Meet Maya Sol Dansie with CanvasRebel
* An article by CanvasRebel with Maya Sol
Meet Maya Sol Dansie
We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Maya Sol Dansie a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Maya Sol , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
In my own lived experience as a 1st generation, Spanish-speaking Mujer in Boulder County, I experienced a huge gap in services, visibility, and experiences that were relevant to my identity. This was true in community events, leadership positions, mental health & therapeutic services that considered Indigenous practices; inclusion to my Spanish-speaking self, and overall access to resources. I have I lived in the ‘in-between space’, being told to “check your activism at the door.”
As I grew, I learned I wasn’t alone in my experience and desire for change, access and representation in my community were shared and we found and cultivated a strong, intergenerational community committed to creating new systems built on authentic cultural identity formation, social and institutional change. I believe that mental healing and authentic identity formation include engaging in social justice. Mayamotion Healing is my response.
Maya Sol , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Hola mi Gente! Yo Soy Maya Sol. Before I share more about myself, I want to begin with a few words of gratitude. I am honored to be sharing my story from the beautiful lands of the Ute, Cheyenne, and the Arapaho Peoples in what is now known as Boulder, CO. As I share this, I encourage you, the reader, to not only acknowledge the lands you are reading this from but also to be curious of how you cultivate connection and honoring the original Indigenous care takers of the land and to connect with your local Indigenous led community organizations. It is from honoring my ancestors that I am able to express who I am and what I do, because little of who I am comes only from me, I have been created from the courage and wisdom of my community and of my ancestors before me. I give thanks for the opportunity to continue their prayers and be a good ancestor in the making. I will express myself from my most authentic voice that includes English, Spanish, and Spanglish – My Spanglish is intentional and a piece of my resilience, especially in institutional and academic spaces. Thank you for listening to my story.
I am a Xicana Mujer & founder of Mayamotion Healing offering Cultural Mental Health Therapy & Transformative Equity Consulting. I am an activist, dancer, educator, and licensed clinical social worker dedicated to raising awareness and political consciousness, cultural healing, and being in power with our community. I was born into the understanding that it is my matriarchal responsibility, como hija of Mexican parents and activists, to continue their efforts and to experience community as my family and that our work comes with honor, cariño, and responsibility.
At Mayamotion Healing, we are catalysts for change. Our mission is to disrupt the status quo and create a world where diversity, equity, and inclusion are not just buzzwords, but a lived reality. We understand that the journey to a more inclusive and equitable society requires a bold and unapologetic approach. We’re here to speak truth to power and challenge the norms that have held us back for far too long. Our services are not rooted in the ordinary; they’re designed to be extraordinary. We provide guidance that is as compassionate as it is courageous. We take pride in our holistic approach, recognizing that true change starts from within – mind, body, soul, and community.
Outside my practice, I have worked in both the community and government sectors and directed a national award-winning program in Public Health aimed to promote reproductive justice, mental health, and racial justice. As a first generation in the U.S. mujer and a cultural broker with a mixed immigration status family, I am dedicated towards increasing culturally grounded mental health access in Boulder County with an emphasis on Spanish-speaking and immigrant communities. I have a long history in addressing disparities within the community with an intersectional lens and inclusion for LGBTQ2S and Communities of Color. I graduated from the University of Denver with a Master’s in Social Work with Clinical Mental Health & Global Practice and Sustainability concentrations and I am proud of my therapeutic offerings specifically to our youth, undoc/daca-mented and monolingual Spanish-speakers.
I am deeply grateful to my mentors, Comadres, Aunties y Compañeras who support my growth and development and inspire me to be brave and balance activism with self, soul, and community care. I am committed to healing through canto, baile, danza, cultura and finding time with familia, my love, and community.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Growing up with activist parents, I was deeply connected in community grassroots efforts and the non-profit realm which came as a suprise when my professional journey led me through working within the government sector, in predominantly white institiutions. During my time in these spaces, I was advised and pressured to ‘pick a lane’ between either direct service or systems level work – this felt so disjointed and impossible to me at the time… Burnout and stress was my body’s response to an environment that centered the colonial and capitalist ideology. I was not alone in this constant struggle, in fact many of my collegues, perhaps even you, found themselves in the constant struggle of fighting for change in a system designed to suffocate transformation and uphold oppressive mechanisms. These sterile models resulted in further harm, disconnecting individuals from collective community and separated culture from interventions for healing.
I began to explore what it would look like to design my life, not just my profession, but my purpose, belonging, connection to land and being in service with a totality-oriented focus. It was in my community, with Indigenous, Brown and Black relatives that honored holistic and integrative ways and teachings that it became clear that I had to take the risk (and it is a huge risk blended with privilege) to establish Mayamotion Healing, a space that holds both individual and collective-systems level transformation aimed towards liberation – of the white supremaist and colonial strucutres that have us all in dis-ease.
Boulder often is regarded as the ‘bubble’ with a community that claims itself to be invested in spirituality, community, and harmony. The reality is that injustice and racism are alive and well in our community. Contrary to much belief- we indeed have a diverse community here, only that access, visibility, and representation to our communities of Color has been marginalized for far too long. Many of the obstacles I have faced in my work and personal lived experience are rooted in systemic injustice and my privileges of race, education, and resources have allowed me to adapt to these very systems. My vision is that our communities not only create collective awareness of how these systems have perpetually failed us but to create new ways of operating that are inclusive and created by and for the community.
Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?
Co-creating strategies has been one of the my favorite things to do with others… Everything from professional development to community engagement, strategizing has come naturally and necessary when current systems fall short of meeting needs. Decolonizing has become an ongoing, lifelong, generational practice and a strategy that is weaved within the work in Mayamotion Healing. We are guided by decolonial therapeutic approaches to offer healing and transformative mental health wellbeing, invoking the mind, body, spirit, community. Our decolonizing therapy approach seeks to challenge and dismantle colonial legacies embedded in traditional therapeutic practices. We prioritize cultural humility, respect Indigenous knowledge, and work collaboratively with our clients.
By way of honoring our client’s “symptoms” as intellegent ways they have responded to an unjust and unhealthy environment – we have opened a reciprocal truthtelling space to process the root causes for unwellness. We are grateful to the lineage of community, leaders, advocates, Elders, and Spiritual Aunties y Tios who have paved the way for this work, in protecting and providing a remembering to who we are.
*This article is credited to CanvasRebel