Today we’d like to introduce you to Lumalia Armstrong.

Hi Lumalia, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?

We hung all the bridesmaid dresses up on a clothesline, as if we were Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, yet we were in New Mexico photographing a backyard wedding set against the Jemez mountains. Something in me then knew I loved the highs of events in breathtaking locations. I was a wedding photographer for years, and I thought that was what I loved. Little did I know then that what I loved was much bigger than just weddings.

Fast forward to 2017, when I had to close my business of eight years because I was battling chronic illnesses that left me disabled and unable to care for my daughter, let alone myself.

Deciding then and there that I would not be a victim in my life, I began a ten-year journey into the deep waters of the human experience and dove into becoming a yoga teacher, meditation teacher, and deep student of the human experience.

This led me to discover how much I love celebrating the human experience and why I now create women’s retreats that blend somatics, movement, meditations, and portrait empowerment photography with archetype studies and the magic of letting women be fully witnessed and celebrated.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?

Over the past few years, I’ve decided that I’m not here for a smooth road. I want the hills, the peaks, the valleys, and the deep waters. I am on this earth as a human because I want to experience it all. So now, I embrace the experiences that didn’t come easily.

When my health declined in 2017 with chronic illnesses, autoimmune diseases, and symptoms that Western medicine had zero support for me besides treatments and medications that came with a higher list of possible side effects than what I was already experiencing, I knew there had to be another way.

I was twenty-six when I got sick. I’d barely lived my life, and I was not going to let this be my life, sick, alone, in bed. So I let my hunger for life drive me after lots ups and downs, thousands of dollars, treatments that did work, then didn’t, every possible alternative therapies, to finding in the end my body was looking for friendship with me when it had to hide so much of my life experience from me to keep safe. Finally, it was time to heal, witness, and be present with me.

That alone was just my health, through it all I kept trying to find my place in the world, trying to find a way to keep creating was a whole other game of being a photographer, a yoga teacher, a meditation teacher, writer, poet, and discovering it wasn’t just one of them, but all of them I longed to be. Because who ever said you had to fit in a one term box, nowadays I prefer the term “beauty hunter,” because I’m just here to enjoy, share and spread as much beauty into the world as I possibly can.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?

As a beauty hunter, I love to gather all the things I’ve fallen madly in love with and share them with the world, then invite them into an experience with me. Sometimes this looks like my memoirs, my first one now out Blooming Upside Down, where you’ll go on a journey with me through healing, we’ll upside down. Other times, it will be through an invitation to dive into a topic like the Siren Archetype and learn more about how to embody her through my online workshops. In a more profound experience you’ll take the archetype like the Camellia Rose and learn her medicine and integrate it into your being with an in person experience that then get’s paired with being deeply witnessed and celebrated by having me take your portrait, which is absolutely nothing like a photo you got taken at the department store studio growing up. It’s a bit more like a magazine cover, but this time, you get to be celebrated instead of witnessing other powerful women. I love to make sure we all feel like the main characters in my work. In one last avenue, I take all of this to curate a customized empowerment boudoir-ish photography experience for people to dive deep into a self-love journey, dig into the roots of the most profound ways they want to be celebrated, and see they are walking poetry.

I adore playing in different avenues, from group experiences to sharing the musings of my own life to diving deep into co-creating with an individual. It’s all connected but also very much a unique journey.

How do you think about luck?

None. I don’t believe in luck. I only believe in experiences to learn from and grow from. Failure isn’t what most of us have learned; it’s just getting more opportunities to learn how many things can happen in so many different ways, more than we can ever have imagined. Sometimes, I think when things don’t “go our way,” it’s because our original vision was probably just not big enough, and that mindset changes everything.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://celebrateagain.org/womens-retreat-in-oregon-wellness-experiences/
• Instagram: http://instagram.com/celebrateagain/
• Youtube: http://youtube.com/@lumalia
• Other: https://celebrateagain.org/boudoir-photography-portland-oregon/