Today we’d like to introduce you to Mariya Javed-Payne, Greg Payne
Mariya Javed-Payne, Greg Payne, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Greg and I actually knew each other in junior high school in Lawrence, KS. We were on the same track team! I moved to Minnesota soon after high school in 2008 and Greg’s comment on one of my Facebook posts kickstarted a connection between the two of us again. We hadn’t spoken in 16 years! We decided to meet up as friends for a trip to Costa Rica, and that’s when we realized we had a much stronger connection.
Fate would have it though that we would ignite a long-lost soul connection. We’d both been learning about secure relationships, personal emotional healing, the esoteric, and being good stewards to Mother Earth and our fellow human siblings ever since last seeing each other in junior high. Our beautiful reconnection is rooted in healing ourselves and sharing the wisdom to do the same with others.
The birth of our businesses is the culmination of years of searching for meaning, healing, and wellness in a world that is traversing enormous change. Mariya, born in India and having moved to several different countries as a child before landing in the United States, struggled significantly to adjust to US culture. As an immigrant, she experienced childhood trauma, depression, anxiety, PTSD, and an 8-year battle with opioid and crack cocaine addiction. In 2010, she finally entered sobriety and frankly, the real healing of wounds from the past has been a process of death and rebirth like no other. It is an ongoing process.
Through these experiences, she navigated both the Western medical model and numerous holistic, integrative modalities to seek peace. Greg survived several significant losses in his own life, including losing his mother in 2017 from cancer. He transmuted his suffering by seeking greater self-awareness and personal wisdom for the past two decades, studying Reiki, channeling, and other healing modalities as a young adult and beyond.
When our paths finally converged, we had much to share and exchange. It was palpable to us both that we shared a deeply held mission to create and share sacred spaces for healing.
Mariya started her first company, Awaken Consulting Services in 2020. Awaken Consulting Services provides a plethora of trauma and addiction healing services, including trauma therapy intensives, somatic therapies like Brainspotting, psychedelic-assisted therapy with ketamine and cannabis, consultation services for providers, speaking engagements, and Brainspotting training for professionals worldwide. Through ACS, Mariya has trained thousands of healers worldwide and guided hundreds of clients back to their innermost knowing. She has served the mental health profession for 14 years in a variety of settings and leadership roles, spearheading somatic-based therapy, ancestral healing, and heart-based approaches that reach beyond the limited Western lens of mental illness.
After establishing Awaken Consulting Services, Mariya and Greg decided to follow our innermost spiritual callings, and officially launched Awakened Roots in March of 2024 as a sanctuary for healing that provides holistic healing services like Reiki, emotional release breathwork, kambo (an Amazonian folk medicine), one-on-one coaching, and shamanic healing services.
Awakened Roots blends many integrative practices, and has brought integration and a sense of completeness to our long-term goals to heal mental and emotional suffering. Our mission emphasizes connection and guiding individuals to recognize the medicine within as the healing we need. Sometimes we just need someone to reflect with us and hold us while we reconnect to the immense power within.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Ha! Having a business is like having a child. We view our business as a reflection of ourselves – in both the beauty and the areas where we need to grow. Creating not one, but two entities has required massive commitment, dedication, faith, and teamwork. It has forced us to face the many fears our egos hold- you know, the “I’m not good enough” or “Is anyone even going to show up?”. It’s also a very interesting nuance to open a business with your spouse. Working together has required us to strengthen our bond even more, and of course, this has been tested. When the days are difficult, we come back to the root- our love for one another, our shared desire to bring good into the world, and to make ample space for our gifts to be blended. Greg and I are very different- he is like water, I am like earth. We balance each other and bring different energies into the work we do. We are in constant inquiry with ourselves and of the business so we can create a space that holds the sanctity and essence of healing continuously.
Awakened Roots has pushed us to show up in front of people and highlighted the type of leadership we want to embody – non-hierarchical, based in sovereignty for all, and rooted in compassion. It’s pushed us to move beyond being small because being small doesn’t help anyone.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Awakened Roots offers healing services focused on emotional release breathwork, group workshops, Reiki and energy healing, intuitive and shamanic healing, as well as an Amazonian frog medicine called kambo. We are learning additional modalities and skills and will continue to add them into our repertoire. We host monthly virtual and in person breathwork experiences. We aspire to teach communities about the power of the breath and when used in specific ways, how it can lead to profound insights and releasing of trauma, stuckness, and all that which does not serve us.
Awaken Consulting Services is Mariya’s private therapy practice where she offers trauma and addiction therapy intensives (meaning she doesn’t do hourly therapy and instead sees clients for 4-6 hours a day upwards of 5 days). Mariya specializes in treating complex PTSD and addictions. She also utilizes psychedelic medicines such as cannabis and ketamine, and is trained to facilitate other psychedelics once they become legal. She is a Certified Brainspotting Therapist and International Trainer and offers monthly Brainspotting trainings worldwide, consultation, speaking engagements on the topics of trauma, somatic approaches to healing, spirituality, psychedelics, and ancestral healing. She has trained thousands of people in Brainspotting over the last 3 years and has served hundreds to find relief from trauma and compulsive behaviors in her private practice.
The core essence of both of our businesses is depth, trust, and humility. Our goal is to create spaces where individuals feel safe enough to drop their guards and explore deep within.
Compassion, fearlessness, and unconditional love are our mantras. Having gone through our own profound healing journeys (we’re always going to be healing), we’ve been there. Clients often comment that they’ve never felt so held, seen, and supported in their entire lives. We are able to meet people exactly as they are and ground in the belief that we as beings are designed to heal.
Our bodies are stores of wisdom and abilities, and when we’re guided back to this wisdom, our truth appears. We are going beyond therapies that center only on the mind like talk therapy to include the body, the mind, the spirit, as well as ancestral practices that connect us with the Earth and our true nature.
Some highlights:
Awaken Consulting Services:
Mariya has a waitlist of 40 plus people for her private practice. She is the upcoming keynote at the Minnesota Counseling Association annual conference. She’s been invited to be a presenter at the Trauma Wisdom Circle and she has spoken at numerous conferences on trauma work and somatic healing.
Awakened Roots:
Currently hosting monthly breathwork experiences at the Yoga Sanctuary in Minneapolis in addition to monthly group breathwork healings online. So far, all of our events have been near sold out and we are hoping to continue spreading the message about breathwork. Why? Because breath is always accessible, and everyone ought to know that the answers they need live within their life force, the breath.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
Our best advice for those just starting out is to keep your vision clear in your mind as you make steady progress from day to day. Some days you’ll feel very accomplished while on others you’ll feel like nothing is going according to your carefully laid plans. We recommend a stance of patience in the early days of starting a business – with dreams, goals, and especially with yourself while you persistently take the next best positive steps to grow your business.
Remember that each step along the way plants small seeds that will ultimately grow into mighty trees that can sustain themselves and keep your business thriving. Pay attention to which strategies produce results and which strategies simply don’t- having a business is a powerful reflection of the creative act – taking something formless and bringing it into form. Steadily complete the inner and outer work to keep your enterprise on course.
Pricing:
- Breathwork: $160 for a 75 minute long session, Group Breathwork is $100 per 3 hours and $40 for virtual 90 minute workshop..
- Brainspotting: $160 for 1 hour long session.
- Reiki: $100 for a 1-hour session
- Transformational Life Coaching/Brainspotting: $160 for 1 hour long session.
- Kambo- $160 per 2 hour session
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.awakened-roots.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/awakenedroots_healing
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61561650420493
- Other: https://www.awakenconsultingservices.com
