We recently connected with Samantha Thornhill and have shared our conversation below.

Samantha, appreciate you joining us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

Samantha Speaks, my writing and intuitive healing consulting company, stands on the frontier of holistic healing for aspirants of their own liberation and expansion. While we are ready to serve any person that resonates with our work and is a good fit, our heart beats for unconventional parents and families: intersectional, marginalized, overlooked, underserved, world-shifting people of all races and walks of life that desire healing and community. We also gift probing sessions to unconventional families that are over-burdened and under-resourced.

What makes us stand apart in the healing realm is that we are comprised of mostly Black / indigenous practitioners, which does not echo the demographics of the healing industry, which centers white practitioners, which can be alienating for melanated people that seek representation in an industry as intimate as spiritual wellness.

Additionally, most healers are siloed in their work, with little to no collaboration. My company has spent years fostering a community, and has a built-in team of practitioners that are intimate with each other’s work. This allows our clients to build their own healing team with practitioners that trust each other, and seamlessly collaborate to address the whole needs of the client.

An example of how all of this covalently collides. I have a psychic medium on my team who does medical intuition and ancestral mediumship. One day, this medium and I were tag teaming on a probono client, a mom with a non-verbal autistic son. I was giving an oracle reading before she came in with her mediumship. It was during this session, that my medium discovered that she was able to telepathically communicate with this non verbal autistic child! She carried on a full conversation with him, while I was tending to his mom. After my reading, my medium shared the conversation that she had with the child, and the mother wept with amazement and joy.

“That’s my baby!” she said, recognizing the sentiments of her non verbal child, now put into words. We recognized that mediumship is not only a bridge to the unseen world, but also to the unheard.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am an unconventional, multi-passionate, multi-dimensional creative entrepreneur & matriarch.

More specifically, I’m a globally-traveled poet, author, educator, oracle, and healing facilitator from Trinidad & Tobago.

Words are my medicine. I started journaling and writing poetry when I was a child, and I began dabbling with oracle cards in 2018 after a life-altering spiritual awakening. My unique offering to the world is in how I triangulate my three great passions, poetry, journaling, and oracle divination to help us to access our inner realms in order to activate self-remembrance and inner-evolution.

My words walk the world ahead of me in the form of 15 children’s books, a poetry collection, a spoken word compilation, and a self-definition guided journal for all ages, The Black Unicorn Journal of Passions.

I provide writing/ book/ and journaling coaching as well as spiritual guidance using oracle cards. My intention is to lead my clients back to themselves, helping them to unearth their own sleeping truths, trust their own intuition, reclaim their power, and alchemize their passion into purpose.

To this end, I am innovative in how I mix modalities in my sessions with offerings such as: oracle journaling, where we use card pulls as journaling prompts for a deep dive into the inner reality. My newest offering is super exciting and niche: oracle poetry activations, in which I write poems to oracle cards, using oracular poetry as a form of medicine in my sessions. This utilizes my poetry background (I have an MFA in poetry and a decade-long poetry teaching career at The Juilliard School) and my oracular capacity.

I”m proud to see what started out as my one woman business, Samantha Speaks LLC expand during the pandemic with the creation of my inclusive, heart-centered, and gifted healing squad, The Aspirant Agency of Intuitive Talents. This is my growing constellation of spiritual practitioners that exist globally.

I want potential clients to know that we exist and ready to serve them.

Here are the problems that we address:

Lack of accessible, culturally-rooted healing spaces
Digital culture has contributed to rising loneliness and community disconnection
Limited avenues for emotional expression and creative release
Wellness resources that are overpriced, exclusive, or not trauma-informed
Self-healers overwhelmed by scattered tools and no clear guidance
Black and brown healers rarely see themselves reflected in mainstream healing spaces

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

In 2014, I was on my tenth year teaching poetry to actors at the Juilliard School, and serving as a teaching artist to NYC youth and senior citizens, inmates at Rikers Island, and more. I was also being invited every year to travel internationally to perform poetry. I was a highly visible poet in NYC, known for performing poetry in unconventional spaces: subways, laundromats, ferries, and elsewhere. In fact, I had co-founded an organization, Poets In Unexpected Places, years before.

Even with all of this going on, it didn’t occur to me that I was a one-woman company, so even though I was doing big things, I was still playing small, internally. That year, I landed a high-profile client who hired me to produce poetry videos of top poets, performing all over the city. That client was Russell Simmons. This is when I realized that I was a business, and formalized it into. my LLC, Samantha Speaks.

Months later, I found out I was pregnant with my first born son. This inspired a pivot that my work with Russell laid the ground work for. I decided to leave all of my teaching positions, as well as all of NYC, for the wild unknown. I placed full trust in my new identity as an entrepreneur and went on a nomadic journey that persists to this day. I now live in Costa Rica with two children, who I am parenting solo. I’ve been in business, and haven’t had a traditional job for 11 years.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I used to think, without thinking, that confidence and self-worth were the synonymous. Because I am confident in my capabilities, I didn’t realize that there were cracks in the foundation of my self-worth. I only understood this when I was elbow deep in a toxic entanglement with a verbally abusive partner who made me feel unsafe with his violent words and unregulated outbursts. I stayed in this unsafe container for much longer than I should have–4 years. In this relationship, I turned the other cheek, hoping to never get hit. I over-gave, until I had nothing else to give, which caused a heap of problems. I forgave and forgave until my forgiveness became normalized and weaponized, rather than seen as a gift and an opportunity to grow. I had become an enabler of my own destruction.

It was during that time that I began creating The. Black Unicorn Journal of Passions, a self-definition guided journal for survivors and self-healers. At first I thought I was creating the journal for my clients, who had lost themselves in life’s sauce and needed to find their way back home to the self. it turns out that I also created this tool for myself. The prompts jolted me back into the singularity within me where there is no chaos. I started to ask myself the questions I’d been unconsciously avoiding. It was through this process of deep introspection that I discovered the distinction between confidence an worth. I had been overcompensating my lack of self-worth with my fierce confidence in the abilities that I’d been doggedly cultivating to prove myself to this world as Black, female, Trinidadian, immigrant. l discovered that I remained in this relationship for so long because a part of me had forgotten that I deserved a blissful, loving experience that would challenge me to grow in a healthy way. I deserved a bond that was peaceful, healthy, balanced and enjoyable.

This is when I decided to break the cycle of abuse and leave the country with my children. A year later, I found myself on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, to rebuild my life from the ashes of my choices. I’ve been here for over a year now, and I’m happy to say I’m flourishing!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.samanthaspeaks.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/ladygriot
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/samanthaspeaks/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samantha-thornhill-she-her-28008179/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@samanthaspeaks
• Other: Substack: https://substack.com/@samanthaspeaks

Image Credits

Janelle Hamrick, Moses Djeli, Derek Jones, Tony Nabors