Melissa LaFlamme, MA, Jungian Psychotherapist & Author

by Melissa LaFlamme, MA

Praise for the book, What You Are For: Inciting A Revolution In Your Soul:

"What You Are For:  Inciting A Revolution In Your Soul is a shaman’s brew of poetic ayahuasca. A vine of soul, of death, of new life. To sit with these poetic lines and the power of the word, even if they jolt you or make you flinch, is in itself a breaking open of our egos, their compromises and identifications which bind us and hold us back. 

This is a new kind of poetry. What Melissa La Flamme offers, here, is medicine for the soul, and like an entheogen, gives you the needed boost to move out of your self-constructed cages. 

As you do that, you become the Code Breaker of your own soul's authentic and sacred purpose. Always, this book is ontological dynamite, a ceremony of soul initiation — which makes the reading simultaneously delightful and challenging, while Melissa’s lines — always pushing the edges of the ego's false identifications and limitations — invite you to deconstruct yourself to encounter yourself anew, free of the old fear-based rules that hold you back. And Melissa does this with much love, encouragement and in joy. 

Do not let fear hold you back, is her great message as she opens you to imagine the impossible, as she calls you to dream big, and to subvert anything — like a surrealist — that suppresses the essential You that wants to express itself. Here we have shamanic poetry at its best, at its freshest, a post-modern poetry that unites the old initiatory themes with crackling expressiveness. So read. Read and realize what you hold in your hand is not something to just relax with by the fireside, but is, itself a new-life-giving ceremony.  This is Clarissa (Pinkola Estes) on rocket fuel. Enjoy!" 

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—C. Michael Smith, Ph.D.,  licensed Jungian Psychologist, Medical Anthropologist, Shamanic Teacher & Director of Crows Nest International, as well as author of Jung and Shamanism In Dialogue: Retrieving the Soul/ Retrieving the Sacred, and the award-winning, Psychotherapy and The Sacred

"The poet of this impassioned collection of soul-rallying gems is aptly named, since "Melissa" is associated with honey as sweetness and balm, and "LaFlamme" any measure of fire — from seductive candlelight to volcanic eruption ~ a spectrum she deftly plays.These are challenging and, if you accept the challenge, emboldening, breath-taking writings, illustrated by turn with darkly haunting or dazzling playful imagery. Altogether engaging. I love Melissa's much-needed creativity for many reasons, a key one being that she understands my central passion, Initiation, as illustrated with:

"The heart of you, reverent now, having kissed Death's evolutionary intelligence - Licks life alive again, giving birth..."

What I found myself humming, as I dipped into this collection time and again, was the old Gospel tune, Wade in the Water, which was inspired by a locale in the American South where the waters were reknown for choppiness, whirlpools, all sorts of treacherous behavior. But if you dared enter them at their times of great upheaval, you would be healed.

A recurring line in the song is, "God's gonna trouble the water," which the locals believed was done by an Angel dipping its wing into the waters and stirring them, with your deliverance intended. I imagine this poet up for such a task, a fiery Archangel woven of the lights of the Aurora Borealis, dipping down to gyrate a whirlpool and then dip a feather in blood to compose these offerings, encouraging life more authentic and profound. Wondrous!" 

—Mary Trainor-Brigham, M.A., author of DEEP CINEMA: Film as Shamanic Initiation