We were lucky to catch up with Vanessa Persephone Wells recently and have shared our conversation below.

Vanessa Persephone, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you recount a time when the advice you provided to a client was really spot on? (Please note this response is for education/entertainment purposes only and shouldn’t be construed as advice for the reader)

Forgiveness is often a component that comes up in my sessions with clients, as many of them are confronting the consequences of living with unprocessed complex trauma. One of the most potent pieces of wisdom I’ve shared is that compassion is not an invitation for compensation.

In other words, just because you can understand why someone did something to you that caused harm, just because you recognize the pain, conditioning, or systemic circumstances behind what led someone to choose to perpetuate or project that pain onto you, does not mean it becomes “ok” that you were hurt. It is not your responsibility to compensate for what another person has done because you can understand why they did it.

Ideally, you reach a point in your healing process where you can hold compassion for the hurtful ways someone treated you while simultaneously honoring your experience of/with that person as damaging for you, as not the way things should’ve been and not the way you’ll allow them to be going forward.

This is huge for those clients who’ve gone through a chunk of their life being told that their needs are “too much,” or that others’ needs are more important and should come first. Because when you learn to deny your needs, you also learn to endure excessive pain.

Compassion can become a weapon you wield against yourself when you put the pain of the person hurting you before the pain they’re causing you. So learning how to hold compassion for the self and another in (eventually) equal measure, and free yourself from the responsibility or expectation to compensate for someone else’s lack of empathy, self-awareness, self-regulation, or general understanding of kindness, is a powerful step toward finding forgiveness and practicing self-love.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Dark Hearts Healing Arts is a psycho-spiritual growth space where intense, creative, sensitive, against-the-grain folx can cultivate self-connection, expansion, and expression.

My work is an alchemy of intuitive coaching, somatic practices, energy work, shadow work, and inner child reparenting. I call it Heretical Humanistic Healing.

Heretical because fuck the rules that weren’t written with you in mind, or were written to intentionally exclude you. In this work, we question authority, challenge the status quo, and rewrite the rules to prioritize your unique needs, values, and ambitions.

Humanistic because we’re focusing on your very real needs, centering on dignity, and valuing rather than escaping the human condition and experience. We worth WITH the spiritual to support your material experience.

Healing because we’re not fighting against who you are or fixing the flaws, we’re bringing all parts home to be loved. Here, healing is a return to wholeness, reclaiming parts of yourself that were repressed or rejected, and developing new parts there wasn’t previously space for or permission to own.

My work is predominantly one-on-one for the time being, in the form of individual sessions that combine Oracle reading, Astrology, and coaching.

I also have a year-long coaching intensive in which we work to identify and unmask the coping mechanisms and personas that were developed to help you through difficult times but now feel like they’re holding you back from what you want; we then foster a practice of self-connection, trust building, and developing new skills and parts of self that are authentic expressions of who you truly are.

Lastly, I’m currently creating and releasing monthly DIY classes for each zodiac sign, in which I explore a shadow element of each sign and guide you through prompts for self-directed healing.

The intention and ultimate mission of my work is to help people “shed the shoulds” of who they’ve been pressured or conditioned to become out of self-preservation, and guide my clients through the rebirthing process of become who they’re meant to be – the person they’ve always, deep down, been.

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

Being present. All the theories and research in the world amount to very little in my line of work without the ability to fully listen to a person, to witness them in their vulnerability, to not judge them or their circumstances, and to not rush in with what they “should” do.

The thing is, you can only do this if you’ve done your own growth work – not in a training sense, but experientially. Presence is what people who are hurting need more than anything. And to be fully present with others requires the foundation and fortitude to be present with yourself, especially when you don’t like yourself very much.

The practice of self-presence and self-compassion are what cultivate the empathy and stillness needed to be with someone while they’re struggling, and not swoop in to solve their problem or rescue them with a five-step framework for shifting their mindset.

People generally want to not feel alone with the feelings and experiences that they can’t hold on their own, and they want to not feel alone with someone who can handle what they’re going through. So part of my responsibility as a healing practitioner is to continue exploring my own emotional depths, expanding my capacity for self-connection and spiritual connection by being with myself, and practicing what it means to love the parts of myself that need it most but ask for it least.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to unlearn the lesson that “doing your best” is a metric of satisfaction. Sometimes you will do your best – and it will still not be enough.

The pivotal experience for me with this lesson involves a 17-year-old dog named Harry. Harry’s family fell on hard times during the pandemic and couldn’t give him the care that his chronic health conditions needed. He found his way to the house I was living in at the time, and we instantly bonded and I quickly became his primary carer, with his original owner still involved as much as she could be.

Over the next year, we spent every day together and he absolutely had my whole heart. I was meticulous about his medications, his vet appointments, and became very attuned to when he was feeling “off.” I added energy work and natural supplements to his routine and met every need of his that I could. His original owner was even amazed at how much progress he seemed to make!

But decline is inevitable. And eventually the day came when no matter what I did to help him, the rebound, the improvement didn’t come. I was doing my best – and my best was more than what a lot of people would see fit to give – and it still wasn’t enough.

To say I was gutted is an understatement. I had put everything into keeping Harry happy, healthy, and alive and I was failing. My failure was costing this little being I loved his life. Or that’s how it felt. Even though I knew his health and age would eventually catch up with time, I couldn’t beat the feeling of having to try harder – that if my best wasn’t enough then it wasn’t my best.

After Harry died, I was able to come to the understanding that one person’s (or dog’s) need and another person’s capacity to meet that need are not necessarily correlated. I applied this perspective to my parents, ex partners and lovers, former friends…what if they had done their best, but their best just wasn’t enough for me – wasn’t what I needed? And could I hold both of those truths together without invalidating one or the other?

It’s a lot to work through. It confronts a lot of core wounds that many of us experience and grow up with. But when I work with this lesson in client sessions, it’s incredible to see the amount of freedom and validation they feel when they realize they don’t have to diminish the pain they feel just because someone else was limited in their ability to offer kindness, caring, or safety.

It’s probably really easy to answer the question, “When was someone’s best not good enough?” But when your best falls short, it takes on a whole new meaning and brings a deeper capacity for compassion and understanding to experiences and relationships that have left a less than ideal mark.

Contact Info:

• Website: darkheartshealingarts.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/darkheartshealingarts