Author: Lucia Matuonto

How do we love ourselves in a world made to point out our flaws?I have spent much of my life grappling with myself, my weight, my height, my disability and my general sense of value as a person.  Entirely magnified by social media, how do we disconnect from a constantly connected world and recognise ourselves in the mirror again?  I have spent a lot of time reflecting on who I am, literally looking into the mirror, asking this question.  I do not claim to know everything, but I hope these words leave you with some peace: – You are enough…

This October, The Relatable Voice (The RV) is starting a new weekly series airing on Saturdays called “Carpooling with The RV”. Every week on Carpooling with the RV, the episode will be dedicated to one specific and relatable topic: education, physical and mental health, grief, immigration, history, etc. Each episode will have two to three experts all relating to said specific topic. They will offer different perspectives and information about the subject, but it will also allow listeners to dive deeper and learn more. The RV was born in February 2021 at the peak of lockdown. Lucia Matuonto came up…

Addiction, recovery, and the forces that drive them make for some of literature’s most compelling reading. Those of us who seek others’ reflections on the often horrific path toward death or redemption have a treasure trove to visit and revisit, from Baudelaire to Bukowski, Dorothy Parker to Anne Sexton. Every such work is a travelogue, and the journey, on the continuum from AAA magazine to The Divine Comedy, is only as interesting as the writer who has lived and is telling it. Add Nadia Bruce-Rawlings’s compelling Driving In The Rain to the list of must-reads. Like her harrowingly powerful first…

One year while teaching Spanish at a local high school, Jennifer Degenhardt had a couple of classes who were struggling with the language. Thinking there must be a better way to grab their interest and attention, she wrote them a short novel, La chica nueva. “I wrote the basic story in a week,” she says. After reading the first several chapters, the students began to ask what was going to happen next. It was then that Degenhardt knew she was onto something. La chica nueva is about a Hispanic girl, Taruka, who moves into a non-diverse town. Taruka faces many challenges…

If one may ask, “Where do ideas for plot lines and characters develop?” An author may answer, imagination or … real life. Such was the idea that sprang to life within my imagination after visiting the St. Augustine Wild Reserve, in St. Augustine, Florida, US. Known as an ‘Old Folks Home for Big Cats,’ such as lions, panthers, cougars, tigers, etc…  These beautiful big cats are the leftovers brought from around the world to this WildLife Reserve. Leftovers from TV shows, movies, and those harbored as pets until the big cats decide to bite your head off! Ouch!! A fan of quirky titles and…

On todays’s episode of the Relatable Voice Podcast, we had a nice talk with Nicole Thomas. Nicole is a wife, mother and first-time published author of the book “The Tales of El-Hanai”. The fastest way to see the world and experience adventures without limits is to open a book. Reading has always been my favorite thing to do, it is what I would rather be doing at any and all times of the day and night. In 2019 I reached a point in my life where I felt stagnant, I needed direction and a fresh start. As a Christian I…

As a spiritual guide, Shytei Corellian has spent a lifetime in spiritual pursuits. She holds a bachelors in Spiritual Counseling and is working on her Masters in Metaphysical Science. She is a Qi Gong and Meditation instructor, and communicates frequently with her guides, gaining metaphysical, universal, and personal insights. She wrote her first story at nine, and began writing novels at fourteen. For Shytei, the mystical has always been unavoidable. Though she long kept the truth secret, her writing is made up of memories of other lives, other people, and other worlds. She’s never worked out a plot, made an…

Lucio Carlos Gil talks about dynamic meditation with Lucia Matuonto 1.  What is exactly dynamic meditation? Different from the Transcendental Meditation, the Dynamic Meditation enables you to conduct your energy, during the meditation process, to work a specific feeling and/or achieve a specific goal, whatever would that be: a material goal (for example, you wanna buy a new house or you want a new job) or a spiritual goal (such as “what type of life you would like to have? How would you like to interact with people? How would you like people to see you? How to expand love…

The Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, in the Pacific Northwest, home to Olympic National Park, was the last unexplored wilderness in the continental United States.  A jagged complex of mountains, forests, rivers, glaciers, and snow fields, these mountains are the beginning of a great coastal rain forest that extends from the Olympic Peninsula north and west against the Gulf of Alaska all the way to the Bering Sea and the North Pacific. Still wild, remote, and mysterious, this arc of forest, mountains and shore is the setting for a series of tales about an ornery young girl, her grandfather and his…

The idea that when somebody is diagnosed with cancer we must kill the cancer before the cancer kills them, is a deadly and unscientific mythology that has resulted in the unnecessary suffering and death of millions of people. Only if a cancer cell or tumor is viewed as some kind of monster-like creature that’s hell-belt on killing the patient can the use of knives, poison injections and ionizing radiation be justified as treatments.If Cancer Inc. were to ever admit what has been known scientifically for over 150 years – that cancerous tissue is simply a collection of damaged cells, and…