Meet Onyi

Welcome to our monthly blog: Warrior Women Wednesday, featuring women who are making a positive impact in the holistic community. We seek participants, healers, teachers who are actively engaging in various healing methods, healthy food, physically active lifestyles and teachers of the soul. We want to create a community that shares a quest for a more rounded, holistic approach to life.

For our very first episode of Warrior Women Wednesday, We had the pleasure of interviewing Felicia “ONYI” Richards (also known as ONYI LOVE). If she looks familiar, she is the beautiful model that so graciously appears on our website. As you will see, she truly is beautiful inside and out and embodies the spirit of a Warrior Woman. Read on as she shares her wisdom with us today. 

1) What led you to living a more holistic approach to life?

ONYI: Becoming an adult and encountering people of various walks of life and belief systems (which included the idea of “holistic living”) led to me living more holistically. Additionally, making a conscious decision to heal from various experiences that I had growing up and to step into a deeper awareness about health and wellness, was a huge factor. At a certain point in my life, I felt as though I was at a standstill and didn’t know how to move forward or through much of the despair I was feeling. I had a moment where I literally thought or spoke out loud “I don’t know what to do. I need help.” Not too long after, I was reminded about a 10 day silent meditation retreat and applied for it. The experience changed my life. Shortly after, I joined a discussion and accountability group that was focused on dissolving personal history and uninstalling the mind. During the years that followed those experiences, I began delving more into different aspects of spirituality (including grounding in a traditional ancestral practice); having sessions with various body and energy workers; shifting my diet in ways that supported me; and doing other things to live optimally in all the ways that I could. I know from firsthand experience that our overall health and wellness is determined by how we are doing across all aspects of being.

2) What do you do to help others find this path?

ONYI: Services, Showing by example etc. I am an artist and multi-modality healer; and whether it is through one avenue or the other—or both, as they often overlap—I am reflecting to people messages that center wholeness and healing all parts of ourselves. During individual and group coaching, energy healing, or sound healing, the energy that I channel works to illuminate and identify imbalances and attachment to negative beliefs. How I then communicate or support in shifting what has been identified may look different based various factors, but it is all the same. If there is a specific area in which I am not an expert, then my work is to provide the resources to my clients so that they can receive what they need from elsewhere. I also help others on the path of holistic living through leading by example. To teach what I don’t know or am not experiencing would lack integrity. I make it a daily practice to support all aspects of myself so that I am living as holistically as possible. I have also had or witnessed many transformative experiences when it comes to physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health; and it is through the sharing of the knowledge and wisdom I’ve gained from them that I act as a supportive resource.

3) How do you define what it means to be a warrior woman?

ONYI: If the term “warrior” is being used to speak to power, strength, and taking action to achieve breakthrough, then I’d say that standing in that role means showing up and being whatever there is for you to be, however that looks. For so long, women— and certain groups of women in particular—have been instructed as to how and what to be. Our presence or contributions have not been fully appreciated or honored. We’ve been told that our only purpose is being perceived as objects. Being the power that we are is us saying no to all of that. Choosing to not be defined by society’s standards and making whatever choices are in alignment with our joy and integrity—no matter what those choices are—is us doing something different and thus transforming things. By being a reflection of what we want to see in the world, we provide a reflection to others—regardless of gender identification—of what is possible. I also see that we step into our strength and power when we honor our emotions and allow for our vulnerability to take up space. To me, it’s unfortunate that vulnerability is still considered a sign of weakness to a degree—though much is changing around that. Being vulnerable is one of the strongest actions a person can take.

4) Has there been a specific event, experience that made you more aware of your calling?

ONYI: I don’t know that I would isolate one specific event that made me aware of my calling, as multiple experiences played a part, one building upon or leading to the other. Everything I have experienced thus far—from navigating certain types of chaos in my household, to moving away from certain religious beliefs, to exploring into Afro-diasporic arts, to leaving Corporate America, to going through initiation into an indigenous West African practice—has brought me greater awareness of my calling. And my future experiences will help me continue to chip away at what isn’t me so that I hear that call more clearly. If I had to single out any one element, rather than it being an event, I’d say it was a shift in perspective: making the decision to listen to and follow the messages that were presenting themselves to me at various moments in my life and leading me in the direction that would provide the various lessons I needed to learn.

5) Define what natural beauty means to you.

ONYI: I often chose to see “beauty” from a more spiritual, energetic, and metaphysical perspective. Perhaps this is a way to shift from the hyper-focus on categorizing people/the beauty of people in ways that are exclusive and negating. Humanity has bought into ideas and created standards that take only a small portion of the population into consideration, at the expense of everyone and everything else. Rather than using beauty in a way that lends itself to setting things apart from others as beautiful, I like to see and consider the beauty of everything. So on that note, to me, natural beauty speaks to the energy of recognizing that we are beautiful because we exist. We get to do what there is that is in accordance with our actual natures. If we present ourselves in a certain way aesthetically or take some other action in alignment with our natures, then we are reflecting our natural beauty. When people go about doing things from a place of fear and anxiety, then they are choosing to align with something other than their own natural beauty.

6) Define your view on aging gracefully.

ONYI: To me, aging gracefully is surrendering to and/or being in harmony with and respectful to the biological process we call aging. So many people “fight” or try to avoid aging—or the various aesthetic markers and physical abilities associated with it—for a lot of reasons. When we come from that place of negativity, there is no space for grace and thus gracefulness. In fact, the resistance leads to us taking actions that oftentimes do more damage than good in the long run—though they might have immediate [superficially] positive effects. However, if we see aging as a beautiful and natural process, and we remember our beauty and value through it all, then that is where the gracefulness can truly come in and through. And ironically, coming from these perspectives/beliefs will shift our emotions about aging, and lead to actions (in all directions) that will have positive effects that will manifest physically, sometimes in the most surprising ways.

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