Malou Araneta on a life recentered

Photos by JT Fernandez

It’s a rainy day as the breeze rustles through damp leaves—spraying droplets onto the patio that looks out into the lush garden. Barefoot, eyes closed, Malou Araneta sways to an internal pulse only she can feel. The music is primal, trance-like, and quickens with bone-deep drums that seem to rise from the ground. The shamanic minister quickens in step, moving without choreography, thought, or self-judgment, connecting and attuning with her body in ecstatic dance.

At one point in her life, Araneta sparkled through the glamorous world of fashion—working as a model and designing her own accessories. But over time, she’s delved deeper into a more grounded calling, one close to the earth. During the pandemic, she went fully into it, training for her shamanic breathwork certification in the Sacred Valley, a region in Peru’s Andean highlands, and a geographical spot known for being a place where the physical and spiritual planes meet.

“Being a shamanic minister is all about helping people connect with nature, with who you really are,” Araneta says. “It’s movement, breath, energy healing. Music and sound are medicine, too. It’s connecting with the spirit and the divine within us, which our culture and society push away.”

“We are part of nature,” she continues. “We just forget. It’s a universal practice… We forget how to center ourselves in a natural way, but it’s so easy. It’s just breathing.”

A transcendent trip

Araneta’s path into the grounded yet expansive form of healing wasn’t carefully mapped out. “I had no dream of being a teacher,” she admits. “I was just practicing yoga for myself for 15 years. It was a tool to reset, to recenter.”

But during the pandemic, a mentor asked her to teach shamanic breathwork to teenagers, and something clicked. That moment opened a door—one she hadn’t realized she was ready to walk through.

She recalls her first practice vividly: lying down with an eye mask, listening to chakra-based music, and breathing continuously in a connected, cyclical rhythm. In through the nose and out through the mouth, for over an hour.

“When I experienced shamanic breathwork for the first time, it was so instant,” Araneta recalls. “I couldn’t believe what happened to me. My whole body was shaking, even until the next day. And imagine, I was just breathing, listening to the sound.”

That shaking, she explains, is part of the process: as the body hyperoxygenates, it releases stored trauma, past experiences, and emotional blockages.

“Even if we’ve mentally healed,” she says, “our body and energy field still hold it.”

Following this life-changing experience, Araneta trained at the Venus Rising Association for Transformation in North Carolina, and later deepened her practice through movement, healing, and integration work in Peru.

She is now a certified shamanic breathwork facilitator and founder of Sama in Salcedo Village—a wellness space that merges multiple modalities.

A space for spirit

With a broad range of yoga classes, Sama also offers mat pilates, breathwork, ecstatic dance, and breathwork classes—many of which are taught by Araneta herself. It’s an intentional space where people relearn how to move, breathe, and reconnect with themselves, with what they’ve set aside, and sometimes, with their spirit animals.

Araneta’s is the gray wolf—a spirit animal she met in a vision during intensive meditation. The wolf just observes; never barks, and Araneta, with her quiet, steady demeanour, appears similar to it.

“The wolf’s intuition is very active and high. They’re loyal, protect the tribe and those they love. They’re curious to explore the world… I saw it running beside me in my peripheral vision,” she says, plainly, like describing what she had for breakfast. “It led me to a cliff, and we both jumped. I landed in the water. That was the start.”

These days, Araneta—a mother of three, including a toddler—has created a real, rooted space for herself and others. “This is it,” she declares. “This is who I am. And I’m blessed to be able to say that… everything I’ve done has shaped me. I don’t see them as separate. I don’t even want to call anything a mistake. It’s part of becoming who I am. Malou 2.0.”

But don’t mistake Araneta for a soft-spoken wellness guru who floats around the room. Instead of floating above reality, she’s rooted in it, evident in her steady stance, clear-eyed gaze, and manner of speaking that’s quite matter-of-fact.

And after everything she’s gathered over the years, through movement, motherhood, and traversing both inner and outer worlds, she carries a quiet authority not just for holding space, but to open it up, making room for others to return to their true selves.