Stephanie Zubiri is a woman living her best life at 40. She’s the founder of Soulful Journeys and her podcast Soulful Feasts, a mother, journalist, award-winning author, host, content creator, and now even venturing into the world of music.

Stephanie Zubiri | Photo via @scottawoodward She is encouraging women through her own actions that women can be anything and everything they want to be in the world. She has helped women reconnect with their Divine Feminine and live a mythic life through her wellness platforms and advocacies. Her ethos of approachable wellness to nourish one’s body, mind, and spirit stems from her own experiences in life and how repressing and not processing emotions can be carried throughout one’s life. “There's so much wisdom to be had when we just don't shy away from what is really happening in our lives. We don't shy away from our emotions. We don't shy away from even the ugly parts.” She adds that having an open dialogue and creating space for it helps people end unhealthy generational cycles, “It’s such a break from my parents’ generation, where it's like, don't wash your dirty laundry in public, then a lot of people end up suffering in silence. What happens is, because we know that the body, mind, and spirit work all together, they end up sick. It quite literally eats them up inside, because we store all that trauma, pain, and anger inside our bodies, and we never get to process it.”

Photo by Scott A. Woodward

Stephanie is empowering women to look deeper and do the inner work so they can move more intentionally and freely in their lives. “How do we be empowered and be sovereign in how we move forward and make our decisions, rather than operating from an unconscious state where we let our traumas, our issues, our pain, kind of unconsciously drive the way we move in the world and drive our choices.” She admits that she, herself, has put in a lot of work in shedding and unlearning a lot of the stuff that was holding her back from living a full life, and she wants other women to feel that too. “I lived my life in shades of gray, kind of like this numbness, and now I just want to live a colorful life and feel the colors and emotions of life, equally the good and the bad, because then you're really living at 100% right?”

Metro caught up with Stephanie as she shares her journey to find one’s radiant self, how to reclaim your Divine Feminine, and why she’s in her “why not?” era.

Photo by Scott A. Woodward

Metro.Style: What has been the most rewarding thing about starting this podcast that's all about holistic nourishment and sharing meaningful conversations with women about different aspects of wellness and being a woman?

Stephanie Zubiri: I think a big part of the podcast was also exploring my own healing through being authentic and sharing my own challenges with the world, and connecting with other people and their challenges. I think a lot of us keep these things inside and being able to openly share and not hide my traumas, my grief, my worries, my anxieties, my issues, share it with other women as the audience and other men and women as guests, and listen to their insights about their issues, challenges, their journeys, has been incredibly healing and insightful and enlightening. 

MS: You also host a retreat called Soulful Journeys that’s all about reclaiming and reconnecting with the divine feminine energy. What was your inspiration for that?

SZ: The whole inspiration for Soulful Journeys is really a culmination of all the things that I love. I love travel, I love food, I love new experiences, and there is something really quite magical about stepping out of your comfort zone, removing yourself from your routine, from your regular spaces, your home base, and feeling the magic and energy of a new place with new people with new connections. And it's really an invitation to dive deeper and to really look and dedicate time to look at yourself and have that inner self-reflection.

MS: When did you personally discover your own journey?

SZ: It's really funny, I was always a very feminine person. I was born with that divine feminine energy. I was a super kikay child. I was so in tune with nature, with plants, with animals. I was very creative up until university, and frankly, until the early stages of my second marriage, like my second relationship. But then something kind of changed. There was a shift where even the way I dressed, the way I spoke, the way I operated in this world, became so masculine. 

It was an unconscious embodiment of, like, the death of self that happened inside me. I had to operate from a masculine perspective, always being, “I need to be successful.” “I needed to be on top.” I needed to constantly achieve, constantly do, to be valuable. But things happen where I just lost who I was, and it happens to a lot of women who get married, become mothers, or suddenly find themselves in roles where they feel like they have to operate like a man to kind of push forward, lead, and be powerful. 

Eventually, I learned through my own healing journey, through my practices, that there is this power and strength in being a woman, and we have a different kind of power—a soft, nurturing power that actually comes from the womb, rather than logos. We give life to things. We generate creativity and passion and fire, and really like discovering how these energies and archetypes work within us. I suddenly just started to feel like myself again. That's not to say that you reject masculine energies. It's knowing how to balance it. Men and women have both male and female energies inside of us, divine masculine and divine feminine. And it's really like working with both and finding integration, the light and dark, and the inner and outer worlds.

Photo by Scott A. Woodward

MS: Why was it important to help other women find theirs, too?

SZ: I'm always surrounded by these incredible women who have so much to offer, but feel so empty and tired. They are bright, beautiful, creative, and capable. But for whatever reason, whatever their situation, they gave up a lot of their power. They feel like, particularly in our societies, to be valuable, you have to sacrifice yourself to be worthy of love and devotion and to be worthy of being praised. “A woman's role is to sacrifice herself.” “I will do everything.” “I will do anything, even give up myself.” Right? 

I really want to empower women to realize that when you are strong and powerful and radiant and operating at your most authentic, radiant self, it's different. It's not about being strong or powerful; it's really having that inner light, and it's effortless. I love to quote my friend Kimilu, a life coach, who gave this really beautiful, simple way to understand the importance of tending to yourself first, before tending to others: You have to give from your overflow. If you keep giving from your own cup, your cup will empty, and it's very hard to fill again. So you have to make sure that your cup is always full and you give from your overflow. That's what I hope to do in my workshops, not just for women, but anyone who feels empty, that they have the power through different practices, through breathwork, just being intentional about wanting to always have that cup full.

MS: How would you explain a mythic life in a nutshell for people who are curious about it?

SZ: I am a huge fan of Carl Jung. He was fascinated by mythology, by the hero's journey, and the different archetypes there. What does it mean to live a mythic life? It means to reclaim your rightful place as the hero of your journey. 

If we don't take the time to do inner work, then we are only reacting to situations. Let's say something triggers you, and then you'll react with anger. You're not operating consciously. You're not pausing to think. The sum of the work of Carl Jung is basically to get to know your unconscious self, your shadow self, the why of what you are doing, how you operate in the world, what are the reasons why you act this way, you move this way, why you relate to people in this way. 

Once you understand that, then you have power. You take back your sovereign self, you become the sovereign of your life. You're no longer operating from trauma, from belief systems that were just handed down to you. You are now operating with choice, with sovereignty, and that's when you become the hero of your life. I can not just change my story, but transform myself into being whatever I want to be, and that's really empowering.

MS: You’ve lived many lives and play many different roles in your current day-to-day. You’ve even shared on your podcast some lessons that you’ve learned when you turned 40. How is this season in your life different?

SZ: I know who I am, and I am not afraid to get to know myself even more, all the dark and twisty bits, not just the good stuff. I know, with that knowledge, I can alchemize it to light. I'm also no longer afraid of difficult emotions or situations. Whenever something triggers me or is frightening, I really lean into it, because the only way out of fear, pain, and grief is through it. You can't suppress anything.

I think the biggest change, as well as turning 40, is actually I’m in my “why not?” era. I have shed the people pleasing need for outward validation aspect, which really ruled my life. I was able to let go of that, and there's so much freedom and so much potential. It's so exciting, because now I feel like, hey, I can do this! Because why not? Who says that I can't do it? Why not try something new? Why not reincarnate myself? Why do I need to have only one career path or one role? In that light, I just released a song! For someone who thought she could never sing, even though I love music. Turns out, I just had to write my own songs (and my friends who helped me put them to music). It was a gift for Scott’s 50th birthday, a personal endeavor, a poem that I wrote for him during the pandemic. And, it turned out to be so nice. And all the people who worked on it were like, Let's release it! And I'm like, why not? Old Steph would have been like, 'What are people gonna say'?

I don't give people that energy to say those things about me anymore. I want to reiterate that to all the women and people out there, if you want to do something, go ahead. It doesn't matter if you, quote, unquote, fail or it's not successful, if you enjoy doing it or if it was fun, then why not go for it, right? It's actually so liberating to do things that are fun and happy without any kind of monetary goal or objective. I don't need to be the next Ariana Grande or pop star. It was just fun to make a song, write, collaborate with artists, see the music-making process, how it was produced, and then to put it out there in the world is fun. I'm actually working on two more!

MS: What’s the best thing about being a woman in this day and age?

SZ: We can do whatever we want to be and there are a lot more support systems for that. It really lies up to us to know that the possibilities are endless, that we are infinite, and that we are powerful in our nurturing, gentle way. We have our own ways about the world, and it's actually our purpose to operate with that beautiful, divine feminine energy, not to try and operate like a woman trying to be a man in a man's world. We have to bring balance to it, not try to replicate it. 

I think that it’s really quite beautiful and exciting that a lot of women are also just supporting each other, which I would say 15 years ago, was not necessarily the case. There's a lot of competition, and now, all my friends, we support each other's businesses, posts, careers, and we're just also open with each other. It's really, really beautiful to see the community of women come together.