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EnlightenDXB

Episode 11

From Shadow to Sovereignty: Integrating Light and Dark Archetypes with Laura Deva

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About This Episode

In this powerful episode of The Enlighten DXB Podcast, host Erika Masako Welch sits down with transformational guide, psychotherapist, and ISTA faculty member Laura Deva for a soul-stirring conversation on healing, power, and personal transformation. Together, they explore the mystic’s path — one that calls us to integrate both light and shadow, and reclaim all parts of ourselves. Laura shares her profound journey of descension, from confronting a life-threatening illness to navigating unconventional and often misunderstood realms of human experience. These moments became gateways for deep insights into identity, power dynamics, and emotional sovereignty. This episode dives into the potency of shadow work, group healing, and archetypal integration, while shedding light on how mystery schools and embodied practices can help us access wholeness. Whether you’re on a journey of awakening or walking the edge between the mystical and the real, Laura’s story is a reminder of the power found in reclaiming what we once pushed into the dark.

Special Guest Profile

Laura Deva is a transformational guide, psychotherapist, and ISTA faculty member devoted to awakening embodied sovereignty and soulful power. With over 15 years of global experience, she weaves deep psychology, sacred sexuality, trauma alchemy, and ancient temple arts into potent spaces of healing and rebirth. Trained in clinical and criminal psychology, and rooted in tantric and shamanic lineages, Laura holds a fierce yet tender container for radical transformation. Whether through her private practice in Geneva or international workshops and rites of passage, she leads seekers home to their bodies, their truth, and their divine essence.

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Laura Deva

transformational guide, psychotherapist, and ISTA faculty member

Laura Deva is a transformational guide, psychotherapist, and ISTA faculty member devoted to awakening embodied sovereignty and soulful power. With over 15 years of global experience, she weaves deep psychology, sacred sexuality, trauma alchemy, and ancient temple arts into potent spaces of healing and rebirth. Trained in clinical and criminal psychology, and rooted in tantric and shamanic lineages, Laura holds a fierce yet tender container for radical transformation. Whether through her private practice in Geneva or international workshops and rites of passage, she leads seekers home to their bodies, their truth, and their divine essence.

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Rita Hraiz

Spiritual Visionary, Sacred Artist, and Modern Mystic

Rita Hraiz is a spiritual visionary, sacred artist, and modern mystic devoted to awakening the divine feminine and guiding souls back to their truth. As a lifelong student of Ageless Wisdom and a keeper of the Shambhala flame, Rita weaves ancient teachings with modern consciousness to help others embody love, purpose, and radiant presence. Through her transformational work in color alchemy, soul mentorship, and conscious fashion, she empowers seekers to walk the path of beauty, integrity, and inner liberation. Rita is not just a teacher—she’s a mirror, a catalyst, and a voice for the rising light of a new humanity.

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Alice Hong

Pleasure & Embodied Feminine Leadership Coach

Alice Hong is an Embodied Feminine Leadership Coach and Tantra teacher. She helps passionate women create lives that turn them ON – in love, life, and business, so that they can have more aliveness, pleasure and financial wealth. She’s supported thousands of women and hundreds of men create greater intimacy, passion and purpose in their lives by connecting to the wild wisdom of their bodies, increasing access to pleasure, and equipping people with tangible tools that align actions with soul purpose, so people can move forward with their lives in a powerful way.

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Daniel Li Ox

QiGong Master, Zen Buddhist Monk

Daniel Li Ox is a Traditional Chinese Medicine Doctor, Medical Qi Gong Teacher, and an ordained Zen Buddhist Monk. He is also the Founder of ZenCleanz, a revolutionary detox and cellular nutrition product that helps us cleanse with the power that comes from the enzymes of fruits and plants that have been fermented for three years.

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Nikola Jurisic

Cultural Transfiguration Catalyst

Nikola is a spiritual warrior, cultural transfiguration catalyst and a leading global expert in building values driven systems and organizations at scale. He brings a career of experience working on culture with hundreds of organizations and systems around the world, blending more structured organizational approaches with more intuitive work. He is the Managing Partner of Transfiguration Advisory, where he works with corporations and institutions on broad systemic and cultural change. Prior to building his own consultancy, Nikola lead McKinsey’s culture and change work across more than 90 countries in Eastern Europe, the MIddle East and Africa (EEMA). Nikola is also the Founder of Project Light, a non-profit organization focused on processing collective trauma and supporting the collective healing work within the Balkans, where he was born and raised. He brings a wide range of divergent perspectives, and weaves them together as a self-described ‘free radical’. His top three values are learning, fun and adventure, and excellence. Nikola also takes private one-to-one clients from the executive leadership space.

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Fadi Rifaai

Singer of Sufi Poetry

Fadi Rifaai is a Syrian artist, singer, actor, and writer, who was born and raised in Dubai. Though he has acted in films, he has a particular love of producing art and interacting with the world through his gift in a live format. He has a particular penchant for Sufi poetry and a love of Sufi wisdom, which comes live through his classical singing and sufi sound journeys. Beyond playing curated shows, at various theatres across Dubai, he also plays at deeply healing and transformative retreats – and creates journeys for private events as well. You can connect with him on Instagram. 

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MayBritt Searty

Family Constellations Therapist

May-Britt is an esteemed international therapist with over 30 years of experience in personal development, natural health, and spiritual psychotherapy. Certified in a wide array of therapeutic modalities, she holds expertise in 3-in-1 Kinesiology, Counseling, Coaching, Osho Therapy, Family Constellation, Trauma-Related Systemic Constellation, Kundalini Yoga, and various bodywork techniques, including Cranio-Sacral Therapy. Additionally, she is a trained Naturopath.

Throughout her career, May-Britt has facilitated hundreds of workshops and conducted thousands of one-on-one sessions, impacting lives across the globe. Born in Greenland and raised in Denmark, she has accumulated a wealth of life and work experience from living and working in 12 countries across three continents, including the UK, Bahrain, Kenya, Egypt, Nigeria, Germany, Qatar, and the UAE.

May-Britt’s holistic approach is both transformative and integrative, merging spirituality and psychology to create a nurturing environment where clients can embark on their unique journeys of healing and growth. She intuitively and directly engages with the human energy field, offering guidance and resolution for personal and career issues.

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Liberty Gelderloos

Liquid Flow & Womb Steam Practitioner, Menstrual Cycle Coach

Liberty coaches women, advocating for menstrual cycle awareness. She helps women reconnect with their wombs, and also facilitates womb-healing practices as a certified womb steam practitioner and devoted plant medicine womban. Driven by a passion to empower women, Liberty has been sharing the profound benefits of womb steaming since 2019, bridging the gap between tradition and modern self-care.

Since 2022, Liberty has also been facilitating transformative experiences in water as a Certified Liquid Flow Practitioner, trained through Watsu India, under the Worldwide Aquatic Bodywork Association (WABA). Liberty’s work aims to create a sanctuary for individuals to simply just be.

Liberty has also curated and created her own line of womb steaming products, from the steam herbs to drinkable teas, and the womb steaming chair. Find out more by visiting sheisliberty.com

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Rike John

Embodied Love & Relationship Coach

Rike is a VITA certified love and relationship coach working with the modalities of Internal Family Systems (IFS), Nonviolent Communication (NVC), and Authentic Relating, infused by her background in Tantra and modern mystery schools. She works with clients from around the world using various methods such as shadow work, embodiment and somatic practices, as well as inner parts work and practical communication tools and processes for couples and individuals. When you meet her, you realize she’s built for this; she provides a safe space for deep healing – as if it’s in her blood. But she’s lived a few lives already, from working in the corporate world, to the startup world, and then spending several years in tantric and sex positive spaces. She is now based in Dubai, working with clients in-person and online, to help them feel the love, connection and joy that they desire.

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Roos Veerle Krijnen

Personal Coach, Medicine Journey Facilitator, Yogi & Tantrika

For over a decade, Roos has been working with the intelligence of the body and facilitating fungi medicine journey’s to help people connect with their intuition, inner knowing and internal instructions. As soon as you meet her, you’ll see that she’s a deeply rooted and earthy being. Roos pulls from many schools of thought to weave sacred healing spaces infused with her Psychology education and her work in Tantra and Conscious Sexuality, Breathwork and Psychedelics, as well as the Art of Gathering.

She runs medicine journey retreats, tantra retreats, and facilitates 1-on-1 coaching trajectories. Roos works with clients to embrace their naked truth and follow nature’s guiding principles to purify whatever needs to be purified – which ultimately always results in the frequency of pure love.

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Nathan Marcuzzi

Energy & Bodyworker, Breathwork Facilitator

Nathan is a bodyworker and energy healer, travelling the world and educating people on how to access and clear their energy body. He does this through breathwork, de-armouring, and what he calls full-body ecstatic experiences – which uses Kundalini energy to open the body up to greater joy and aliveness. He weaves many modalities together, including sound healing and shamanic journeying.

Nathan has been a lifelong yogi, committed to a hatha yoga and meditation practice since the age of 14. He’s a certified Reiki energy worker, and has studied sacred sexuality through ISTA, rebirthing breathwork, and trauma care practices in a 500 hour kolo informed program. He heals with sound as well as shamanic journeying.

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Erika Masako Welch

Spiritual Warrior & Podcast Host

Erika is a Japanese-Canadian Dubai-transplant that has called the Middle East her home for the past 15+ years. She’s an empath, a heart-warrior, community builder, entrepreneur, dog-mum, and eudaimonia practitioner – which she describes as someone that seeks “a life lived meaningfully well”. Erika has been a spiritual seeker on the spiritual warrior path for most of her life; curious about the human condition, and how to interact and relate more authentically with others, all in the name of creating deeper intimacy. 

Erika is a multi-dimensional being balancing the aliveness of being plugged into the matrix as an entrepreneur and business-woman, while providing safe spaces for her and others to unplug, anchor back into ourselves, and connect into source. She’s studied Neurobiology and Psychology at McGill University, Sustainability and Leadership at the University of Cambridge, and received her Executive MBA from Stanford University. She’s also studied design thinking at the d.school and had a keen interest in researching the intersection of technology and well-being. She has also studied at multiple Mystery Schools including the International School of Temple Arts (ISTA) working with coaches and facilitators from around the world exploring various types of shamanism, energy work, body work, tantra and sacred sexuality, and has opened her mind and heart to journey with plant medicines from around the world. 

She’s always been a community builder, serial-connector, and human-first being; she’s been running women’s circles in Dubai for years and is one of the ISTA alumni community leaders in Dubai. She’s worked in over 40 countries, and travelled to over 70; she loves to learn from all cultures and peoples. Erika decided to bring this Podcast to life because she’s met so many divine beings along her healing journey; many of whom she wishes to help amplify their voices and bring their healing gifts to Dubai. EnlightenDXB is all about levelling-up together in community, in tribe; particularly here in Dubai, where the healing community is still in its nascency. Erika works with global practitioners of all kinds to bring their work to this dynamic city.

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