A little about me…

Hi. I’m so glad we are meeting virtually, me in my little corner of the world and you in yours.

My name is Dana da Ponte and I teach highly sensitive people how to manage their sensitivities and enjoy the intuitive and creative powers that come with them.

I am the host of the Art Journal with the Moon podcast. I also offer intuitive support and free weekly moon updates to help highly sensitive healers and artists discover their inner witch and heal with the magic of lunar cycles.

When I’m not helping highly sensitive people follow their dreams and manage their sensitivities, I’m creating artwork that works with the magic of the moon.

A random fact about me is that I have this tendency to not quite fit in anywhere.

I’m a book worm and word geek, a prairie girl with a trucker mouth and a woo woo channeler. I’m a little bit of a witch (ok, maybe more than a little), a lover of bread (but I have MCAS and can't eat it), a student of astrology with a touch of rebel and trickster in me.

To heal my body (as I said, I have MCAS or otherwise referred to as McAss in my household) I learned how to manage my trauma response, soothe my nervous system and work with my subconscious mind to manage my sensitivities (I have A LOT of them). I'm also inspired to do my part to end the legacy of white supremacy but I also love to doodle and paint while watching old favorites like Star Trek and The Princess Bride. I’m a smorgsborg of personalities. A true Gemini I guess.

Why I do this work…

I LOVE magic and I think we need more of it in our lives and what better place than our art journals to start.

I also believe you don't have to be serious to practice magic or be a witch. You're allowed to dabble. You're allowed to play because YOUR IMAGINATION IS MAGIC! You can use your art journal to heal and create the changes you want to see in your life. It's okay if you can't prove whether or not the moon is actually in tune with your body. It's perfectly alright if you struggle to believe your spirit guides and angels are real or if secretly wonder if magic truly exists. You're allowed to make believe then watch what happens.

And you can start with a paintbrush in your hands (even if you’ve never held one before), laughter in your belly and a box of tissues by your side (just in case).

How it all began…

I knew I wanted to work with highly sensitive healers and artists when I realized how deeply I was affected by my own sensitive nature.

I grew up with gaping emotional voids and unhealed trauma that made me sick, wreaked havoc in my relationships and hurt my self-esteem.

I wasn’t even aware of the unhealthy patterns in my life until I started communicating with the angels for other people.

(Oh, yes! I talk with angels. We can do that in our work together, too.) But it wasn’t until developing my own approach to emotional healing, that I learned  all we ever really want is a feeling. The holes in our lives that look like unrequited love, depression, career failure, stress, anxiety, relationship conflict, loss and pain are simply a reflection of a hole that exists somewhere in our own hearts. Most of these holes were formed in childhood (they also have a deeper spiritual root than I ever imagined but I'll save that conversation for another time).

Most sensitive children, and I was included among them, are not taught how to look within for love, acceptance and security nor were we taught how to embrace our sensitivities and manage them so we could thrive. Instead, we looked to their parents, teachers and the adults in our lives to make us feel whole, safe, loved and like we are good enough. But these adults were children once too with similar unmet emotional needs that were never nurtured. How could they possibly give what they did not have?

I, like so many other sensitive souls, ignored, dismissed and mismanaged my own sensitivities.

This one misdirection set the stage for the unhealthy patterns of my adulthood. My addiction to carbs, my co-dependent relationships that always ended in pain, my crippling insecurities, my anger, resentment and hurt were all seeded in my unmet emotional needs and my inability to value and manage my sensitive gifts.  When I made one tiny shift in understanding and learned how to meet my own emotional needs, the past unraveled and the challenging areas of my life started to change for the better.

What came next…

My life had been built around all these unhealthy patterns and once I no longer needed them, major structures in my life started falling apart.

Imagine purchasing a house only to later learn it was built on a poor foundation. Before you could turn this house into your dream home, some serious restructuring would be required. Walls would need to be torn down. Debris would litter your sacred spaces, chaos would reign and the old faulty structures would have to be carried off to the dump before the stronger new structures were set in their place.

At some point in my own healing, my life looked like demolition day. Major structures in my life were falling apart. Things got really hard before they got better. This is where art quite literally saved my life.

As my life transformed into something I no longer recognized, I sought refuge in front of my canvas. It is there I learned the healing powers of art.

Art soothed me. Art kept me in the present moment. Art revealed my subconscious roadblocks.

When I was playing with art, I was in a space I could easily hear my spirit guides and angels. It was that same space I feel just upon waking up or during a great meditation - that space where the veil between our world and spirit’s seems so thin. Art slipped me into that space and miracles started happening in front of my canvas.

I didn’t know it then but art would become one of my favorite forms of therapy and MAGIC.  And that is what led me here… to inviting you to play and heal with art right alongside me.

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If this seems like something you would enjoy, I’d love for you to explore the services I created for you. You’ll find my art here and my free weekly moon updates for sensitive healers and creators here. If you’re really into art journaling with the moon, you might really like the courses I lead.  But if you’re like me and enjoy deep intimate healing conversations, you might want to learn more about my Intuitive Support sessions first.