Soul Leader welcomes and celebrates lesbian, queer, bisexual and pansexual women and any other sexual identities and choices in our training programs and Certification. We fully embrace and celebrate LGBTQ+ sexuality and welcome all sexual orientations and queer-identified women to the program.
We are an inclusive training academy and believe that all orientations are healthy and natural expressions of human sexuality.
However, some of the language in the program is heteronormative. If you feel safe to do so, we welcome you to adapt this language to how you will work with your LGBTQ+ clients in the future.
Soul Medicine is gender and sexuality neutral. Every human being has a soul and is on their own personal journey to invoke and embody the work of their soul regardless of the gender or sexuality they identify with.
We welcome and celebrate anyone who identifies as a women, regardless of sex assignment at birth, and non-binary folks to join this program.
We acknowledge that the lens that some of our work has been created is one of someone who identifies as a woman and works primarily with women.
Sometimes we have used the word ‘womb of creation’ to describe the melting pot of creative potential that exists within the Creation Centre. We have endeavoured, across all of our content to replace ‘womb of creation’ with ‘cauldron of creation’ to represent that every human being – or those who identify with being human – has a cauldron of creation deep in their pelvis. For those who identify as women, they may also feel into the energy of the womb, for those who don’t – stir the pot/cauldron/cave/pelvis. If you feel safe to do so, we welcome you to adapt this language to how you will work with your clients in the future. The creation centre is not dependant on having a uterus and it exists for every human being.
If you do join the Certification, we will welcome your feedback on how to be even more inclusive – with the understanding that when you are working with practices in the program, there will sometimes be heteronormative and cisgendered language. As you learn the practices, we welcome you to adapt them to fully support your clients.
The founder of the Soul Medicine Academy, Melissa Sandon, is a women of mixed heritage with white privilege. Her journey of healing and soul awakening has been upon the bedrock of this privilege. Her capacity to grow her soul business has been within the context of the system and oppression of white supremacy and she acknowledges the privilege in which she has developed her spirituality and grown her business.
At Soul Medicine Academy we are actively trying to atone for this privilege. We are reviewing all of the work that has been developed through the singular lens of Melissa’s journey in order to teach and share Energy & Soul Mastery as a collective truth for all individuals, especially Black, Indigenous Womxn of Colour (BIWOC) and any individual who identifies as marginal.
We are actively investing in the training and expertise of BIWOC to inform us of our blindspots and inherent discriminations. We are taking this investment and working to resurrect our business in allyship.
We are committed to understanding the science and heart of healing and soul awakening from the experience of those who are marginalized and are subject to oppression and injustice.
We are passionate about the reconstruction of energy fields of sovereignty from the true and harrowing personal experiences of trauma.
We acknowledge that we don’t all begin with the same privilege when it comes to soul activation and transformation. We understand that many BIPOC, disabled and marginalized individuals have significant hurdles, challenges and systemic oppressions to face when choosing and then creating their souls desires.
Through our programs, we acknowledge and witness the feelings and experiences of our students, and work to create a space where it is safe to feel, tend to and embody those feelings and experiences without making them wrong or encouraging an individual to bypass them.
We will never tell someone they are a ‘victim’, we will never deny someone’s pain, we will never skirt around someone’s real experience of racism, oppression or injustice. We will also choose to see someone in their wholeness, to believe in their sovereignty and to hold the highest vision of their potential in their awakening journey.
We, as Energy & Soul Mastery practitioners, can allow the paradoxical nature of life. Where we need to atone for our privilege and the violence perpetrated by our ancestors that we continue today, while knowing that we can rise up in our power. We can be humble and sorry, whilst being strong and present to what is. We will not be fragile and we will not gaslight.
If we do, please don’t hesitate to identify our harm and call us in to make amends for it.
We understand that you cannot have a soul awakening without coming into alignment with the earth’s rhythms. We understand that embodiment is not just about being in our body, it is about understanding and taking a stand for what is happening on the body of the earth, the body of our communities, the body of our governments, the body of our industries.
We know that we have a role to play in being uncomfortable. To unpacking our own inherent racism and supremacy. To speaking up for truth and change. To investing in BIWOC and marginalised communities.
We commit to working with experts in the fields of race, gender, social justice, aboriginal rights, migrant and refugee activism, environmental sustainability and activism.
We, as the Soul Medicine Academy, commit to unpacking and dismantling our own white supremacy and being a part of the collective movement of social and environmental change.
We will seek to be honest about our inherent prejudices, spiritual superiorities, conditionings, discriminations and open to receiving feedback on how we can do better.
We commit to being open to the emotions, truths and experiences of those who experience oppression of white privilege and supremacy.
We will defer wisdom and understanding to those who have direct experience with the impacts and discrimination of white privilege.
We will allow ourselves to be uncomfortable and ashamed when confronting our own role in white privilege. We will take responsibilities for these emotions and will not project out onto BIWOC, defend our history, be abusive or harmful or disassociate from the actions and unpacking required.
We will provide opportunities to individuals of Black, Indigenous Women of Colour and marginalized communities to access our work when there are significant financial barriers.
We will work with experts to ensure any scholarship program is ethical, in integrity, not harmful or problematic and empowering.
Our programs will endeavour to meet the needs of persons with a disability or impairment. We will continue to expand our disability capacity in all of our technical and online endeavours – including providing image text on social posts and making sure our websites are disability accessible.
Our training venues will have disability access.
We will provide solutions for those who cannot use massage tables due to issues of weight, stability or disability.
We will work to collaborate with students who experience disability. We will be pro-active and responsive in collaborating with vision or hearing impaired students. We will ensure our programs can be done in conjunction with an Auslan interpreter.
We will protect the dignity of our disabled community members.
You may see the use of the word ‘She’ as a pronoun when relating ideas of soul or personal journeys of awakening. This formed as part of Melissa’s journey of reclamation of the woman she is from the clutches of the Patriarchy. It is also Melissa’s personal relationship with the soul, a flavour that she uses to express her connection. The soul does not have a gender or sex. It does not need a pronoun, even though you are welcome to give it one. You are welcome to use the concepts of femininity or masculinity or not at all. You are welcome to work with the many beings of your soul, in whatever form they come to you.
Our work will evolve our understanding of the nature of soul, beyond gender. We will endeavour to use the pronouns they/theirs/them to represent our work.
Melissa will also use woman from time to time because her body of work has been derived from her own experience of identifying as a woman but we will actively identify this as a personal choice
To date, we have only offered our work to those who identify as a woman, regardless of their gender or sex. This is because we have felt ill-equipped to teach to the many diverse personal experiences of soul awakening and to this time, have only solidified our knowledge through personal experience.
We endeavour to continue to grow our capacity to learn, explore and qualify ourselves in the science of energy & soul mastery through different lenses than just those who identify as woman.
If you have any suggestions for us with this, please do contact us at hello@soulleader.co
Within the realm of our own becoming, we will explore the relationship we have with our own body. We do not and never will discriminate against any body type. We will never promote diets or a fetishised body type as ideal. We will endeavour to compassionately explore the concepts of releasing emotional weight, burden, healing trauma, energising your cells and anchoring your lightbody with NO reference to the physical shape or size of an individual. These concepts will work purely with the focus of personal liberation and loving acceptance and the wonderful and humanly flawed body we all live in.
We acknowledge the direct harm and erasure of spiritual bypassing within the wellness and spiritual industry.
We acknowledge the violence of terms like ‘love and light’ and ‘we’re all one’ in response to education about discrimination.
We commit to never teaching a one-dimensional light based spirituality.
Our spiritual education will be deeply rooted in earth-based truths, including social and environmental justice.
We understand the harm of cultural appropriation of the spiritual industry and communication to the spiritual cultures of communities across the world.
We acknowledge the use of spiritual practices of indigenous cultures is an erasure of the systemic oppression those cultures still experience and the profiteering on cultures without permission or a deep relationship with that culture.
At the Soul Medicine Academy, we will not teach the spirituality of cultures that are not our own. We will actively educate our students of the problematic nature of cultural appropriation.
We will not:
When we purchase gifts for our students we will only purchase or make products that are sustainable, independent (as in not derived from other cultures) and preferably local.
We will not purchase or gift:
We will actively work towards ensuring our programs are well represented with a strategy towards this is of building trust as a non-harmful organisation of allyship.
Inclusion policy | Environmental and social policy | hello@soulleader.co