Meet Delia Sullivan: Writer, Yoga Teacher, Wellness Warrior
I slid into a chair across from Delia Sullivan with a latte in my hand at Mae’s Market. An hour later, I had shared something deeply personal with her, something many of my friends don’t even know. That’s the kind of openness she exudes – you want to tell her everything. Every dark secret you’ve buried, the deep hurts you’ve endured. She doesn’t pass judgment, she just listens. She has also endured…and survived.
It was Phyllis Patterson that texted me Delia’s number after seeing her at a wedding, and said I had to meet her. She wanted to connect writer to writer. Delia had just published her story in the anthology, Desserts to Mountaintops: Choosing Our Healing Through Radical Self-Acceptance. She had sent me her chapter, “The Story I Told Myself” prior to our coffee date, but I hadn’t found the time to read it. I kicked myself under the table, because I had so many questions, and would have had even more. But she understood. She too, had been in the throes of motherhood and wifehood, trying to find herself while taking care of everyone else.
Delia was born and raised in Alexandria, and left a few times, but always came back. She attended community college in New Orleans, and spent some time in Sarasota, Florida crewing on sailboats and waitressing at 19. She started Bittersweet (where Sweetgreen is now), a gourmet, catering-to-go company in 1984 with her mother, and worked there for seven years, growing the business they built by specializing in corporate catering and weddings.
After her third child was born, she went back to school and started her own photography business. “I was itching to have something of my own. During my time as a mother, everything was so busy and fast. All I wanted was solitude. I’m an empath. I needed down time to regenerate and get back in. I wanted to be Delia again.”
It was at an art workshop photographing indigenous people in Guatemala that she says she found herself again. “I didn’t speak Spanish. I didn’t know anyone who had been to Guatemala. But I connected with the woman who ran the workshop schools. She was a war photographer in Guatemala who stayed there and adopted two Guatemalan children. I was at the workshop for ten days. It was my birthday present to myself.”
It was the pivot she needed. “I reacquainted myself with myself. I came back and started doing photography and thought, ‘Maybe I should charge for this?’ It burst open my confidence and creativity. I felt less guilty about shining.”
Yoga is also one of her great loves. “It’s my sanctuary, my peace. I wish I could take a class every day. When I had breast cancer in 2013, I took a year off from teaching and underwent chemotherapy. I was about to turn 50. I slowed down and shifted from active yoga to restorative yoga, it helped with my range of motion. I started taking a class at Radiance and when my instructor was getting ready to move, I was asked to take over her class.” She’s been teaching there ever since.
The anthology was yet another thread tying her journey together and the first time Delia’s been published. She referred to her chapter, sharing, “Dad took us to AA meetings. I was 12 at the time, and would be looking around the room, thinking ‘that guy runs a bank’…soaking it all in. I, too, was craving a group with just talk and no judgment. I wished I could show up and just tell someone how I’m in pain and suffering from the accident…and my parents getting divorced. I didn’t know what therapy was. I was sad about the accident and then moving just a year later.”
I wouldn’t know what the accident was until I found the time late at night (with no disruptions from my household) to fully envelop myself in her story. It deserved my undivided attention. And now I understand, when she shared: “Our words become our thoughts, our thoughts become our beliefs, and they run our lives. I stuffed my feelings down and became detached. I thought I was not worthy of being loved and it manifested in my relationships. I had survivor’s guilt. Those AA meetings I saw as a kid instilled something in me. I wanted to host weekend retreats for women…and walk…a spirit walk. We need this. We have little ones at home and we can’t give people what we don’t have.”
She described her piece in the anthology as “vulnerable, a love letter to myself. It’s very scary putting that out into the world. But everything led to what I’m doing in the world now…women’s circles and my retreats…offering restorative life-giving instead of life depleting and soul-crushing. It’s about transforming suffering into rejoicing.” You can find the anthology here.
She says her monthly Women’s Wisdom circles with co-facilitator Tara Casagrande at Wellness Junction in Del Ray are still percolating. And I see that’s her golden thread, she always wanted it and now she’s offering it – to others. It’s an intimate group with 12-14 women and there’s always a theme they talk about, with gentle movements in between.
“It’s reflective time…sacred listening and sharing. Each person has five minutes on a theme they journaled around or something that is bothering them. Five minutes with no talking over them…just a stream of consciousness. There are guidelines: what’s said in the circle, stays in the circle. No reaching over. Just close your eyes and listen.”
And then she shared this pearl, “You wouldn’t have wanted to choose what you went through, but what you went through is giving you the impetus to share and someone will resonate with some part of it.”
Read more about Delia and see her upcoming workshops and events.
