The Beauty of Wings: An Interview with Alexandra Mika

1014

Mika-Alex-wideSome people are just too sensitive to the pain and misery of life on Earth. Alexandra Mika is one such person. She endured an excruciatingly painful childhood of bullying, exclusion and asthma, followed by years filled with anorexia, pneumonia, panic and suffocation to near death. Her healing process led her to journal her experiences, and those writings became her book The Beauty of Wings: A True Story of Transformation from Near Death to Unconditional Love.

The Twin Cities-based author is a keynote speaker at the Minneapolis Psychic & Healing Symposium, which returns on Saturday, Feb. 27, to the Earle Brown Heritage Center in Brooklyn Park. Alexandra Mika will present “Find the Beauty of Your Wings” at 11 a.m. Saturday. She will share messages from her new book, a true story of inner transformation, and offer techniques to awaken the heart chakra and free yourself from addictions, pain, trauma and disease. Admission is $19 in advance and $24 at the door.

Pia Smith Orleane and Cullen Baird Smith, authors of Conversations With Laarkmaa: Remembering Who We Are and The Return of the Feminine, said this about Alexandra’s book: “The Beauty of Wings is the story of an incredible journey of inner awakening, a story concerned with the task of learning to love oneself. This remarkable young woman has achieved what we would call ‘speaking oneself into being’ through aligning her inner and outer speech with positive thinking and removing herself from the toxicity of negative thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about her experience.”

Alexandra Mika is a registered nurse, Reiki Master, certified yoga instructor and artist who enjoys guiding people towards well-being, joy, unconditional love, and freedom. She spends her free time with nature and animals. Speaking softly, and with great intention, Alexandra shared with The Edge about her childhood, her healing process and what she hopes to share with others at the Psychic & Healing Symposium.

Your book is the story of your healing journey. When did the pain begin for you in your childhood?
Alexandra Mika: It started as early as I can remember, feeling rejected instead of loved. Feeling criticized and judged instead of embraced. I would say around ages 3 or 4; I can remember that.

So, that came from your parents?
AM: I grew up with a mother who was very critical and very judgmental and did not know how to embrace or love, and a father who really wasn’t present, who was really out of the picture — and when he was around, he was really angry. As far as I can remember, I would run to my room and cry and not feel safe. My brother bullied me in a lot of ways and tormented me.

At times I wanted to run away from home. At times I even wondered, did I come from them? Is this my place in the world? My parents really did not have a lot of expectations for their kids in the home. My brother was the older one, and so he was put on a pedestal. He was popular in school, and my mom viewed him as the golden child. I was a bit different. I was sensitive. I talked about life after death at a really early age.

I think my parents did the very best they could with what they knew — and what they knew was to try to change me, put me into a box and to get me to be more like the other kids, or to be more like my brother. Internally I felt like, “Oh, there must be something wrong with me then.” And, so, from the earliest age I just remember feeling like I was not good enough. That’s when I turned to nature and animals, because that’s where I found my sense of belonging. Ultimately, through the processes of healing, I found that love is within, it’s really not without.

As a girl, what type of things did you do in nature to escape all the issues in your family?
AM: I always wanted to be outside. I played on the swing set, and I started riding horses at the age of 5. By age 8, I was in horseback riding lessons. From a very early age, I thought, “I’ve got to be around horses.” I had a baby-sitter who rode horses and right away, I was like, “I’ve got to do this.” She introduced me to the horse world and my parents allowed me to take lessons.

I went to the barn as often as I could. Because a lot of bullying happened to me in school, I remember being at the barn and wrapping my arms around the horses, talking to them, and crying, and connecting with them. My family and my school weren’t places of safety and love, but it was instantly with the horses. All summer long, my baby-sitter and I would spend our days riding on trails. When I got older, I became involved with a camp and we would go backpacking.

And your height became a challenge for you as you got older.
AM: Yeah, it did. I grew really quickly, so by the time I was in sixth grade I was six feet tall. I became a quick target for bullies because of my height. It was easy for bullies to bully me, because I was very sensitive and very sweet and didn’t say anything back. I internalized all of it, thinking, “There must be something terribly wrong with me. Everybody at school is saying this. My family is saying this. They were thinking I should be more like my brother.”

Did you ever think of ending your own life?
AM: Yeah, there were moments of that, with the pain of feeling rejected in the family, feeling rejected at school and feeling so alone and isolated and not understood and not embraced. My parents just did not have that ability at all. They saw the torment happening in school and they saw what was happening with my sensitivity, so they just tried to change me — and that made me feel even more like there was something really wrong with me. I felt deep pain, and I did have moments of, “I don’t know that I can go on.” But there was always something deeper pulling me to continue on the journey. There was always something deeper — a soul purpose — that always overrode those thoughts.

How did your reaction to your early experiences in life manifest in your adult years? Did it continue after you got out of high school?
AM: Yeah, it continued into my twenties. It manifested in the form of anorexia, and it continued in my relationships with men. I still had the feeling that there was something wrong with me and the feeling of rejection from my mother and father. My mother was very controlling, one of those helicopter parents who was very critical.

I ended up trying to fix myself, thinking that if I was small enough or if I was a good enough runner or if I somehow changed myself, these feelings of not being okay would go away. That resulted in a form of anorexia — and it was playing havoc with my health. It really wasn’t until I started waking up to the fact that I had anorexia, and waking up to what happened in my childhood, that the healing started to happen so I could change my world.

What led you to that point?
AM: The pneumonia. When I was 25, I was struck with pneumonia. By that time, I had lost touch with the horses from my early days, because I had gone off to college and I got in touch with running on the trails. That was my outlet and escape from everything. I spent any free moments I could running on the trails. When I got pneumonia, I tried to run and I couldn’t. Then my childhood asthma came back. I tried to run again, because at this point running was my only source of light in the darkness. The thought of not running — not being able to move outside in nature — was excruciatingly painful. But I had to stop running. That was my turning point.

I got to the point where I couldn’t even walk because the pneumonia and asthma became so severe — and then my anorexia really kicked up because I wasn’t able to run and deal with the darkness. I knew something was wrong with me, and all of those things became heightened all at once. That was when I had to look at what was happening. My bodily condition forced me to slow down. I had to sit with my feelings, and I had to stay and look at what had happened in my life up until the age of 25. I couldn’t run away from them anymore. That was really the catalyst for me to start to do the inner work, to change what was happening in my world because I had no other choice.

Was there a person or a specific direction you turned to to do that?
AM: I met Dr. Katherine through a friend at work. She is a woman who channels angels and ascended masters. At that time, I was in a very dark place, not being able to run, or walk, very well — or breathe. My life really had taken a radical turn. I called this woman and I asked her what was happening to me.

She told me what I was going through was for a very specific purpose, that I was here to awaken to my soul and I was here to heal and I was a healer and a teacher. She started to talk to me about what happened in my childhood. She said I was here to learn about love, that I didn’t have any of that in my childhood and part of my process was the journey to learn that. She talked to me about what was happening with my lungs and that what I was experiencing was the grief in my childhood.

She gave me tools to start healing. She told me to start utilizing the self-love journal. Talking to this woman was a radical shift for me. I talked to her every month for about a year — a lot about my soul purpose, about healing, about energy work. And then I started to meet other people who did energy work, and then people who trained me in energy work.

Was that really your first connection with people who treated you differently?
AM: Yes, that was my first time. I remember getting off that phone feeling love like I had never felt love before. This woman loved me unconditionally through everything I had been through, through everything I was going through. I had never experienced that kind of love in my life, and it was such a huge crack for me. I just remember feeling bliss after talking to this woman, the kind of bliss that I felt running on the trails, but now it was something that I got without being active and without being outside. I didn’t even know that that kind of love for me existed.

So I started to train in energy work, and I started to learn about how the mind affects the emotions and the body and about the body’s whole energy field, and I started a self-love journal. I got into affirmations. I started to study Louise Hay’s work. I studied Reiki, LaHo-Chi, and Angel therapy. I studied Abraham Hick’s work. I studied Doreen Virtue’s work.

That was the shift for me. My whole world up until that point was backpacking and running. I was a nurse, and my life’s course shifted towards healing and learning unconditional love and following this greater soul purpose.

Speak to me now about surrender. What does surrender mean to you and how does one surrender?
AM: I think surrender is the first part of the process of healing. Our bodies heal by allowing the light and the healing energies to flow. When we are constricted and controlling our world, we can’t allow that higher frequency to come into our bodies. Surrendering is surrendering what we know. It’s surrendering what we think life is to something higher — and trusting in the process.

When I was in so much physical pain from the pneumonia and the asthma, it went on for about a year-and-a-half because I was still resistant. I was still in fight-or-flight. I thought I was doing something wrong. Why am I not healing? Finally, I got to the point of turning the process over to something greater than me. I had a very specific moment when I said, “Universe, Angels, Higher Power, I give this over to you because I don’t know the way through and you do, and I surrender this to you.” I let go completely. And my life radically changed.

There was so much energy flowing through me, so much unconditional love, light, God, whatever term you want to use. It was a miracle. So much light and love came through my whole body once the healing energy began. I was sweating profusely and I coughed up gallons of blood in that moment and all of my pneumonia and asthma was able to come out and heal. That happened because I surrendered over what I knew about healing and I surrendered over my judgment about my situation, and I let go of all the resistance I had to who I was and I allowed this unconditional love to come into me.

The way we surrender is by saying, “Dear Universe, Dear God, Dear Spirit, I give this over to you for you to show me the way because I deserve to be healthy.” I really think it’s by us setting that intention.

What inspired you to write your book, The Beauty of Wings?
AM: When I felt all of this energy flowing through me, I knew I had to sit down and write. The first 20 pages just came out of me. It was as if something greater than me was writing my thoughts, and it felt so incredible to get down my story. I wrote every time that happened. It would often be at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. I felt this surge of energy and all I needed to do in that moment was write, and it felt so good. I didn’t even know that it was going to turn into a book. All I knew was that it felt so amazing to write about my story, so I kept doing it and doing it. Later, I met a woman who was also a healer and a writer, and I shared some of my writing with her. She told me, “I think you need to make this into a book.” And I thought, “Okay. I think I’m going to.” And it organically unfolded.

For those sensitive kids out there, girls and boys who are finding every day a struggle to survive, what message do you have now for them?
AM: That they’re really, really important in this world and to love themselves unconditionally, like their soul loves them. Their work and their message is super important because we need sensitive people. We need gentle people. That’s what this planet needs. The animals and nature really respond to them. They are so important and don’t allow anybody to tell them otherwise.

What’s the most powerful transformative thing our readers can do on a daily basis to propel their lives forward in a positive way?
AM: Allow yourself to be authentic. Let go of perfectionism and judgment. Embrace unconditional love of yourself and others.

What message do you hope to leave with those who attend your Psychic and Healing Symposium keynote talk?
AM: That you are loved way more than you’ll ever know, just the way you are. You don’t have to do anything to receive love. You are loved.

Once you have gotten to the place where you are now, do you find it still a challenge to stay in that space? Are there still remnants of the old toxicity that still exists?
AM: I wouldn’t say I’m always in unconditional love or always in my heart space. There are residual effects of the toxic childhood. It’s just become easier and easier to come back to my heart space. I think it’s a journey, just coming back over and over again.

Do you think the healing process ever ends?
AM: I don’t. I think it’s a lifelong journey. I think that you go from one level to the next and to the next, from one state to the next. I think sometimes there is this idea that, “Oh, now we have arrived and life is going to be perfect!” I think it’s a continuous process and I think that for the rest of our lives, we’re healing.

What are your goals for the next five or ten years, in terms of taking where you are now forward out into the world?
AM: I want to share the message of unconditional love and bring the message of self love to people who need it. I want to help the sensitive ones grow and become into their own self. I want to work really closely with horses and nature. I want to do more with equine therapy and possibly have a hobby farm. And I would like to write another book about unconditional love and loving yourself.


For more information on Alexandra Mika, visit Alexandramika.com.

Fare for All pop up grocery store
Previous articleThe Heartland Medium: An interview with Kelli Miller
Next articlePaw-sing on the Path of Life
Tim Miejan
Tim Miejan is a writer who served as former editor and publisher of The Edge for twenty-five years. Contact him at t.miejan.25@gmail.com.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.