🍃 About She Leads, She Receives She Leads, She Receives is my new interview series on The Polarity Podcast, featuring women who lead powerfully in business and have learned, sometimes the hard way, how to stay connected to love while chasing their dream. For some of these women, building a business put pressure on their relationship, and they found their way back to each other. For others, a relationship ended, and they came out the other side wiser and more whole. Some have discovered how to lead boldly at work while staying soft, open, and connected at home. However each story unfolded, I believe it could be exactly what another woman needs to hear. This series is about finding the balance of doing it all without sacrificing love and family. I’m Darlene Cook, a somatic relationship guide for driven women who are building their dream and quietly feeling their relationship drift. I’m an occupational therapist with over 20 years in nervous system science, and helping couples come back into connection after drifting is my specialty. As an ambitious woman, you have reached a certain definition of “success”. You have built, (or you are building) something extraordinary. You lead, you decide, you solve, and you carry more than most people will ever see. Still, there may be one part of your life that hasn’t followed the rest: love that truly matches the woman you have become. In this first episode of She Leads, She Receives, I sit down with Riana Malia, a brilliant woman who knows this terrain from the inside. Her story moves from a lonely early marriage, through betrayal, loss, and starting over, all the way to the greatest love of her life. Along the way, she created the method she now uses to help hundreds of women change the wiring that decides who they choose. 🌸 Before You Read Another Word, Take the ELI Riana’s free Extraordinary Love Index, lovingly called the ELI, is the very best place to begin. * It is 30 questions and takes about 12 minutes. * You receive a personal portrait of about ten pages that shows what is actually standing between you and extraordinary love. * It is for you whether you are single, dating, or married. * Riana has promised it will always be free, so please share it with every woman in your life. 👉 Take the ELI now at taketheeli.com 🍃 Meet Riana Malia Riana Malia is a Board Certified Integrative Neurosomatic Practitioner and identity architect for high achieving women who’ve built an extraordinary life, except for the one thing they want most: love that matches it. She works at the level where insight and knowledge can’t reach, and in a decade of private practice she’s helped hundreds of women change the wiring that was deciding who they chose. Riana has been featured on CBS, NBC, Fox, and The Chronicle. She writes for women on Substack in her publication, The Last Piece. Beyond her work, Riana is first and foremost a mama to a daughter who will soon turn 23 and recently graduated from college in San Diego. She was born in Maui, spent her childhood summers in her grandfather’s horse barn in the tiny town of Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, and now lives in California. She is also about to celebrate her third wedding anniversary with a love she once believed would never happen for her. 🍃 Her Story: Knowing and Choosing Live on Two Different Planes Riana married at 23, before she truly knew who she was. It became a lonely marriage, and after the birth of their miracle daughter, they separated when her little girl was six. She did everything women are told to do. She talked it through in therapy, leaned on her girlfriends, and filled journals. All of it helped to a point, yet she found that the more she stayed in the story, the more the story stayed with her. A few years later, her father, who had rarely been part of her life, invited her to move across the country to take over a family business. Every part of her knew she couldn’t trust him. She still chose to go, moving her mother, two horses, three cats, and her daughter from a Minnesota winter to Northern California. “This is where I talk about knowing and choosing living on two different planes. I knew, and I still chose. We do that all the time in life.” The first months felt magical. Then, one December day, she discovered her father’s business was the subject of a federal investigation. In one moment, the relationship with her father was over, she was several hundred thousand dollars in debt, and she was alone in a state where she barely knew a soul. She made the choice to stay and keep her promise to her daughter not to uproot her again. Carrying what she called a mountain of evidence that something was wrong with her, Riana began dating for the first time and found herself in a relationship that hurt her deeply. Leaving it became her line in the sand. She declared, never again, and she began searching for a different path, one that didn’t require retelling the same painful story for another twenty years. What she found became the foundation of her life’s work, and within weeks there were parts of herself she no longer recognized, in the very best way. 🍃 Why Insight Alone Is Not Enough You may have read every book and done years of therapy. You know your patterns, your triggers, and the moment at seven years old when you decided you had to be perfect to be loved. Riana honors all of that awareness as the foundation. Still, she explains, knowing is not the same as rewiring. * Your conscious mind is only about ten percent of who you are, and the other ninety percent is where your patterns actually live. * When you gain awareness without replacing the old wiring, your unconscious mind fills the empty space with what it already knows, even when what it knows is painful. * Familiar feels safe to the unconscious mind, which is why chaos can feel like home if you grew up inside it. * Most of who you are was shaped between birth and age seven. As Riana asks, would you let a five year old make your life decisions at fifty? “We don’t get what we want. We get who we are.” Riana compares it to tuning a radio. Everything you desire is playing on your favorite station, yet much of the time your unconscious is tuned to a station you can’t stand. You won’t hear your favorite song there, no matter how hard you listen. The work is changing the frequency itself. 🍃 The Extraordinary Love Method: Clear, Create, Claim “How many times do we hear, I want a different story? To which I say, you have to stop telling the old one.” Riana walks through five clearings, each one opening the door to something new: * Clear the story to create the life. You can’t write a new chapter while you keep rereading the old one. * Clear the patterns to create the partnerships. Patterns left running bring you more of what you don’t want, in love, friendship, and business. * Clear the cycles to create the confidence. Life moves in cycles, and once you clear them, you can trust your own yes and your own no again. * Clear the resentment to create the results. When you notice procrastination or self sabotage, Riana invites you to ask what you are resenting. * Clear the loss to create the love. Even a relationship you knew you had to leave carries a loss that deserves to be cleared. The Love Standard: Ordering From Your Own Menu After clearing, you create what Riana calls the Love Standard, a deep exploration of your values, your non negotiables, and your desires. She describes it as ordering from a menu. If you sit down at a restaurant and ask for a drink, a salad, a protein, and a vegetable, you might receive iced tea, a Caesar salad, and roasted chicken. You got exactly what you ordered. What you truly wanted, though, was a glass of champagne, an arugula salad with fresh figs and goat cheese, and a gorgeous piece of halibut in beurre blanc. Saying you want someone kind, generous, and fond of travel is ordering a beverage and a salad. Specificity is what brings you the meal you actually desire. With your menu in hand, you can often know within a single conversation whether someo… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wildfemme.substack.com/subscribe
