MysticMag meets Sephora who strives to help you unlock your purpose and navigate each chapter of your life. With a background spanning from California to New York, and from India to the Mediterranean, she is an intuitive seeker and explorer. Inspired by the ancient Mayan Goddess Ixchel, Sephora works with others to offer wisdom and guidance from their team of benevolent beings. Whether through tarot, oracle cards, or intuitive reflections, she provides insights in group settings or one-on-one sessions. She offers both online and in person sessions, the latter from The Mystic Rose in Big Bear Lake, California,
Sephora, can you share more about your personal journey and how it has shaped your approach to intuitive guidance and coaching?
The symbol seen on my website (https://www.artsofixchel.com/), a feather looping to connect overlapping circular forms, is one that is also tattooed on my left forearm and visually expresses the connection between my own heart’s journey and what I hope to share in companioning with others through their journeys.
The feather connects with the meaning of my name, Sephora, which derives from the Hebrew word for bird, “Tzipora” (my family of origin is Jewish). From my youngest years, I have felt deeply connected with avian creaturely life. I carry within my spirit the desire to “nest” and build a home from the collected materials of a life spent freely flying through air, while connecting with the natural world and bringing beauty into it. For me, this manifests as a passion for travel, adventure, and expansive academic and experiential education, balanced with a strong, rooted connection to the sense of home that is nurtured from within and without.
The circumstances of my upbringing, which was emotionally tumultuous yet spiritually centered and steeped in various forms of learning, fed these complementary urges.
The evocation of the interweaving circles is twofold: the full moon, and the ouroboros. I follow lunar cycles closely as a practitioner, which I see as closely linked with womanhood. The ouroboros, an image of a snake eating its tail, is a symbol of regeneration and rebirth. In my experience, life flows cyclically. I believe that we traverse many phases of life, liminality, and rebirth over the course of our lifetimes on this Earth, and it is this which the symbol encapsulates.
Similarly in my practice, I describe my purpose as one of “lifecycle midwifery,” as I like to call it. I see myself as a companion and supportive channel for insights that are already very much alive within the energetic field of each person I meet with for an intuitive session of any kind. In my philosophy, these practices are an art, and like all of art, we bring ourselves to the piece in front of us as a mirror. Part of my role is to help clear the mists and hold the energetic field as revelations, meanings, and divinations emerge.
What inspired you to incorporate various modalities such as tarot, oracle cards, and somatic awareness into your practice?
I believe that in the same way our physical bodies are an ecosystem, so too are our spiritual, emotional, psychological, and subtle bodies, each of which are informed by one another. Each of these modalities, I believe, are channels of communication from our Guides, Angels, Ancestors, and Inner Knowing—our unique Divine Spark—and together help surface the larger story, meaning, or insight that is waiting to emerge.
Together, they can help offer a broader context for what is being communicated, it’s meaning and impact, and how that material can be productively and meaningfully integrated to serve as a source of creative and healing energy.
Could you explain the significance of the Goddess Ixchel in your work and how ancient Mayan culture influences your practice?
Growing up in Los Angeles, I was nurtured through my formative years in multi-cultural households and contexts with an array of religious and mythological influences. In particular, the house of my father and stepmother, whose family is originally from Mexico, was heavily intertwined with iconography and cultural influences stemming from across Latin America.
As I grew in my experience with various healing modalities and deepened my own intuitive practice, I began to participate in shamanic healing work and cacao ceremonies and found these to be a deeply resonant form of healing practice. Connecting with the Cacao Goddess opened many portals of insight and healing for me; these ceremonies helped me understand my own purpose as practitioner of the healing arts.
At one point, while I was still evolving toward embracing my path as a practitioner, a shamanic healer that I worked with shared an intuition about the influence of the Goddess Ixchel as an inspiration and light as I charted my own course. As I became more familiar with Ixchel, I found much that resonated with my own approach: the link with the moon (as I described above), healing, and a deep connection with the womb space, life, and cycles of endings and rebirth.
To me, the term “Arts of Ixchel” encapsulates these various threads and expresses my reverence for the expansive, interconnected weave of potencies that Ixchel represents as we embark on healing journeys as individuals and as a collective.
I am deeply humbled to have been inspired on my path by the wisdom and ritual traditions of ancient Mayan culture, and the Goddess Ixchel in particular, as I strive to do justice to this sacred heritage through my work as an intuitive and healing arts practitioner.
How do you tailor your sessions to meet the unique needs and goals of each individual client?
My strong belief is that each and every human on this Earth is gifted with an intuitive compass, and also that sometimes it is through companionship in a safe and trusting space that we are empowered to most deeply connect with the insights offered by that compass.
In that sense, I also consider each person I meet with a client-partner, because within the space of the container, we are partners on the journey.
My utmost priority in my practice is to establish just such a container, by seeking permission to listen and connect deeply with each client-partner’s energetic field and guiding sources of wisdom, whether Angels, Ancestors, Spirit Guides, or all and more. Thus, in all sessions, we begin by establishing holistic, somatic resonance, and then open the space to share and express mutual feedback about any intuitive insights I have received, or particular areas of inquiry that have been particularly active within the client-partner’s consciousness.
Throughout each session, I also feel that verbal, expressive, and intuitive feedback is vital so that we can flow together, ensuring that each client-partner receives the most nourishment for their needs at the time and comes away from the session with a greater sense of clarity, balance, and most importantly, connection with their inner compass.
What do you hope clients will gain or experience after working with you, whether it’s through individual sessions or ongoing coaching?
The great teacher Ram Dass, who is also a profound source of inspiration to me, has a beautiful quote, which is that “we are all just walking each other home.” In my practice, I understand these words as holistically referential to the universe that lives within the body, heart, soul, spirit, the cosmos, and the natural world around us.
I interpret these words in a spirit of mutuality, which is to say, within an experience of coming together for a session, I feel my purpose is to facilitate my client-partner’s awareness of this connection with their inner home as an everlasting point of connection with the Divine Spark that I mentioned earlier, and serves as an eternal link across the universes of body/heart/soul/spirit/cosmos/nature. On this path together, I also feel grateful and humbled to get to connect with my own sense of purpose in this lifetime, which means that each client-partner is walking me home, as well.
In that way, I hope each client-partner experiences a deep sense of belonging in their own journey, partnership on the path, and attunement to the wisdom of their own hearts leading them home.
If you would like to find out more about Arts of Ixchel, please visit https://www.artsofixchel.com/
