We recently had the chance to connect with Cara H. Cadwallader and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Cara H., thank you for taking the time to reflect back on your journey with us. I think our readers are in for a real treat. There is so much we can all learn from each other and so thank you again for opening up with us. Let’s get into it: What battle are you avoiding?
Most people look at my life and view me as extremely courageous. Living outside the proverbial “box,” I have spent the past six years world, road and unschooling my son across our planet. (We have even boat schooled in French Polynesia!) Along the way, we have called both southern Ecuador and Mexico home, while 2025 has seen us primarily living in Egypt. This past summer, we also backpacked through Europe for two months. The bravest part of our journey is that I do this as a lone mother who is a widow living on a very nominal and fixed income! I live on faith and lean into discomfort and this is what people admire about me from the outside.
However, there is always an internal battle that most don’t see. Mine is with a primal fear that if I completely reveal who I am to our world – from the way I allow my gut instinct and intuition to guide my life choices to how I can ‘see in the dark’ the things that others try really hard to hide – then I will lose my life (just as I have in many lifetimes that have come before.) Like a little girl trembling before an invisible monster, I have spent most of my adult years running away from and avoiding the confrontation of this fear head on.
Sauntering through life like a black cat, my preference is to see while rarely being seen. Anonymity feels safest. Shying away from external attention, I am no longer the performer that I once was in my teen years. These days, I prefer to fit and blend in – not stand out. I surround myself with women and children because this feels the wisest. And yet… my soul’s purpose is wrapped up in how I came here to Love. More specifically, how I came here, in this lifetime, to help transmute toxicity from a sticky, destructive goo into a joyful, connected return to wholeness.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
As an embodiment artist, I have spent my life studying, performing and teaching dance. While earning my master’s degree, dance became both a healing tool for transforming our lives (from pain and sorrow to power and connection) as well as a philosophy that I live my life by. (E.g. How do we sew the same grace and ease that we weave on the dance floor into our day-to-day relationships?)
Embodiment is simply the act of coming down from largely residing in our heads and thoughts to being fully connected to our authentic self. This means that we know what we are feeling at all points in time; that we can express what is in our hearts out through out mouths; and that we have a strong sense of our personal boundaries – of where we begin and end, and where others do the same.
Our bodies are the vehicles through which we lead our lives. I guide people back into their bodies and I help them to source the healing and answers that they are seeking from deep within themselves. To be embodied is to be a fully empowered, sovereign being – I wish embodiment for everyone.
I offer Dance Medicine sessions, courses and trainings, as well as Emotional Fitness Coaching. A coach and consultant, my sessions can make your team a tribe and leave you feeling joyful and connected along with a sense of belonging (in 90 minutes, or less!)
Motherhood is my #1 job right now though and, as I have chosen an alternative path (called worldschooling), this requires more focus and energetic output on my end. As a result, I also offer my traveling and educational consultation services to others. As a writer, I am in the trenches of telling our tale of loss, survival and healing during the time of Covid and across our planet through my forthcoming book, called The Mama Caravan.
Okay, so here’s a deep one: What relationship most shaped how you see yourself?
My relationship with my mother has long been the most complicated relationship in my life. I always say that she is the most powerful “witch” in my life, as my mother is known to cast spells. She will repeat the same things, over and over, until they come true – even if it’s things she doesn’t really want for herself, or others. She also raised my siblings and I with ideas about premonition through our dreams (called deja vu) and intuiting things that are going to happen. As well, she is a masterful storyteller who can keep people spellbound by her tales.
She was also mentally unstable. Her moods could swing from moments of hearty jubilee to a red hot rage that spared no one in our household. We didn’t know what to expect, or when a dark cloud could suddenly appear overhead. Daily life often felt unsafe and unpredictable. As an adult, I live with low grade anxiety due to how I was raised.
My mother was like the ocean. I came to fear my own emotional body in response. I feared that strong emotions would overtake me, like a tsunami, and drown me in their deep, black void. It’s taken me a long time to come back into alignment with my physical, mental and emotional bodies.
As the youngest of three, I was also left alone at a foundational age to be shaped by my mother. She was the strongest force in my life that I marveled at but that I was also caught up in a codependent relationship with in which I wasn’t allowed to have my own boundaries. Emotional neglect along with verbal and physical abuse were part of the package too. It took me a long time to disconnect from this dysfunction and tune into all of the toxic shame that had been handed down to me as both intergenerational trauma and with the experience of being both of my parent’s daughter.
At one time, my sense of self was highly based in ego identity – like, identifying myself by my name, or where I am from and what I do – along with external validation. I once received way too much attention for how I looked and this, along with a lack of healthy guidance at home, did not serve me well. And yet….my relationship with my mother – both the good and the bad – gave me a strength of spirit that makes me nearly indomitable.
I am wise and brave. I trust myself and my ability to get out of any situation that arises. I am hearty and whole in my experiences of both the light and the dark here on planet Earth.
When did you stop hiding your pain and start using it as power?
Healing isn’t linear, and it is extremely messy. For me, the path towards my healing meant claiming my victimhood.
I was just a child. I didn’t deserve or ask for the pain and suffering that I was raised in.
Around 2010, I became more vocal in sharing about my early childhood trauma. At that time, I kept an online blog in which I would often write about my experiences. My family felt this was disloyal and judged me for this choice. But others would say, “Me too!” and “I understand,” and I felt less
alone. Still there was so much toxic shame that I had internalized, and that was still being thrust upon me, that I hadn’t yet claimed my power.
It was around 2017 when I started to become the most authentic version of myself by honestly acknowledging how I was feeling. “I feel miserable,” I finally
began to admit aloud to both myself and others. This didn’t mean that I didn’t experience fleeting moments of joy – because I did – it just meant that I lived in a regular state of heaviness.
It was as though there was always a weighted blanket draped around my shoulders. No matter how many ceremonies I sat in; how much healing I did; or how many friends I had; the weight of it wouldn’t ease up. So, I began to stay with my authentic feelings, even when I was out in public. When I felt bitchy, I would just tell people so. Not as a means to push them away, but rather as a vulnerable share so that others could understand how I was feeling and we could still experience a sense of connection. When I felt sad and unable to joyfully greet others, then I would refrain from doing so and instead I would just wave my hand at them and maintain a peaceful distance so as to respect all of us.
As the years continued to pass, my little family and I downsized our southern California life and headed south of the USA border for worldschooling; my partner’s cancer returned to claim his life; and then Covid came. Along the way, I have grown to feel grateful for all of it while also learning how to receive the mixed blessings of my life as exactly this. It’s all a blessing – it’s just a matter of taking the raw, source material and transforming it into the lessons that our souls came here to learn. This is the alchemical process that we call magic and it is available to all of us at any point in time.
Next, maybe we can discuss some of your foundational philosophies and views? What are the biggest lies your industry tells itself?
Western psychologists and American healers are largely missing three, crucial components in understanding our highest health and well-being:
1.) There’s too much focus on individualism and not enough understanding that our wholeness is rooted in our connection – to each other, our planet and ourselves. Talking on and on about oneself maintains the “I” in Illness. We need to become reinvested in the “WE” in Wellness. There is no real healing on an individual level if the healing of our collective is not an intrinsic part of our plan. We should all be committed to our collective struggle. Instead, we are sold lies that we are suffering from diagnoses that keep us disconnected and unable to participate in something greater than just our own separate lives. (I.e. Feel depressed? Get outside and start weeding a garden. Keep tending to the garden, every single day, until you start to feel better.)
2.) Planetary patterns over the past 5,000+ years have a real effect on all of us. The way women and men have been raised and conditioned; the main myth that underlies our global systems; and the fallout of both of these on our physical, mental and emotional bodies, has real time consequences on the way we relate to and with each other. Common refrains within pop-spirituality and pseudo-science can be heard to say that we attract how we are and that if we just change our own frequency then we will draw a different outcome.
Yes, and…
(see lie #1. As well)
We have to turn towards and address the inequities and injustices that exist in our material world around us right now. These are fabricated after all. Until we do this, the majority of us will be sleepwalking through life while erroneously believing that the only thing that matters is that “we work on ourselves.”
And 3.) Our greatest intergenerational trauma that we have all inherited is toxic shame. Toxic shame is the #1 killer of all relationships and intimacy. It grows between us, creating more and more separation but it is invisible and hard to distinguish. Especially when it has been ours, and our dominant world culture’s, main operating system for the past five-thousand+ years.
Toxic shame is an insidious, unconscious voice deep within us that believes that we are unworthy of the joy and connection that we were born for. It maintains separation out of fear of being found out – that we aren’t good enough exactly as we are, for example. Toxic shame looks and sounds like defensiveness, guardedness, and an unwillingness to be vulnerable. Toxic shame can feel numb and like humiliation and rejection. Addiction is often rooted in toxic shame. Toxic shame can behave in a controlling manner. And those suffering from it can believe themselves to be either superior or inferior to others
A huge lie the health and wellbeing industry tells us is that all shame is bad. But we actually want to feel ashamed when we hurt someone – either purposefully, or accidentally. When we experience guilt, we are more likely to take action to rectify this feeling within us. Not experiencing healthy shame is an indicator that someone is gravely mentally unwell. Unearthing toxic shame and transforming it into worthiness is the greatest internal pursuit that we can undertake today.
Okay, so let’s keep going with one more question that means a lot to us: What are you doing today that won’t pay off for 7–10 years?
I am raising my son alone, in a way that I wasn’t. I am largely doing this outside of ‘the system.’ Many people, especially the elders/grandparents in our life, don’t understand how my son will have the skills to apply for advanced degrees, or to get a professional, well paying job in the future. My take on it is that the future that is coming will look nothing like the future that our parents, and even we, looked forward to. I can’t see the future. Rather, I only intuit that the skills my son will need to be successful ten years down the road are cooperation, resilience and adaptability.
I don’t know how all our current travel and life experiences are adding up to make my son into the man that he will become. What I do know is that I am doing my best to be both the emotionally stable mother to him that I never had as well as the wise, disciplinarian father that I never had (and that he could have had if only our life path had been different.)
In seven to ten years, my son will be entering adulthood – ages 18 – 21. My hope is that he doesn’t have to spend years de-conditioning himself from his childhood, or decades excavating his trauma and claiming his healing, as I have had to do. My intention is that he has the skills to succeed at all tasks placed before him, and especially at being a kind and considerate employee/boss, friend, lover and partner.
More than anything, I am raising my son to be a considerate, emotionally available partner one day because connection is what we all need. And with true intimacy we can survive anything. We sustain our human spirit by remaining in loving contact with each other. Truly, love is all we need.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://carahcadwallader.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/youaremagicmama/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cara-cadwallader-queen-bee/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cara.h.cadwallader/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@BEELOVENOW
- Other: https://emotionalfitnessdojo.com
Image Credits
kalanita.com;
