Today we’d like to introduce you to Stephany Mejia.
Hi Stephany, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
My path to becoming a therapist, business owner, DJ, and trauma informed sound healing practitioner has been anything but linear.
As a first-generation low income Latine college student, I spent much of my early adulthood trying to figure out how to pay for school, work enough hours to survive, and decide what I wanted to do with my life. Like many first-generation students, I didn’t have a roadmap. After leaving one college to attend another, I eventually found my way to North Carolina State University, where I discovered my first academic love: Sociology and Nonprofit Studies. I became fascinated by questions of collective care, systems of support, social justice, and the ways our communities and institutions shape our lives.
After graduating from NC State, I worked in higher education and later enrolled in a Master’s in Public Administration program. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the program wasn’t aligned with my values or the kind of work I wanted to do in the world. A friend suggested that I consider social work, and that conversation changed everything. I applied to the UNC School of Social Work and was accepted into their MSW program.
During my time at UNC, I balanced classes, research assistantships, and organizing work. I co-founded Aliadas, a community organizing group rooted in racial justice and collective liberation. At the same time, another important part of my journey was unfolding through music. I joined an all-women DJ collective called The Mamis and the Papis in Durham, NC- where I learned to DJ and discovered the power of music as a tool for connection, joy, healing, and community building. Together, we created events centered on the music that raised us while also raising funds for nonprofits, grassroots organizations, mutual aid efforts, and small businesses.
Around that same time, I completed my 200-hour yoga teacher training with Michelle Cassandra Johnson, whose work is at the intersection of embodiment and social justice which deeply influenced how I understand healing. After graduating from UNC, I began my career as an in-home therapist working with children ages 0–5 and their families throughout Wake County. That experience shaped my understanding of attachment, family systems, and the profound impact relationships have on our wellbeing. I later worked in a group practice where I specialized in maternal mental health and saw how Covid impacted so many parents before opening Healing Seeds Therapy, my private practice, which I have now been running for four years.
Today, my work focuses on supporting eldest daughters, first-generation children of immigrants, mothers, creatives, LGBTQ+ individuals, organizers, activists, and people navigating trauma, identity, and belonging. Much of what I do is helping people reconnect with themselves, understand their stories, and build lives that feel more aligned with who they truly are.
In recent years, I’ve become increasingly interested in bringing together the different parts of who I am. My work as a therapist, DJ, and sound healing practitioner may seem separate on the surface, but to me they have always been connected. Whether I am sitting with someone in therapy, curating music for a dance floor, or facilitating a sound bath, I am creating spaces for people to feel, connect, heal, and remember themselves. I continue to explore the intersection of mental health, music, sound, movement, and community. My hope is to keep building experiences that honor both individual and collective healing while reminding people that joy, creativity, culture, and connection are not separate from healing—they are part of it.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
There was a point in my college journey where I genuinely thought I wasn’t going to finish. Like many first-generation students, I was carrying the weight of trying to figure everything out on my own—how to pay for school, how to work enough hours to survive, and whether higher education was even meant for someone like me. I felt overwhelmed, exhausted, and unsure if I could keep going. I had been accepted At Meredith College with a scholarship but due to the high price of the school and my lack of guidance around that , I was seriously considering dropping out especially as my mother lost her job. I remember feeling like I had run out of options after talking to administration and that leaving school might be the only path forward. During that time, my sociology professor, Dr. Lori Brown, had a conversation with me that changed the trajectory of my life. She told me, simply, “Don’t do that.” She encouraged me not to give up on myself and helped me see that dropping out wasn’t my only option. Instead, she encouraged me to transfer schools and continue pursuing my education.What stands out to me now is that she didn’t solve my problems for me. She offered something equally important: belief. She saw possibility in me at a time when I couldn’t see it for myself. As a first-generation student, I didn’t always have people around me who understood how difficult it was to navigate higher education without a roadmap. Her encouragement was exactly the support I needed in that moment.
Looking back, I often think about how different my life might have been if she hadn’t taken the time to have that conversation. I don’t know if I would have transferred, graduated, attended graduate school, become a therapist, started a business, or found my way to the work I do today. That experience taught me the power of being seen and supported at a critical moment in someone’s life and how that can make or lack of it can break someone’s future. Having that belief when life was telling me otherwise felt like it saved me and I have continued to have those moments even when things seemed grim.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I was born and raised in New York City, it allowed me access and experience of learning and interacting with so many people. I learned how to dance from my friends in the Bronx and Washington Heights and experienced everything from Hip Hop, to Dancehall, Salsa, Merengue, Bachata and the melting of music in all languages. As an artist I seek to understand music with the historical and cultural realities of what music has meant to different cultures and how they help so many of us feel connected to our cultural lineages. I honor my Dominican and Nicaraguan heritage by playing music that I grew up on but also including music that has accepted and enveloped me. AND as a openly Queer woman I create dance spaces that also center Queer people especially those of the Latinx diaspora and QTBIPOC people. As a therapist I understand how sound can help regulate us, how it can help us process things, how it can even help us release and move things through us. Which is why combining sound healing, DJing and intentional music curation in spaces is how I want to continue building on this belief, that sound is a pathway to connection and to ourselves and we can do so much healing with it and through it.
How do you think about luck?
I have faced real moments of doubt from others. During one of my one-on-one meetings with my high school counselor, she said very plainly, “You won’t ever go to college.” Years later, I returned to that same high school as a graduate student intern, where I supported Latine students in achieving academic success and coached them through the process of publishing a book. In that project, they shared their own experiences with educational attainment and the burden of often being the first in their families to navigate these spaces.
What could have been discouragement became fuel. The experience of being doubted by others pushed me forward and taught me how to transform that pain of being doubted into growth, resilience, and ultimately, blooming.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://healingseedstherapy.com
- Instagram: healingseedstherapy
