Danni
Danielle is a 29-year-old Kiwi from a NZ-European family. She was born in Palmerston North. After spending part of her childhood in Tasmania, Danielle and her family returned to New Zealand - moving to Hamilton while she was still young. A lover of food and nutrition, she studied at Massey University, Palmerston North, graduating with a Bachelor’s Degree in Nutritional Science. Danielle now lives in Hamilton where she works as a nutritionist and angelic frequency healer.
A daily wellness go-to of mine is meditation, with exercises for grounding and being a part of nature. I meditate for anywhere from five minutes to an hour each day, and usually sit on my healing chair surrounded by my crystals. This sets a nice and safe atmosphere, so my mind can relax into the space for meditation.
Meditation gives me the opportunity to develop an understanding of self, to check in with where I’m at in my thoughts and emotions. “What needs to be healed? What needs to be forgiven? What am I feeling today?”
Through meditation, I’ve been able to grow my emotional awareness, and now know how to acknowledge and release troubling emotions before they can mull around inside my mind.
One of the most powerful things I’ve learnt to do is to forgive on a deep level, so that I can be at peace on my mental, emotional and spiritual levels.
Practising how to love myself and connect are really important to me. I’ve put a lot of time and energy into learning and strengthening these areas.
I see good emotional awareness as having the tools to manage, transform and reframe situations in my life for the better, especially the ones that aren’t so great. First, it’s about being aware of the emotions I might be experiencing at a given moment. The next step is noticing how they are making me feel; how have I reacted to what’s happened? And lastly, it’s having the tools to transform what I’m feeling from lower thoughts and emotions to higher ones; to turn lower energies like anxiety, victim consciousness or fear, into higher energies like peace, love and harmony. It seems obvious but I find that in reality, it’s easier said than done. My daily meditative practice helps me keep good emotional awareness, so I can move forward with this higher perspective.
For me, my higher perspective comes from an understanding that there are other energies and beings in the universe, beyond those we can physically sense ourselves. Having a spiritual focus nurtures my connection with my spiritual guides and angelic energies of love. It has been quite a thought changer in how I see life, and in how I am able to seek higher guidance to create greater flow in my life.
I think it’s understandable that people out there who are in a similar boat could be afraid to speak about spirituality. It’s a bit like coming out of a closet - but a spiritual one.
I see intuition as a big part of developing higher guidance. When I’m working with my intuition and listening to the messages, I’m tuning in to my higher self, my spirit. I believe working alongside my soul self are higher dimensions of consciousness that work with spirit guides and angels. Anybody can tap into these beautiful higher love systems within themselves, if they desire it. How I receive the higher guidance from my guides determines how I am directed. So I know there’s a lot of self-development that needs to happen for me to understand the higher guidance. Guidance comes to me in different ways: it can be through songs, it can be a thought while driving along, or through posters and pictures. I let myself be open to receiving guidance from higher love and peace dimensions, and with work I’ve done on developing my intuition, I’m now more ready to receive it when it comes.
I wasn’t always on the spiritual path. However, the story of how it began is extraordinary.
In fact, as a teenager I had an intense “type-A”, high-achiever mindset. My way of seeing the world was from a scientific point of view, and I always studied a lot! Through academics and sport, I was focused totally on improving the mental and physical sides of myself, and ended up neglecting everything else. My spiritual awakening - which was a massive turning point in my life - happened in my early to mid-20s. At the time, I’d been having experiences that weren’t making sense to me. Inside, a desire to understand more about life, the purpose of it, and why I was even here had slowly been building. After a series of synchronistic events, I found out about a lady in Whakatane who is a spiritual healer, medium and channel. Her name is Suzanna Maria Emmanuel. So I decided to travel down to meet her. I have no explanation other than going to see her just felt right. She is the most lovely, beautiful lady I’d say I’ve ever met, and she had a huge positive effect on my life.
Going to my first visit to a healing with her in 2013, I felt a mixture of nervousness and excitement. During the healing session she stood in front of me and held her arms out. Then I could feel all the emotion that I'd been holding in for years came out all at once. Out of absolutely nowhere, I burst into tears. It was completely uncontrollable, in a good way. There was a big release and I was free of many emotions that had been weighing me down. I couldn’t deny what I was experiencing. It was so real.
I later learned that as she is a channel, the healing frequencies she brought through for me were from angelic spaces. This was all very new to me, but it resonated so much. I thought there had to be more to life and existence than what I’d yet discovered. It got more interesting as then she explained that I had the gift of healing. I thought "Well, what do you mean?" I assumed she was referring to my work as a nutritionist, but that was far from what she meant.
It was like this whole new magical world that lay dormant inside me had been opened up for me to discover and investigate. I couldn’t turn a blind eye to it and I wouldn’t change a thing.
It was from that point I decided I wanted to start attending workshops with Suzanna, alongside others who felt this path resonated. One of those workshops I attended in 2015, was called the Divine Pineal Gland Activations of Caeayaron, which is still current these days. These workshops have taught me mental, emotional and spiritual tools such as: grounding, forgiveness, meditation, healing, self awareness, understanding a higher perspective of situations and the lessons from them, and developing the spiritual connection I now have to my higher self and higher guidance. I now use these great blessings to stay healthy and create my life in a peaceful way that flows with more ease.
The beautiful part I found about these workshops was that all the teachings and tools were gifted to me, with the freedom of choice and it is my responsibility to use them to heal my life. I’m personally always so grateful for these tools and practices. They have become embedded in my everyday life. And the beauty is that it’s all still evolving. I’m learning more and more about my spiritual gifts and I’ve discovered my greater sense of purpose: helping others - and the planet - to heal.
I’m constantly asking for guidance and signs from my higher soul self when there are situations that I need help with, or decisions that need to be made. Receiving answers, signs and confirmation is the most magical thing. The evidence flows into your physical life and everything becomes more peaceful. And when I ask for guidance, my higher self and higher guidance team definitely give it! If I’m open to it, it comes in floods! Fear and anxiety are replaced by peace, security and trust. And what reassures my faith in my path. I now know to trust in myself, and that what I am receiving is my truth. I know within myself that the discoveries I have made and the path that was already within me is the one that I am supposed to be on.
From my observations, there are some ideas out there that spirituality is tied with crazy people, or with religion or with broomsticks, but it’s none of that. I believe it’s about discovering greater truth - w whatever resonates within the heart. It's about discovering greater purpose, what a person can manifest for themselves and bringing greater healing to self, others and the planet. For me, I knew I had been missing something. That’s why I had been so depressed even though really I had a good life and was brought up in a good family. The deeper fulfilment that I found when I discovered my spiritual journey was like finding the piece of missing treasure within myself and my life.
I love to move, so physical wellness is important in my routine too. It doesn’t need to be strenuous exercise, but if I don’t do something as simple as stretching or going for a walk daily, I get agitated. Movement makes me feel like my energy is free to flow. I love mixing up my physical activity, including walking, hiking, dancing, gym work and stretching.
Eating well is a must for my health and wellness. I can’t go a day without fruits and vegetables. I can feel how nourishing they are for my cells as soon as I eat them. I chose to be vegetarian (which I really love) as I felt my body changing and food like meat, fish and chicken now messes with my digestive system and makes me nauseous.
I'm not locked into any one diet, meaning I don’t do high carb or low carb diets, or fat or protein focused diets. I keep a balanced diet and always check in with my body as to how I’m feeling and which healthy foods I’m drawn to for that day. For example, one day I may really feel like broccoli, other days I could happily leave it for something lighter on the digestive system like spinach. As a nutritionist, I feel blessed that I have an understanding of how to blend my scientific nutritional knowledge with tuning into myself intuitively to see what my body needs through my increased awareness and spiritual growth.
Nature is a peaceful energy. Nature is healing. When I’m around many people for long periods of time, and there's a lot of energy (and since I’m sensitive to energy), nature provides a peaceful energy that I can step into if I become overwhelmed. It helps me come back into myself.
I do what I need physically, through diet, exercise and sleeping well. But the real core is the spiritual work that I do. From that spiritual work really stems the benefits of also assisting mental and emotional healing as well. The key tool for my mental wellbeing is definitely to be grounded. Being grounded helps me feel centred, focused, and calm. Another key tool I learnt at the activation workshops through Suzanna was protecting my energy. In the same way that we look after and monitor our physical things, our money and possessions, I look after and monitor my energy. The idea of protecting my energy is to stop it from being drained unnecessarily.
Forgiveness is also a huge practice on my list of tools I received at the workshops. Knowing how to truly forgive is something I have come to understand. In itself, forgiveness is a very powerful energy-healing tool that helps to let go of pain I might be holding on to, or thoughts that are not so great. In these moments I take on the role of an observer to my thoughts, to see the greater purpose of the situation taking place and what I am learning, then I forgive it all, so then I can come back to peace and joy more quickly.
I see healing as being like an onion - it has layers. Tools, like forgiveness, give me the ability to access those deeper layers so that I can deal with things better when an upsetting situation occurs. Rather than being stuck in the emotions or mental issues for months or longer, I can process things in a healthy way and move forward, and spend less time dwelling on the negatives. For me, this is again where I have built massive trust in this road less travelled; it really has been a life changer!
I believe a person’s spiritual self is a greater being than their physical self can ever be. And as far as I’m concerned, if I’m not in touch with that at all, then of course I’m going to feel incomplete, and have a sense of searching.
Being in touch with myself and grounding into my spiritual self fills in that gap, and forms that base upon which I can build a stable, peaceful and love-filled life.
If it was possible to send a note back to yourself when you needed the most help, what would you write?
Danielle experienced depression between the ages of 15 and 23. The death of two of her friends between the ages of 15 and 17, added to the extreme academic pressure of her chosen course at University.
How you felt as a result?
Lost - thinking that this couldn't be all there was to life.
Misunderstood
Confused
Sad
Did you take prescribed medication?
No
Were there any triggers that exacerbated your feelings?
Usually when experiencing any sort of emotional pain, such as people not being nice, or loss. Also whenever I was experiencing a lot of mental pressure such as tight deadlines, too much on my plate or my own high expectations of myself; as well as if I didn’t achieve something (in my mind at the time “failed”), then it could sometimes end up in a spiral of lack of self-worth.
Was there a turning point when things started to get better?
Yes - at 23 years old I had my spiritual awakening. A significant part of this was visiting a healer in Whakatane. My curiosity around spirituality grew, and I came to make it a priority in my life.