Monique Carmela, Gold Coast (2026)

22/01/2026

When things were good, they were really good… And when things were hard… they felt unbearable.

When the relationship felt good, I wanted to stay… When it felt painful or confusing, I wanted to run.

I was so wobbly I couldn’t tell what the “right” choice was. Stay or go. Hold on or let go.

I was terrified of making the wrong decision — of choosing something I’d later regret.

So I froze.

I shut down.
I disconnected.
I went into my head.

I got lost in the stories my mind created.
I made every challenge mean something about me… about him… about us.

And the more meaning I layered on top,
the more trapped and overwhelmed I felt.

Until something shifted.

I found the courage to feel.

✹ To turn toward what was here instead of running from it.
✹ To meet my fears with presence rather than panic.
✹ To lead from truth instead of protection.

And in doing that, I experienced the most profound freedom.

Not because everything suddenly became easy — but because I stopped abandoning myself.

I kept choosing truth.
Again and again.
Even when it felt uncomfortable.

And that devotion led me to the deepest love and connection I’ve ever known.

With myself.
With life.
And within my relationship.

I wasn’t wobbly anymore.
I wasn’t waiting for clarity to magically appear.
I wasn’t stuck on the edge, analysing whether I should stay or go.

I was grounded.
I was present.
I was free.

And from that place, everything changed.

✹ Deep wounds healed.
✹ My relationship transformed.
✹ And the love, connection, and intimacy we now share… it feels truly beyond words.

This is the work of The Embodied Woman.

A 12-month journey of mentorship, community, and embodied guidance —supporting you to build the inner safety, clarity, and self-trust to meet life and relationships from truth, not fear.

It’s not about forcing answers.
It’s about becoming so deeply anchored in yourself that the answers arise naturally.

✨ If you feel yourself in this story — if you’re tired of wobbling, freezing, or living from panic — The Embodied Woman is a space where you don’t have to do this alone.

Comment “EMBODY” or send me a DM, and I’ll share more with you 🤍

📷 Photo: Us in 2019… just a few months in

20/01/2026

You don’t need another program — you need a place to land.

The Embodied Woman is a portal.

A living, breathing space.
A community of sisters walking this path together.

The path that brings you home —
to your body,
your truth,
your deepest self.

While it isn’t about getting somewhere as fast as possible, it will take you places.

It opens doors to experiences you couldn’t have accessed through force or strategy alone.

It awakens the parts of you that have been long forgotten.

It rekindles the love that’s been buried beneath survival and conditioning.

It draws forth your true essence — your light.

This work isn’t about finding the one thing that changes everything.

It’s about cultivating a lifelong inner foundation.

A toolbox you carry with you through every season of life.

One that supports you to create deep inner safety.

To hold yourself through the highs and the lows.

To expand your capacity for more goodness, abundance, and freedom.

To live in alignment with your heart’s true desires — and to know, deeply, that you are worthy and deserving of it all.

It’s about feeling confident and empowered to express your truth and your emotions.

Honouring your sacred yes and your sacred no.

Loving deeply and fully — with your whole being — knowing you can meet whatever arises.

Feeling safe to open.
Safe to receive.
Safe to let love flow abundantly.

This is the remembering.
Living from who you truly are — not who you learned to be.

Step by step.
Layer by layer.

We walk this journey together.

Supporting one another.
Cheering each other on.

Building lifelong friendships as we deepen our connection to ourselves.

As your relationship with yourself flourishes, so do your relationships with others.

Connection deepens.
Intimacy expands.

And you begin to naturally attract people and experiences aligned with your heart’s true desires.

This isn’t a magic pill.
It’s not a shortcut.

It’s devotion that changes everything.

Devotion to continuing to show up — even when it’s hard.

Devotion to allowing yourself to be held and supported as you journey home.

We were never meant to walk this path alone.

The Embodied Woman community is here — through every shift, milestone, challenge, tear, and celebration.

Through all of it.

✨ If you feel the call to join us, comment below or send me a DM. I’d love to welcome you in 🤍

20/01/2026

Today I felt myself get triggered.

That deep wound I’ve carried for as long as I can remember —
the belief that I’m broken…
that things just don’t work for me.

I could feel it echoing through my whole life.

Failing my driver’s licence test again and again because of nerves and fear of failure.
Struggling to get jobs, feeling unchosen over and over.
Boys liking me, but it rarely turning into relationship — always feeling like there was someone better, prettier, more worthy.

Feeling disconnected from my body.
Struggling with intimacy, sexuality, and sensation.
Struggles with money, with business, with things feeling so much harder for me than for others.

Reading other people’s posts online and feeling like a failure.
Feeling behind.
Feeling like I wasn’t cut out for this life.

That familiar loop…
Going all in… then shutting down.
Showing up… then disappearing.
Fight.
Flee.
Freeze.
Again and again.

Today, instead of buying into the story that I’m broken, I chose something different.

I took time and space to go within.
To hold myself with tenderness.
To inquire gently…

What is this revealing to me?
What does this part of me need right now?
How can I hold myself through this — without pressure, without needing to prove anything?

I journalled.
I breathed.
I cried.
I held myself.
I moved my body.
I asked questions — not to fix anything, but simply to be with myself.

And I felt it soften.
I felt it shift.
I felt it land.

Is the wound still there?
Yes.
It may always be.

And that’s okay.

The point isn’t to rid ourselves of our wounds.
The point is to lovingly tend to what arises — no matter how many times it arises.

This wound might be with me for life…
but that doesn’t mean it gets to dictate my life.

In the past, I would have believed the story.
Shut down.
Given up.
Gone into hiding.

Today, I stayed.
I presenced what was here.
I loved myself through it.

So often we think healing has “worked” only if the thing never comes back up.
And when it does, we tell ourselves we’ve failed — that we truly are broken.

But what if healing isn’t about things never rising again?

What if healing is about how we meet ourselves when they do?

Let it rise.
Let it settle.
Don’t make it mean anything about you.

Offer yourself love.
Care.
Softness.
Gentleness.

And witness what happens from that place.

The more we meet ourselves this way,
the more this becomes embodied, lived, natural.

And the shifts ripple outward —
into our relationships,
our work,
our capacity to receive,
our sense of safety in the world.

It’s not about forcing change.
It’s about showing up for ourselves — lovingly, consistently, without judgement.

These baby steps…
these micro practices…
are what actually create the big quantum leaps so many of us are chasing.

And the paradox is —
when we stop chasing the big thing,
and start showing up for ourselves right here…

Everything begins to change.

20/01/2026

It finally happened.
The quantum leap I’d been waiting for… yearning for…
the one that broke me again and again.
The one I quietly wondered might never come.

And here’s the thing about quantum leaps…

They’re not overnight successes.
They’re not the result of doing one thing and suddenly everything appearing.

Despite what the sexy posts might suggest —
the ones that promise instant shifts if you just opt in or buy now.

A quantum leap is a journey.
And your journey will never look like anyone else’s.

We’re not here to walk the same path.
Or follow the same timeline.
Or reach the same milestones at the same pace.

We’re here to gather wisdom.
To embody our own truth.
To claim our own power.

And that path looks different for every single one of us.

I used to read other people’s success stories and wonder…
Why not me?
What’s wrong with me?
What am I doing wrong?

I’d invested in the programs.
Done the work.
Practised the practices.
Read the books.

And yet… nothing seemed to move.

I felt stuck.
Stagnant.
Alone.
Broken.
So deeply disappointed.

It was exhausting trying to hold the vision.
To stay in the “frequency.”
To keep going when nothing seemed to be working.

I shut down.
I spiralled.
I collapsed.

Again and again.

But I got back up every time.
And that’s what truly matters.

Because it’s not about how many times you fall or “fail.”
It’s about how many times you choose to rise again.

Each fall has something to teach you.
Each disappointment invites deeper listening.
Each moment asks you to tend to yourself…
to build inner safety…
to show up — not to prove anything, not to get somewhere —
but simply for you.

To signal to yourself:
I matter.
I’m worthy of showing up for.
I’ve got me — no matter what.

Keep learning.
Keep growing.
Keep taking the next honest step.

Let go of the pressure.
Release the need to prove anything.
Devote yourself to your path and your truth.

That’s what this is really about.
And the rest follows in its own time.

It doesn’t matter if someone else is already “there.”
Or if they got there faster.

What matters is that you honour your journey.

Let others inspire you.
Celebrate their wins.
Cheer them on.

But don’t make their success mean anything about your worth.
Don’t use comparison as evidence that you’re behind or not cut out for it.

If you desire it — it’s meant for you.
And this… this is the adventure of your lifetime.

Every step.
Every fall.
Every rise.

This is the magic of the human experience.

And when your quantum leap happens —
celebrate it.
Revel in it.
Let it be witnessed.

You deserve all the goodness life has to offer.

If you’re honest — where are you being asked to trust your own timing right now, instead of comparing yourself to someone else?

19/01/2026

I felt something I had never felt before —
and it was absolutely divine.

And the truth is…
for a long time, I genuinely believed I was broken.

Sxx was painful.
Uncomfortable.
Loaded with shame, resistance, and fear.

It took so much effort just to get out of my head and into my body.
To relax.
To open.
To receive.

I didn’t feel much — and so many of the things others spoke about felt completely out of reach for me.
A simple org*sm felt like hard work, let alone all the other “wild” experiences people talked about.

I honestly believed it just wasn’t in the cards for me.

There came a point where it got so challenging that I no longer desired any form of intimacy.

It felt too hard.
Too uncomfortable.
Too triggering.
Too emotionally exhausting.

A brief moment of pleasure didn’t feel worth the effort, the work, or the discomfort required to get there.

So I let go.

I stopped trying to be “highly sxxual.”
I stopped chasing an experience I believed wasn’t available to me.
I accepted that maybe I just wasn’t that kind of person — and I made peace with that.

And instead…
I kept doing my inner work.

Not forcing this area.
Not fixing it.
Not making it the focus.

Just tending to myself.
Listening to my body.
Honouring my yes and my no.
Creating safety within myself and my nervous system.

And slowly… things began to shift.

Now I’m feeling sensations I’ve never felt before.
Experiencing mind-blowing sxx.
Feeling desire, passion, and aliveness return in the most natural way.

My pleasure feels alive again.
My body feels responsive.
The numbness has softened.
The shame is no longer debilitating.

Experiences I once believed were impossible for me…
are now happening again and again and again.

It’s absolutely wild.

And it has nothing to do with forcing, performing, or “trying harder.”

This is what becomes possible when we do the inner work.
When we create safety in the body.
When we regulate the nervous system.
When we honour ourselves deeply.
When we prioritise our own care, truth, and pace.

Love deepens.
Connection expands.
Intimacy awakens.

And life opens you to experiences you never thought were possible for you.

This is the work of The Embodied Woman —
not becoming someone else…
but coming home to what was always waiting within you.

A year-long container of mentorship, community, and embodied practices — supporting you to move at your own pace, deeply held every step of the way.

18/01/2026

There’s a reason so many of us can understand our patterns…
and still feel stuck inside our bodies.

We can name our triggers.
We can see where things come from.
We can talk about our childhoods, our relationships, our wounds.

And yet —
our shoulders still brace.
our breath still shortens.
our body still reacts.

Because trauma isn’t only a story in the mind.
It’s often a physical imprint in the body.

The places we clench.
The posture we hold.
The way we collapse, freeze, or push through.

Most of us were never taught emotional hygiene.

We were taught to be palatable.
To be “okay.”
To stay pleasant so we could belong… and be loved.

But when we only allow ourselves to feel some of our emotions,
we don’t become happier —
we become numb.

Emotions aren’t problems to fix.
They’re signals.

Like hunger.
Hunger says: feed me.
Anxiety says: something needs attention.
Sadness says: something needs tenderness.
Rage says: something needs protecting or expressing.

And when we don’t know what to do with what we feel,
we clamp down.
We hold it all together.
We survive.

Not because we’re broken —
but because we were never shown another way.

Here’s what I want you to hear:

✨ Slow is safe
✨ Baby steps count
✨ One minute matters

You don’t need to go deep.
You don’t need to relive the story.
You don’t need to “release everything.”

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is:
• soften your shoulders
• let your weight be held
• breathe
• gently open 5% more

And do that again tomorrow.

This is what regulation actually looks like.
Not force.
Not fixing.
But learning how to meet yourself.

This is the foundation of Grounded In You — a space where we gently rebuild safety in the body, learn how to regulate the nervous system, and develop a relationship with our emotions that doesn’t overwhelm or bypass them.

Grounded In You is for you if:
• you feel chronically overwhelmed or on edge
• your body feels tense, tired, or stuck
• you want to feel safer inside yourself
• you’re new to somatic / nervous system work
• you need foundations, not pressure

This isn’t about becoming someone new.
It’s about learning how to be with who you already are — safely.

💫 If this speaks to you, Grounded In You is open.
Comment GROUNDED and I’ll share more, or DM me if that feels easier.

17/01/2026

I revisited a meditation from my past today…
and wow — it took me right back.

Back to the version of me who first listened to it.
Back to who I was then.
Back to the tenderness, the longing, the not-yet-knowing.

And as I sat with her, something really profound landed.

I’m not someone else now.
I’m not a different woman.

I’m still her.

There’s just… more depth.

It felt like I hadn’t changed myself —
I had gone within myself.

As though I’d descended deeper into my own being, uncovering layers, discovering rooms I didn’t know existed, remembering parts of myself that had been quiet for so long.

And I could feel it in my body.

So often we begin this work because we believe something is wrong with us.

That we’re not enough.
Or too much.
Unworthy.
Broken.
In need of fixing.

But what I’ve come to realise — and what this moment reminded me of so clearly —
is that we were never broken to begin with.

We were buried.

Buried beneath layers of trauma.
Conditioning.
Protection.
Adaptation.

Layers we took on to survive.
To belong.
To stay safe.

And this journey…
isn’t about becoming someone new.

It’s about coming home.

Peeling back the layers.
Softly, gently, in our own time.
Liberating our true essence with each layer that falls away.

It’s about getting to know ourselves again and again —
and falling in love with who we’ve always been…
but had simply forgotten.

There is something so humbling and beautiful about witnessing yourself come back to life.

About realising that everything you were searching for —
the love, the safety, the wholeness, the sense of enoughness —
was never “out there”.

It was always here.
Within you.
Waiting.

Have you ever had a moment where you realised you hadn’t changed — you’d just gone deeper into yourself?

I’d love to hear what this brings up for you 🤍

15/01/2026

“The body remembers” (why talk therapy isn’t always enough)

There’s a reason so many of us can understand our patterns…
and still feel stuck inside them.

Because trauma isn’t only a story in the mind.

It can be a physical imprint:
the bracing in your belly,
the tight hips,
the clenched jaw,
the shoulders that live up by your ears,
the posture that collapses before you even realise you’re unsafe.

Your body learned protection long before your mind had words.

And sometimes… the body is still trying to complete a stress cycle that never got to finish:
• the run you wanted to run
• the “no” you didn’t get to say
• the shaking you didn’t allow
• the tears you swallowed
• the sound you silenced

This is why somatic work can feel so relieving — even when you don’t know why you’re crying, shaking, or sighing.

Because you don’t have to remember.
Your body remembers.
And the body can release without the mind re-living the whole story.

And also… slow is safe.

If you’re new to this, you don’t need to “go deep.”
You don’t need to push your edge.
You don’t need to flood your system.

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is:

hunch → breathe → soften → open
collapse → feel supported → return

Your nervous system learns through gentle pendulation.

If you’ve ever felt like healing is “too much” or “too intense”… this episode will land.

✨ Comment “BODY” and I’ll drop the link, plus I’ll send you a 60 second embodiment practice to support you with this

15/01/2026

Just because you’re hurting right now
doesn’t mean you’ll hurt forever.

Emotions aren’t meant to stay stuck in the body.

They move in waves — we feel them, we express them, they pass.

When something lingers month after month, year after year, it’s often not because it’s “too much”…

but because it hasn’t yet been felt safely.

Anxiety, sadness, fear — they’re not signs that something is wrong with you.

They’re invitations.

To pause.
To breathe.
To build your toolbox.
To learn how to meet what’s arising with support instead of avoidance.

✨ You don’t need one perfect practice.
✨ You get to explore what works for your body.

When an emotion lingers, what do you usually do with it?

14/01/2026

Most of us were never taught emotional hygiene.

Like… we don’t eat one meal and expect to never eat again.
We don’t shower once and expect to be clean forever.
We don’t brush our teeth once and call it done.

But with healing?
So many of us were taught to look for the “one thing” that will fix us.

And what I’m learning (and what we speak about in this episode) is…
regulation + emotional processing is not a one-time event. It’s a way of being.

Emotions are not “problems.”
They’re signals.
Like hunger.

Hunger says: “feed me.”
Anxiety says: “something needs attention.”
Sadness says: “something needs tenderness.”
Rage says: “something needs protecting / truth needs expression.”

And when we don’t know what to do with what we feel… we clamp down.
We hold it all together.
We become rigid.
We become exhausted.

Not because we’re broken.
Because we’ve been trained to survive.

If you’ve been trying to think your way through your triggers…
Maybe your next step isn’t more thinking.

Maybe it’s a slower exhale.
A softening in the shoulders.
A gentle collapse into the earth.
A tiny opening in the chest.

One minute counts.
Baby steps count.
Because your nervous system registers safety through repetition — not force.

If this speaks to you, I shared a powerful conversation on the podcast about how trauma lives in the body and how movement can build emotional intelligence (without pushing or re-traumatising).

✨ Comment “HYGIENE” and I’ll share the episode link + a 60-second practice you can do today.

14/01/2026

We don’t shame hunger.
We respond to it.

So why do we shame anxiety, sadness, or fear?

Emotions are bodily signals — information telling us something needs attention.
They’re not “negative.”
They’re not wrong.
They’re not shameful.

When we try to stay permanently “okay” or palatable,
we flatten our emotional range…
and with it, our aliveness.

Feeling the full spectrum isn’t the problem.
Avoiding it is.

🎧 Podcast snippet from a powerful conversation on somatic healing + emotional intelligence with Manuela Mitevova on The Devotional Woman Podcast

Which emotion do you tend to push away first?

Monique Carmela

22/01/2026

20/01/2026

20/01/2026

20/01/2026

19/01/2026

18/01/2026

17/01/2026

15/01/2026

15/01/2026

14/01/2026

14/01/2026

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