Maryanne Comaroto

Relationship specialist, psychologist, and award-winning author Maryanne Comaroto helps individuals discover essential tools for creating healthy, fulfilling, and sustainable relationships. Maryanne is a clinical hypnotherapist, certified Vedanta meditation teacher, popular speaker, and host of a weekly radio show that reaches a global audience across 130 countries. With a gift for making complex theories practical and telling the truth with compassion, Maryanne offers one-on-one counseling sessions and leads life-changing workshops. She is also the founder of the nonprofit the Queen of the Jungle Foundation.

Maryanne earned her Ph.D. in Depth Psychology with a specialty in Somatics. With years of researching the cultural impact on modern relationships, Maryanne developed the CORR© relationship curriculum and innovated the SHOMI® Method, a transformational system of self-inquiry. She created the audio series “Thrive: Seven Essential Truths for Revealing Your Secret, Sacred Self” and authored the award-winning Skinny, Tan and Rich: Unveiling the Myth and Hindsight: What You Need to Know Before You Drop Your Drawers!

Maryanne enjoys meeting people, traveling, and exploring new cultures. She and her husband own Gassho House, a boutique retreat venue for people to gather, learn and refresh. In her free time, Maryanne loves being with her family and her fur babies, and the beach is her happy place.

Where did the idea for your career come from?

My doctoral dissertation was concerned with the unconscious, embodied experience of heterosexual women affected by female sexual objectification (FSO), my research explored the Western cultural split between the mind as masculine and the body as feminine. And the dynamics of FSO, its traumatogenic effects, and women’s internalization of FSO as a psychosocial survival strategy. The way female sexual objectification constellates as an embodied, psychopathological burden in female-identified heterosexual women. What I discovered was that this trauma is a cultural and heritable phenomenon I refer to as a trance.
It’s important to note that in large part the way I discovered this trance was by way of tapping into my relationship with the Divine feminine. Some people would call this process listening to spirit or co-creation with universal intelligence. Whatever you want to call it, this guidance I was tapping into led me to create a curriculum in order to help others awaken from this trance.

I received a research grant in 2019 as a result of this co-creative process and was guided to call the work “The Queen of the Jungle.” As for many women, it has certainly been at least a jungle out there!

What does your typical day look like and how do you make it productive?

My typical day begins with my husband and me having a cup of tea together, (which he’s been bringing me every morning for almost 20 years now) meditating, and then dropping in about our dreams and what’s happening for us each. We get real and deep right off the bat. And that it sort of creates a momentum. We go from being five miles an hour, the school zone to kind of ramping up and then we work until there’s something in the day that calls us out into nature to move our bodies to be with family and friends. Our days are really typically filled with being of service and being creative.

How do you bring ideas to life?

Oh, that’s one of my favorite things in the world to do, to create tangible ways to help people to tap into their inner wisdom and guidance so they can live a more fulfilling, whole, and embodied life!

For example, I love angel and tarot cards. Have since the 1980s. I turned my husband on to them decades ago. We enjoy doing readings together. It’s a great way to tap into the source. the Divine intelligence that lives within us all. Anyway, I had the idea to create our own deck. So we dove in. We put all our ideas together and took the bits we were most passionate about and began to create our own deck. After 2 years of researching sacred symbolism, geometry, color therapy, numerology, and more, we created a beta deck and started doing readings for clients and friends. Soon after that we started leading workshops and doing seminars using the deck to help people get in touch with their own inner relationship wisdom. We eventually created an app too!

So I guess it’s about having some clear intentions, following your passion and inner guidance, and trusting where it will lead you!

What’s one trend that excites you?

One thing I love is called internal family systems work (IFS). It is an embodied, creative and holistic approach to healing. It goes beyond the dialectical (talking cure) which is really important, rather this work helps bring us back into our relationship with our body, and our plurality. We aren’t just one way. We have many aspects. And yet, it rests on the premise that all those aspects are not who we really are. It’s a fabulous psycho-spiritual map for helping us become whole again. To remember who we really are. LOVE!

What is one habit of yours that makes you more productive as an entrepreneur?

My lists. I make sure whatever my creative world brings forward, is itemized and that it is calendared. So I really make my creative world tangible. I also have an intense love of accomplishment and goal-setting. It is huge for me and always has been, so I know where I’m at in terms of any ideas coming into fruition. Otherwise, I would just be so frustrated having all these great ideas that never saw the light of day!

That being said, I can tell you I am never bored:)

What advice would you give your younger self?

That’s easy. First, to not be so hard on yourself, and second; you’re stronger than you think. And third, have more fun!

Tell us something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on.

That the “Spirit” (the divine feminine) actually speaks to me.

As an entrepreneur, what is the one thing you do over and over and recommend everyone else do?

Yeah, having the courage to believe in what it is that I am creating even if I don’t see any evidence of that being possible in the world, and staying with it.

What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business?

I would say one of my favorite strategies is having the ability to know how to find good collaborative support. People who are light-hearted, like-minded, share the same values, and really trust your picker in that area. In other words, you know, that you can’t wear every hat. Because that’s a recipe for failure in my opinion: to try to do everything yourself. To be able to delegate but find really great people who hold your vision, and your values have been a secret sauce to my success.

What is one failure you had as an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome it?

The truth is I don’t really look at any of my past business experiences as failures. They have all been either grist for the mill or learning experiences. I think the only way to fail is to not try or to not trust my intuition. Looking back, that is where I may have failed. And how I overcome this is to keep listening and working on trusting myself!

What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?

My idea that I had was online therapy. I had an idea to do online therapy before anybody had done it, and then it exploded. We were about to start the company and had some people looking at it.

What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why?

I recently attended an Open Floor International workshop. They are a non-profit organization that brings conscious dance movement to the world. Life-changing work!

What is one piece of software or a web service that helps you be productive?

Traktor. It’s a DJ program. I use it almost every day of my life to add music in therapeutic ways, in personal ways, in every possible way. It’s a fabulous program.

What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?

There’s an author called Tosha Silver and she wrote a book called, “Outrageous Openness: Letting the Divine Take the Lead.” This book teaches you how to be in co-creation with the divine, how we are not alone; we need each other, and how to use those principles through storytelling and success stories. I love that you just feel so good and connected after you read it. I’ve recommended it to so many people.

Key Learnings:

• One of my favorite things in the world to do is to create tangible ways to help people to tap into their inner wisdom and guidance so they can live a more fulfilling, whole, and embodied life!
• Bringing ideas to life is about having some clear intentions, following your passion and inner guidance, and trusting where it will lead you!
• I think the only way to fail is to not try or to not trust my intuition.