Maria Shiyko, PhD, MMetaph, is a spiritual business and life mentor and the author of three books.
Her first book, “From Russia to Love, a journey of spiritual awakening”, is a memoir about her journey of un-conditioning from her culture as she made the move from her native Smolensk, in Russia, to the USA. From a scientific background, she dived into spirituality whilst in a deeply unhappy marriage. In an effort to help herself, she met her first meditation teacher who helped her transcend the mind and realised that she was not her thoughts only. Which, for someone with a PhD, was remarkable. That’s when she started questioning everything.
It took her five years to write her memoir, and at one point she threw away her manuscript and deleted the file, but the book kept on calling her. And it’s within weeks of it being published that she met her current life partner. She speaks about being Russian in a world where Russia is the enemy and how she wishes to be the inspiration to wake her people from their state of victimhood. We discussed what spiritual leadership means to her.
Her second book is about money, as she realised that pursuing spiritual studies meant somehow negating being human. Mariya left academia, and felt angry and thinking to herself that “There has to be a way for do what I love and make money”. She was determined to break the cycle of being spiritual and being broke.
She followed a writing process that she called channeling, where she connected to the universal energies of Love/God/the Universe and received guidance on how to break that paradigm. She then collaborated with a friend to help her edit the book, and became a co-author of “My brilliant money book: for joyful and creative living”.
Her third book is a collection of 31 stories on “Gifts from Pain” in which she contributed a chapter called from suicide to joyful leadership. This book brings hope to anyone going through hard times and shares tools of inspiration.
To find out about Mariya’s course about Money Mastery, head over to her website www.mariyashiyko.love or on Instragram. To listen to the episode click here.