Today we’d like to introduce you to Elizabeth Windham.
Hi Elizabeth, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
We all got to where we are today through all of our experiences leading up to this moment, correct? I believe we are constantly changing and shifting and evolving, and if we are not, then life can get very painful until we do change. I am finding I am showing up in a different way than I was 6 months ago, and yet so much of my journey began 30 years ago as I explored the world as a child. Let’s just say that this journey as The Ecstatic Priestess really started manifesting in my life with dance.
11 years ago I discovered the freedom of dancing at a music festival in Lakewood Amphitheater actually. I had never felt such an open and judgement-free space where I could move my body in any way that felt good to me and even be celebrated for the joy I found in my own dance by the surrounding community. This festival scene opened up for me what it meant to have freedom of self-expression. As I started exploring more festivals around the country and the world, I discovered spaces that gave a glimpse into what communities could look like when we share our art, our music, our food, our water and our dance with each other. I met more and more people who showed up authentically as themselves and had such bright and creative ideas about how to build a more loving and harmonious world. After experiencing the total solar eclipse in Oregon in 2017 with 70,000 other humans at a gathering called “The Global Eclipse Gathering” I decided I wanted to help create communities that supported these spaces of freedom and safety to be yourself without shame or judgment. I just didn’t know how I would do that yet.
During this time of exploration, I moved to Atlanta and have been here for the last ten years with a variety of jobs and apartments throughout the years. I started my career in Atlanta in the service industry, late nights at the bar, cocktailing and bartending, catering to other people’s needs and views of me. I tried to morph myself into the sexy, calm and driven personality that was asked of me in order to get the tips I needed to make rent and provide myself with a life that was as adventurous as I was craving. When I wasn’t traveling, I found freedom in the late-night dance culture to be myself and express myself as wild as I wanted to. I knew I craved freedom but I found that the bar scene and the rave scene had limits to their freedom. I found Kundalini yoga in 2018, just six months after experiencing the Eclipse in Oregon and found freedom in my breath. I discovered a way to feel free as I felt at 2 am dancing in the fields of a festival with my own breath in a Kundalini class at 6 am. This new discovery of freedom found in my own body took me to a new level. I began practicing Kundalini yoga every day with teachers and even took some online courses to deepen my practice.
One of my Kundalini teachers initiated me into Reiki Healing where I became a certified Level II Reiki Healer through her class. I have had multiple Reiki training since as well as an Akashic Records initiation. I studied astrology intensely and still do to this day, have participated in various ceremonies focused on Somatic Intuitive listening, ecstatic dancing, womb healing, and tribal dance. I kept discovering more to learn about my own body and how I was listening to it. It wasn’t until 2020 that I understood how I could show up within my community and share the wealth of knowledge I had learned. I felt that having community during a time of intense isolation was very important so I started organizing small in-person gatherings to honor the Full Moon together in ceremony. My Full Moon ceremonies that I coined “Ecstatic Ceremony” blended together pieces of Kundalini Yoga, Astrology, Ecstatic Dance and Reiki Healing to create a unique elixir of ceremony to connect attendees to their community, their own bodies and the natural cycles of the Earth, the Sun, the Moon and the Stars. I believed that building community that connected to the natural rhythms of the Earth would help all who attended to have more compassion for their own natural cycles and others around them, creating more authentic relationships within ourselves and with each other, leading into a more colorful, harmonious and joyful world to live in.
My offerings with this mission to back them have transformed and changed slightly since I began serving as “The Ecstatic Priestess”. I value collaborations and believe working with others within my community is one of the most important ways I can show up. One collaboration I have going on this year is with local Atlanta artist and photographer Alphonso Whitfield, who coined his watercolor painting experience “Watch P8nt Dry”. We combined my Ecstatic Ceremony formula with his watercolor experience to create an event that meets every turn of the season called “Ecstatic P8nt”. We have met with a group of people on the first day of Spring, Summer, and Fall with the same extra large canvas to group paint and dance upon. Our last gathering will be the first day of Winter this December where we will paint and dance the final layer of colors on the canvas. Once it is dry, we will cut it up and give a piece to everyone who attended to remind us all of the beautiful and colorful tapestries we all weave together as humans on this planet. My other offering that I am collaborating on is a women’s circle that meets quarterly throughout the year coined “Women Who Roar. I co-create this women-only container with Whitney Tougas, an Embodiment and Pleasure Coach. We believe that women need safe spaces to freely express their full range of powerful emotions and expressions without shame, criticism, or judgment for being too much.
When I’m not hosting events that invite you to embrace the fullness and authenticity of you, I manage an art studio in the Virginia Highlands called The Splatter Studio where you can book an hour session to have freedom of self-expression with buckets of paint! I also offer 1:1 Reiki ceremonies in my home studio to clients who want to have a more focused and deeper experience.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
I have never been attracted to the typical life that society laid out for my generation; go to college, get a career, get married, have kids and then teach them to do the same. I didn’t grow up with a “money comes easily to me” attitude either. Since I didn’t know how to, or even where to look for a career that I would enjoy or be good at, I thought that finding someone to marry and have them have the career and dreams would be my best option. So I traveled and adventured in my 20s while working jobs that I never really had to stick around for and waited to get married and have babies. When that married life and kids didn’t surface by the end of my 20s and I thought maybe I should see what I can do in this world? That was not an easy decision because one, did I really know what I wanted? And two, when I found out what I wanted to do was help create a new way of living; a more colorful world; a more loving world, how was I supposed to do that? The ideas I had about how to move about in the world were so different than the way most people thought I should be doing things. They said things like, I can’t create my own business without working for someone else first. That I needed to make lots of money before I decided to do what I love to do. I also had all of my own limiting beliefs about my self-worth and do I even deserve to make enough money to be resourced to do what I love. What is even my business? I want to build spaces of freedom with art and music and dance. I want to help people discover themselves on a deeper level and in order to do that I believe people must have spaces free from judgment. I struggled with making decisions that were spiritually and emotionally aligned with my mission while also financially supporting myself. I grew to learn how to create strong boundaries in my workspaces so that when I worked for other people, I was able to maintain a sense of freedom to be myself.
Thankfully I have had a partner for the past eleven years who has grown with me, learned with me, supported me and cheer-leaded me the whole way; my now fiance Matthew Demarko. He has helped me be able to do what I love, even if I didn’t have any resources to do it. He also helps me believe that I can do big things when my self-doubt gets in the way. I could not have started “The Ecstatic Priestess” if it weren’t for the nudges and pushes that Matt has given me these past three years to just start.
But like I said at the beginning, we are always changing and evolving and this year I experienced a sense of defeat I hadn’t experienced before. I lost the belief in myself and in my mission. I had been wanting to be a big success as The Ecstatic Priestess and with that constant longing for something I believed I didn’t have, the connection to my mission was broken and I felt lost. This summer I stepped away from showing up in my community and experienced a very intense and weepy few months while I explored my own self-worth and what it means to feel deserving of happiness. Externally I was cared for, loved by my friends and family, healthy, I even got promoted at the art studio, but internally I was breaking apart and truly feeling the inner critic of my own worth that I had never let come out before. I am so grateful for this past Summer because through diving into the depths of my shadows I am able to connect to the small and more intimate ways I show up in the community with gratitude and even awe. I am not a big famous success, but the small gatherings I have been creating mean so much to everyone who attended and mean so much to me. I am so thankful to be a part of such a loving community and feel a deeper sense of love for all who I have connected with on this journey.
It is my belief that our struggles help break us out of a pathway or pattern that is no longer aligned with our soul’s mission and I am thankful for the struggles I have had. They have all led me here, more in tune with my why, more in love with my bliss, and so thankful for the changing of the seasons and the moon and all the examples of chances to begin again.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I consider myself a ceremonial Priestess though I do believe that I have years of learning, training and initiation left to fully embody the Priestess title. As a ceremonial Priestess, I step into the role of “space holder” and become a channel for intuitive messages to flow through me for others to hear for their highest and greatest good, some of which I share through Oracle and Tarot card readings, Kundalini yoga and Reiki Healing. I create healing events with the intention of providing judgment-free spaces for others to feel safe to fully express themselves. I love setting up a space with pieces of the ceremony, usually connected to the astrology of the moment as well as symbolic ritualistic pieces that I bring to a space. The elements are important parts of ceremony; a cup or bowl of water, candles for fire, incense for air or feathers, crystals and flowers for Earth. I like to bring in colors that are connected with the astrology, for example right now we are in Sagittarius Season which is a fire element and symbolized by the archer; for a ceremony during this season, I would use red, yellow and orange colors to represent fire and action.
One thing I am known for and take great pride and joy in is building sacred altars for my ceremonies. Altars are my centerpieces and hold all four elements within them as well as oracle cards and crystals to support all who come into the space with energy and messages. One of my favorite parts of building an altar is intuitively selecting flowers to adorn the altar with, sometimes the flowers come to me in a dream the night before a ceremony and I show up to the florist and those same dream flowers are there waiting for me to pick them. Setting intentions is also very special to me as I set the space and even encourage the whole group to share their intentions of why they showed up today. I believe if we can connect to our intentions every day we can live more mindfully and create powerful connections with each other and the moments of our lives.
I suppose I am known for my Full Moon ceremonies, “Ecstatic Ceremony”, which I began in 2020. However, more recently I have become known for my women’s ceremonies “Women Who Roar” and this year’s collab with local artist Watch P8nt Dry, “Ecstatic P8nt” as mentioned before. I also have been blessed with a beautiful home Reiki Studio to host 1:1 clients in and create intimate healing containers for others.
I move with where I feel called the most and right now I feel very called to show up for women to safely express their anger, rage, sensuality and even grief through the container of “Women Who Roar”. My collaborator and I, Whitney Tougas, both honestly feel that the experiences that are had within that container are a part of something much larger than us and we are being called to hold space for the expansive emotional and powerful chaos that wishes to be expressed within the feminine.
Something in the working world that I have tried to break away from with my own work is the sense that I am in competition with anyone. One of my 9 Priestess Vows is “Collaboration over Competition”. I believe I work best when I am collaborating with others and feel I have a power to call others to me to support a unified mission. I believe this comes from my love of music festivals; I want to create experiences that involve teachers, dancers, artists, musicians, herbalists, womb priestesses, all kinds of juicy parts of our human tapestry in one community to inspire us all to build better systems together. We all have a very special and unique voice to give and I want to celebrate that and share those voices out into the community.
We’re always looking for the lessons that can be learned in any situation, including tragic ones like the Covid-19 crisis. Are there any lessons you’ve learned that you can share?
These past three years have been years of deep transformation. Not just within me and my inner circle but truly in the world around us. I believe we all experienced the bliss of and joy of slowing down in 2020 when the whole world was able to take a pause. I also believe the world’s mental health issues were inflamed due to isolation, fear and division. The lessons that were most important to me were that community is key. I worked in the service industry up until 2020 and that industry in Atlanta really pulled through for their community. There were free groceries from local farmers to all servers who worked for Ford Fry. There was free beer from the local breweries given to grocery workers one week, health workers another, and servers/bartenders on another week. Souper Jenny had free food and pantry goods pickups for individuals and families with delicious soups, breads, peanut butters and other gifts from the community.
Farmers started delivering their produce to people since we couldn’t have farmer’s markets. The creativity and the pure amount of “SHOWING UP” was loud in Atlanta and I was very proud to live here during that time. Community to hold each other in dark times was so important, the quality of the people you spent time with was more important/ is more important now. Working together with a group of people within my own community has been so special and one of the things I am most proud of in my life right now. Another lesson for me was learning how to take charge of my own health mentally, physically and emotionally. My partner and I took a year away from drinking alcohol and prioritized learning how to better take care of our own bodies and eat more mindfully; supporting our local farmers and understanding exactly where our food was coming from. We also feel a stronger connection to provide for ourselves by growing our own food and even hunting for our food.
While community and food are very important lessons I have integrated since 2020, my biggest lesson has been finding self-worth when I’m just being me. Not when I’m being “productive” or successful in the ways of finance and fame, but finding joy in the slow moments and believing in my worthiness of love and happiness in all moments, especially the ones where I get to lay in the grass and stare at the clouds for hours.
Contact Info:
- Website: calendly.com/theecstaticpriestess
- Instagram: @the_ecstaticpriestess
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2069746823162065
- Youtube: https://youtu.be/GdJ6KZjxFQ8
- Other: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2069746823162065/media/albums
Image Credits
Matthew Demarko IG @1000wordmirrors
