MY STORY

There was a time when I thought healing meant getting back to who I was before the trauma. I was wrong.

I'm Maria Dominique Lopez - trauma-informed coach, certified meditation instructor, and Reiki Master. But before any of those titles, I was a person learning - slowly, imperfectly, radically - that healing isn't about returning to something. It's about becoming someone new.

I've walked through my own seasons of trauma. I know what it feels like when rest feels dangerous, when your wounds are ones the world tells you to hide, push through, or pray away.

In 2019, something cracked open. A surge of energy moving through my hands during meditation turned into a calling — not just to heal myself, but to guide others doing the same. I went on to certify in Reiki, trauma-informed coaching, and meditation, and I began examining the systems around us: the colonized thinking and survival conditioning that keep so many of us locked out of our own healing.

That's when I understood what now sits at the center of everything I do:

Healing is not passive. Healing is resistance.

When you choose to heal in a world that profits from your pain - that is a radical act.

Here, we don't just manage symptoms. We dismantle the internal architecture of oppression and build something freer in its place.

Your healing is political. Your healing is powerful. And it belongs to you.

WHAT IS REIKI?

Reiki Ryoho Usui is a Japanese healing practice whereby the practitioner channels the Universal Life Force that exists on a quantum level in everyone and everything into the recipient to promote physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual healing and balance. This is usually a hands-on practice, but can also be given over the greatest of distances by building an energetic bridge from practitioner to recipient. The word Reiki is made of two Japanese words - Rei which means “God’s Wisdom or the Higher Power” and Ki which is “Life Force Energy.”

So Reiki is actually “Spiritually Guided Life-Force Energy.”