We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Marie-Elizabeth Mali a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Marie-Elizabeth, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Was there a moment in your career that meaningfully altered your trajectory? If so, we’d love to hear the backstory.

I’ve been a relationship coach for the past 8 years, and about year ago I started feeling like it was no longer aligned for me.

While I’ve always loved the work I do with my clients, I found myself wanting to speak more directly to midlife women, focusing more on our relationship with ourselves, since that has everything to do with how we show up in our relationships with others.

In January of 2023, I offered my first women’s retreat at our home in Mexico. I felt on fire with passion and purpose and offered my second retreat at the end of May. (check out the pics of our view!)

Both these retreats clarified that owning my depth as a spiritual and personal development guide, transcending and including relationship work, was exactly what needed to happen for me to feel aligned and fulfilled again in my work.

So, I continued developing this new work around activating the PassionBody in midlife women who are feeling bored, drained, or burned out to rebirth their passions, purpose and joy to carry them forward through this next stage of their lives.

I incubated it for most of the year, and have finally released it to the public!

A few lessons from this pivotal shift:

Listen to your glimmers of discontent instead of pushing them away… they may be signaling you to pay attention to what no longer fits and where your heart, passion, and purpose want to expand you next.

Notice where you feel most alive and on fire in your life. That’s a sign that you’re on the right track. Cultivate more of that, please, because the world needs people who are turned on and aligned with what they’re doing.

Don’t rush the process… Different pieces of my new PassionBody framework got clarified month by month and I’m glad I waited to have all the pieces in place instead of rushing to release the new work as soon as bits of it landed, so I could prevent having to redo what wasn’t yet complete once more got clarified.

Marie-Elizabeth Mali, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’ve been in the healing and personal development world for almost 35 years, working with clients for almost 25 of those years.

I’m proud of my long-time dedication to growth and for being both grounded in the tangible world and also deeply intuitive and able to access deep insights into where my clients are getting stuck and getting in their own way and how to get free.

I started in 1990 as a massage therapist, then got my Masters’ in Traditional Chinese Medicine and then did two different types of coaching programs, one for Life Coaching and one for Relationship Coaching.

And for the past year, I’ve been focused on creating my new PassionBody work, centered around activating passion and purpose in midlife women. It’s the culmination of all my years of study and work, bringing together ancient wisdom with modern life.

There comes a time in midlife for women who have been taking care of others for years—caretaking family, raising kids, diligently working—when they finally have more time for themselves and they’re shocked to discover that they’ve gotten completely out of touch with their own passion, wants, and needs.

Like they’ve forgotten who they are anymore when they’re not busy caring for others.

For this woman who’s realizing that she’s no longer fulfilled by what she used to love, it’s now time to tune in to her own body, her own mature needs, her own deeper purpose, outside of service in caretaking.

It’s time to finally ignite her unique PassionBody and purpose.

Your PassionBody is the awakened, deeply intuitive, soulful, and sensual part of you that knows what’s what and has the power to create what you want, even as life is life-ing in the bananas ways it does.

Your PassionBody holds your inner wisdom, creativity, sexuality, and agency.

In contrast to your PrettyBody, which is caught up in looking attractive and behaving appropriately based on societal conditioning and norms, your PassionBody is about trusting and acting on your truth, fully embodying who you are, and living in alignment with the cycles of nature.

Activating your PassionBody means getting in touch with your core passions, pleasures, and purpose. It’s about shedding limiting beliefs, stories, and habits that keep you small, so you can boldly express your most authentic self in every area of your life.

Your PassionBody guides you to live according to your soul’s wisdom over other people’s expectations.

I now offer women my Grown-Ass Power quiz, PassionBody Passage private podcast, PassionBody Hub community, and my PassionBody Activation women’s retreats in Mexico, and private coaching all centered around helping midlife women connect and align with who they are and what they want now and going forward in this next phase of their lives.

I’ve also brought energy medicine back into my practice, after leaving patient care 20 years ago, using the NES Health Bioenergetic Wellness system. In this way, I can combine the coaching with bioenergetic support to shift patterns more quickly and deeply, guiding my clients toward optimal health and tons of energy to create what they want to create in their lives.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

My father picked one profession and stayed with it his whole life. He was a doctor, which was his calling and he loved it until he died.

He criticized me for being multi-passionate and carving out my own path, saying that I’d never master anything if I had so many interests.

For me to feel free to pivot my work so that it continues to feel aligned for me and connected to my own growing edge, I’ve had to unlearn that conditioning that it’s best to only have one focus for your whole life,

Even though there’s always been a through-line to my work—a desire to get at the truth underlying our conditioned selves and help others release stories that keep them small by accessing what’s true for them under the surface—how that work has expressed itself throughout my life has changed a lot over the years.

I’m glad I trust myself enough to listen to my own truth instead of allowing my father’s perspective to limit me… AND it has been hard sometimes when I’ve doubted a new pivot that’s wanted to emerge just as I’m settling into the direction I’ve been headed.

But when I’ve allowed myself to follow the nudge to pivot, it’s been right for me and helpful to others, so I’ve learned to embrace being a multi-passionate, evolving person.

Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?

Back when I taught at acupuncture college, I created an elective that was all about helping practitioners do their own inner work, because success all boils down to this:

You can’t take a client/patient/student where you haven’t gone, so if you’re wanting to have a profound impact on people and create real change in the world, you’d better be doing the same with yourself.

You can have all the knowledge, and all the training, but if you don’t do inner work, you’ll basically be parroting knowledge, which stays at the surface level and doesn’t create a powerful enough energetic transmission to create deep change.

Being knowledgeable doesn’t create a compelling enough presence on its own to cut through the noise of at least a billion people online trying to get folks’ attention.

As Maya Angelou said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

To have the level of congruency, magnetism and presence that makes people pay attention, feel something, and want to work with you, you’ve got to do your own inner work and also develop your relational skills.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://marieelizabethmali.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/marieelizabethmali
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/marieelizabethmali
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/marieelizabethmali
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@MarieElizabethMali
• Other: Midlife women: Take my Grown-Ass Power quiz to discover your archetypal power and a clear way forward. https://yourpowerquiz.com

Image Credits
In Her Image Photography