Meet Emily Masnoon (Canvas Rebel Interview)
Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Emily Masnoon. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Emily, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
From my youngest years, I have watched women and girls struggle to understand themselves: who they are, how they fit in, what they are here on Earth to do. I have seen them operate as they’ve been conditioned to instead of trusting and following their incredible, true nature. I have felt them shrink, doubt, and full-on abandon themselves for survival. I grew up amongst this, was immersed in it professionally for many years, and was drowning. When something inside of me awakened to the idea that this is not the life that I wanted and that it didn’t need to be this way, I started getting more and more curious about the ways in which I could realign with the person, purpose and the life that I yearned for. After years of working with trusted guides and practices, I finally found my way back to my own truth. The world needs me at my best and my truest. I have learned (remembered, really) that I deserve to be who I truly am, and I get to guide women back to themselves through healing deeply-held traumas, to giving birth to a new soul, to raising and nurturing the world’s future, to walking through the world with confidence, abundance, and purpose.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
In 2005, I had my first yoga class experience: It was at the gym I attended every day during my lunch-break and was in the same building as the company I worked for at the time. I would escape the messy, corporate, petty, atmosphere and escape to the elliptical, or the weights area, or a pilates class…until one day it was an unexpected yoga class instead! I enjoyed it and was so grateful because I would likely have been too shy and nervous to step into a yoga class for the first time on my own. For the next few years, I continued my budding yoga practice by following along with short audio yoga flow podcasts. My love for yoga grew through these as did the appreciation for my mind/body connection that I always felt was “a thing” but had never had this sort of outside validation of it.
In 2008, I began volunteering at a hot yoga studio in Cambridge, MA in exchange for free yoga classes and it changed my world. The heat, the community, and the flowing movements had such a powerful impact. They created a space around and within me that felt like home and I adored the practice, the space, the teachers, and the transformation I was experiencing in myself.
In 2010, I studied Reiki and connected deeply with the concept of energetics and the body. I also completed my training to become a yoga teacher. In 2011, I surprised myself by doing prenatal yoga-specific training. My interest in the mother/child connection had been there for a long time, but it surfaced much more clearly when I knew this niche was for me. I taught in and around the Boston area, teaching prenatal yoga classes and workshops, mom & baby yoga, restorative yoga, and flow classes. I became a birth doula and supported a number of couples through pregnancy, and the labor and delivery of their babies. I coached women on preparing for their birth experience in a conscious and empowering way.
As I grew, I helped others grow. As my life expanded, I was able to guide others through their own expansion.
I began noticing how powerful it was to teach a room full of people, yet there was something so special about working 1:1 and getting to know a person and their journey on a deeper, more intimate level. I began taking on private clients in their homes, which allowed for more convenient, luxurious, and customized access to yoga for them, and gave me the opportunity and honor of being a part of their yoga journeys. My clients were women, and ranged from being pregnant, to newly postpartum, to many years postpartum, all the way to being almost retired. Being a safe person and space for these women, to guide them into themselves, to guide them back to themselves, was such a purposeful honor. I did notice, though, that driving to and from clients was taking a toll on me. I would later also come to realize that, due to my energetic openness, the being in their space every week and the travel to/from, was more draining for me than I had realized.
In early 2019, I decided to begin offering some virtual prenatal and mom & baby yoga classes. In addition to my wanting to be in the car less, I also knew that there were a number of obstacles that would often keep expecting and new moms from attending an in-studio class: from severe pregnancy discomforts, to work schedules, to location, to reluctance to taking their newborn out and about in the city so early on. So, the virtual classes were so convenient for everyone involved. I knew I needed some guidance on how best to move forward in a way that truly felt aligned for me. I began working with my own coach which was a huge leap for me to take, but came with great reward. I had a sounding board, support system, advisor, and so much more.
In 2020, everyone went virtual with everything. I was grateful that I had already embraced this way of connecting so I shifted my corporate yoga and my private yoga clients to a virtual platform as well. We were all in a state of discomfort with what would become a global pandemic, but there was no denying that doing my work virtually was such an incredible gift.
My work continued to grow and evolve as I did, and I began doing coaching work with those who had previously been to my classes. They were looking for that next opportunity to deepen their own knowledge of and connection to themselves. It felt like a natural evolution for my offerings as well, where I could incorporate my Psychology degree, my work with human behavior, my own life journey, my yoga practice and training, my abilities with Reiki and acting as a support-system and facilitator to clients who came to me for deep healing practices.
In 2021, I learned about the Human Design system, which resonated so deeply with me. My coach worked with me on understanding my own design and what that meant for me as far as how I was meant to “be” in the world, the overall theme of what I was meant to do, and how to most easily and harmoniously align with that. Another incredible gift and game-changer. During this time, the opportunity to nurture and pursue intuitive gifts that I had known about since I was very young came along. So I also began working with a trusted Psychic Medium & Spiritual Mentor who had been in my life for many years, far in the background, until I was ready.
In 2022, I became certified as a Human Design Coach, and did some deep Psychic Mediumship mentoring.
With all that I have been blessed to discover along my journey, through all of the modalities I have mastered and utilized, I am so grateful to have worked alongside all of the beautiful, wonderful clients I have guided through incredible growth, healing, shedding, and blossoming. My work, just as I do, continues to evolve, become more beautiful, more powerful – and still, I know that the best is yet to come!
Currently, I work with women who want to feel better about themselves, who want to know themselves, heal themselves, feel empowered and show up as their best, truest selves for their own satisfaction and for the happiness of their families. I do this through my 1:1 Coaching Offering, Human Design Readings, Psychic Mediumship Readings, and my ‘Aligning for Birth’ course.
I am very proud of my own healing journey and transformation, and even more proud that I get to guide others through their own, in a way that is true to them. My biggest piece of advice here is to listen to that spark within that tells you something is for you. Listen to that deep yearning for something more. It might be easy to fall into the scarcity worries of wondering how you will afford that new course, or the coach that you undeniably resonate with. You might make excuses about not having time. You might be afraid to be truly seen.
I know all of these. I have experienced all of these. But when something is for us, and we make the decision to allow and receive it, the Universe will align to support you. Take the leap. Trust that you are deserving of healing, happiness, love, purpose, and so much more. The only reason you’ll look back is to see how far you have come!
Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.
When I began teaching and officially had a sidehustle, it was 2011 and I was working a full-time job at a software company. I didn’t know leaving a full-time job where I was someone’s employee would be possible for me. I started with teaching 1 or 2 classes a week at a new studio, where I began building a community of students who would come and fill the studio. The income was small, but the feeling of connection and purpose was so fulfilling. I gradually began taking on Reiki clients, and did Doula work all while trying to navigate the full-time job life that I desperately wanted out of. It had never felt aligned and that was even more obvious as I experienced this deepening love for my new line of work. I decided to ask if going part-time at my day job was an option. I didn’t know anyone who was part-time, but I had to ask. This change was approved! What a gift, what a shift! I was able to take on more classes and clients, but it was a lot of energy spent. I was so grateful for having more time away from the office to do what I loved, but now what? I felt like I was in this uncomfortable limbo and needed to get over this hump and do what I love full-time.
Finally, in August of 2016, I was laid off. I knew it was coming and I was a little scared but SO much more excited. What an incredible relief it was to simply be done with a job I resented; one that drained me energetically and emotionally. It felt like permission from the Universe. I had finally been released into my own potential. But what would that even look like? I have a past of fear and scarcity when it comes to money. So, how was this all going to work? How was I going to make ends meet? What about health insurance? What about income taxes? This was probably my first glimpse into a layer of this existence where the ‘1+1=2’ that we’re taught isn’t the whole story; that things aren’t so cut and dry when it comes to money. That would be something I would work on for the next many years: my relationship with money. Somehow, I made things work. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect: I could enjoy summer the way I wanted to, and spend plenty of time with my brother who had just come to town. It wasn’t easy, but it was infinitely better with this new freedom.
The next few years held a lot of growth for me personally and professionally as I got to impact the pregnancies of thousands of women, as I soothed and rocked countless babies to sleep while teaching, and as I got to deepen myself through my work. But in the back of my mind, there was still the worry of having to return to a corporate job if things didn’t work out.
After many years of teaching for studios, alongside my private clients, I slowly started releasing my affiliation with studios as the financials and energetics of what I was receiving no longer balanced with what I was expending. One by one, I relinquished classes and focused more attention on the freedom and solitude of truly working for myself. When I let go of my last class, in 2020, I felt so much freer. There were some feelings along the way of worrying that not being associated with a studio would backfire, but I was determined to acknowledge this as the huge milestone that it was. I had come so far!
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
A lesson that I had to unlearn was the idea that I had to work harder, work more hours, teach more classes and burn the candle at both ends. I did this for a long time for much of my life. It was having a huge impact in me: I was unhappy, not showing up as nearly my best self. Even once I was freed from the corporate world and doing what I loved, I realized that even if I technically had time in my day to get to and from my clients, it somehow felt draining. I had heard the “new” paradigm of working smarter not harder and the idea that trading hours for dollars isn’t the only way from countless business coaches. That concept wasn’t new to me. But soon after, I began learning about Human Design, and my own energetics. It started to make more sense. I began to understand more about why I felt so drained and how to better align my energy, using what I had learned. This is one of the reasons I am so passionate about bringing Human Design to my clients, because so many of us are spinning our wheels and burning our energy in such unproductive and unhealthy ways. In addition, we’ve had these ideas ingrained in us that we should be different than our true nature, we should go, go, go, and that simply is not how many people are designed. In fact, it’s detrimental. After a life full of decades of conditioning that basically told me to do things in a way that is the opposite of how I am meant to be, I continue to decondition and unlearn. It’s another reason I love bringing Human Design to parents, specifically. So we can do better for the next generations.
Contact Info:
Website: https://www.emilymasnoon.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emilymasnoon/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EmilyMasnoon/
This interview was originally published on Canvas Rebel. See the original article here.