I want to be honest with you about something before I even tell you about the interview. I knew before I sat down across from Celinne Da Costa that this conversation was going to change me. Not because I had prepared for it, although I had. And not because I was nervous, although I was a little. But because something in me recognized her before we ever met. I had watched podcasts, read about her book ‘The Burning Ground’, listened to the way she talks about soul and truth and surrendering to something greater than yourself. And my body just settled. Like it was saying, yes. This is real. Pay attention.

I am 23 years old. I am eight weeks into a life in Valencia that I would not have been living if I had not ended a relationship in December that was quietly holding me back from everything I was supposed to do next. I am an MBA candidate who studied marketing and finance, a former college athlete, and someone who has spent most of her young life sensing that she was meant for something significant without having the slightest idea what that thing was. I came to Valencia to figure something out. I am still figuring it out. But the afternoon I spent talking with Celinne Da Costa moved the needle on that figuring out in a way I did not see coming.

Celinne is a USA Today bestselling author, a brand storytelling expert whose work has been featured in Forbes and on TEDx stages, and a coach whose clients include Fortune 150 executives and some of the most influential leaders in the world. She has spent the better part of a decade helping people find the story they are actually living, not the one they perform for the world, and rewrite it from the inside out. Her book ‘The Burning Ground’, which she handed me at the end of our conversation, is the account of how she did that herself: the corporate job that looked like success from the outside and felt like a cage from the inside, the life she blew up to find the one that was actually hers, and the philosophy she built from the rubble of that burning.

She told me something during our interview that I keep turning over. She said, “That most of us spend our lives trying to control our outcomes from the very limited vantage point of what we know and what we think we know, when in reality those two things together represent maybe five percent of the full picture of what is actually possible. The soul, she said, has access to the whole pie chart. The mind is built to serve the soul, not the other way around. And when we let the mind run the show, we confine ourselves to the prison of our own limited perception. We can only go as far as what we can see. And what we cannot see, we do not even know we cannot see.”

I have watched this play out in the people around me. I have watched people I care about spend time doing things that make them unhappy, carrying a story that life was happening to them rather than for them. I have seen fear build invisible walls around people’s lives that keep growing smaller, until the world inside those walls is barely big enough to breathe. I came to Spain partly because I was afraid of becoming either one of those things. Afraid of becoming comfortable in a life that was not really mine. Afraid of letting the years go by in service of someone else’s bottom line and waking up one day to find that the thing my soul had been trying to tell me all along had finally gone quiet because I had ignored it for too long.

When Celinne asked me how old I was and then told me to notice the way her story was firing off connections in my brain, she was naming something I was already feeling. She said, “your soul is orchestrating whatever it is you are looking for. That is why you and I are sitting here.” And I knew she was right. Not because it was a beautiful thing to say. Because it was true. And truth, I have learned in the past eight weeks, has a very specific feeling in the body. It does not shout. It settles. It relaxes you into it. It feels like exactly where you are supposed to be.

Valencia gave me that too, in its own way. Coming from a small town in South Carolina where the world is very narrow and people tend to be afraid of what they do not already know, this city has cracked something open in me. The diversity here, the openness, the way people move through their days with a lightness that has nothing to do with ignoring life and everything to do with actually living it, has shown me a version of human existence I want to build toward. Every person I have met here, from every country and background imaginable, has confirmed the same thing: we are not that different. And the fear that tells us otherwise is the most limiting story any of us will ever believe.

Celinne ended our conversation with something I want to carry with me. She said, “Everything that you want lies on the other end of surrendering to your soul. Let your soul be in the driver’s seat. Your mind is built to serve the soul, not the other way around.”

I leave Valencia tomorrow. I do not yet know what I am going to do with my life or how it is going to unfold. But I know that I am listening now in a way I was not before. And I know that ‘The Burning Ground’ is going to be the first thing I read on the plane home.

To Celinne, if you are reading this: Thank you. Not for the interview. For being the kind of person who tells the truth and hands it to you without apology, and trusts you to know what to do with it.

To whoever is reading this and recognizes what I am describing: I see you. And so does she.

Interview by Faith Callaway

Article copyright ‘24/7 Valencia’

Celinne Da Costa: http://celinnedacosta.com

The Burning Ground, available at https://theburningground.com/
Podcast, It Is Not What You Think, available on all platforms
Instagram, @celinnedacosta