's kind of how I am feeling into 2025.

Molly: Oh, thank you. I really appreciate that.
So my last question that I like to ask everyone is what do you dream of for your
future and the future of the world?

Xenia: I actually think that My dream has a lot to do with what we were talking about today, which is that I really dream of the that hopeful child coming back online and with a lot of respect both for the children of the world and for that aspect of us because I think we have So much creative ability when we feel allowed to be who we actually are that things that people are saying can't be solved will be solved. And I think it actually starts with the respect of the creative child. So yeah, My hope is for that aspect of us to really be supported,
loved, and listened to. 

Molly:  Mm, that's so beautiful. Thank you so much for that. 

Xenia: Of course. 

Molly: Well, thank you so much for spending this time with me and it was just so filled me up so much and I can't wait for other people to tune in and be able to take in your wisdom and words and energy. 

Xenia: Well thank you for having me. I had such a beautiful time here and I really appreciate your questions and your thoughtfulness and your time. Thank you. 


Thank you for listening to the whole paradox podcast Follow us on Instagram at @mollymitchellhardt and @thewholeparadox and join us for our next episode as we continue to remember who we
are together.