Sometimes she calls it her “awakening.” Sometimes she refers to it as her “spiritual shift.” Other days, it’s when she “became conscious” or lifted her level of “awareness.” Whatever she decides to call it on whichever day, the message of profound transformation remains the same.
Mecca Elliot, who describes herself as just a hardworking girl from Dallas, Texas, changed her life through meditation. After experiencing one of the darkest times in her life — she was suffering from a life-threatening autoimmune disorder and adjusting to her new life in Los Angeles as a newlywed, all while raising her teenage son and juggling multiple businesses – she found healing by going within. No fancy L.A. shit. Just simple meditation and mindfulness.
“I was going through this space of shedding forcefully,” Mecca said of the process that successfully restored her health, after trying nearly every prescription drug on the market.
I had to be able to serve my purpose, so God put me on the fast track to healing.
Today, she’s made it her life’s work to share her new-found light with the world. A former hair stylist, Mecca now works as a certified meditation instructor and self-healing coach who specializes in conscious coupling and uncoupling. She sat down with BlackLove.com to share her powerful story of transformation and how everything fell into place when she surrendered the outcome to a higher power.
It’s late August in Studio City, California, and I arrived at The Lighthaus for the first time. It’s a peaceful place that greets you with the smell of sage and palo santo at entry. The walls are dressed in Buddha statues and art that reads “Namaste,” “love,” and “breathe.” It’s a private co-working and meditation space, which Mecca owns with her business partner and ex Michael Elliot and houses her Weightless Meditation practice.
Mecca Elliot (Credit: Yvette Marie Jones)
We met up to dig deeper into her personal story, which I was first introduced to – and honestly awe-stricken by – on season 3 of Black Love. Mecca and Michael not only opened up about their marriage on the show but gave viewers an authentic look at the challenges they were dealing with in real-time. Like the time when Michael found a “stone” under his pillow. He shared with the TV cameras that he didn’t understand why his wife felt the need to leave crystals in their bed, to which Mecca laughed off and said because she knows they “work!”
I wanted to know more about how she found her power. It was a force that was so strong, it physically healed her body and forced everything around her to shift in alignment or gracefully detach. “Where does THAT come from,” I ask as we sat in the lobby with only natural light shining through.
“My body was in pain,” she shares of her physical, emotional, and mental state at the time. It was 2016, and not only was she in crippling pain from her rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease that attacks healthy joints and causes painful inflammation but from the years of childhood trauma she never released.
“About two months into my diagnosis, I was on 11 different medications and seeing six doctors. I had lost a lot of weight. I was sick, very sick, and my body was just deteriorating rapidly,” Mecca recalls. “Michael and I had been dating for five long-ass years. I was newly married and dealing with my own emotional trauma. On top of the health crisis and being newlyweds, we were now living in the same house. Trying just to understand this vessel, and I was not in a good place.”
I was sick, very sick, and my body was just deteriorating rapidly
“I’m trying to work in this space, trying to be married in this space, and trying to cope and learn this new body,” she says of the time right before her spiritual shift. “Then Michael left, and I’m like ‘What?!’ Talk about a face-on-the-bathroom-floor moment. My friends had to come over to make sure I eat. It was awful. I’m already depleted, and then my husband leaves.”
For Mecca, the separation was not only the break up of her marriage, but a realization that the little girl in her was still searching for something. “I was seeking,” she confesses. “I always wanted a family, and I didn’t want to have this feeling of abandonment anymore.”
“I grew up in the projects,” she shares of her earlier years. “My mom did her best. She was a single mom. Dad was and has been incarcerated since I was eight months in the womb. So I kind of came into this world with trauma. Being carried while a woman is going through that level of grief, being separated from her husband and then he pretty much received a life sentence, that was heavy. Once I came out, I became her everything because this was her connection to him. I carried that burden for years.”
Mecca was now a single mom herself. She had been on her own since she was 14. At 17, she married into a Muslim polygamist family, and by 21, she was a mom and back on her own again after realizing life as the second wife wasn’t for her.
She was feeling abandoned again, and her daily cocktail of prescription meds was like adding fuel to the fire. “The medication really messed me up,” she admits while shaking her head. “You don’t really know when you are coming or going.”
Credit: Mecca Elliot
Then, Mecca decided to try something new. While still working as a hairdresser, one of her clients, who she describes as a “heaven-sent angel,” suggested she trade in her medicine for meditation.
“I got the courage to get up and go to work because I had to take care of this little boy, and he’s my world. So I get up and go to work, and it was divine. Nobody knew what I was going through except for my close friends. I was very shameful of the stage of my mind, body and relationship. I didn’t want to share it with anyone because I had just gotten married, and life is supposed to be great and I wanted to keep that facade.”
“So [I’m doing her hair] and we’re having a conversation, and she said, ‘Hey, I’m about to do this 21-day meditation with Deepak [Chopra] and Oprah.’ And I was like, ‘Girl I can’t meditate.’ First off, I have ADHD. There is no way I can sit still and not have thoughts. Not working. Second, who is Deepak? Third, I do like Oprah. So I gave it a try!”
I was doing the meditation, and about a week in, I first started to notice a change in my sleep pattern.
“She gave me the freaking key to so much,” Mecca says of the client that changed her life. “I was doing the meditation, and about a week in, I first started to notice a change in my sleep pattern. And I was like, ‘Why am I waking up feeling rested?’ Because when you are on all of this medication, you don’t really get proper rest, then you have all of these other things going on emotionally, like your marriage being broken up. I was meditating before I went to sleep. Fast forward, I think it was three weeks in, and I started to get some strength and courage.”
She went on to create a meditation space for herself in an empty closet, complete with a cross, Buddha statue, affirmations, pillows, white candles and a rug. “I created a space of things that made me feel good,” she says. “I would come out of my mediations feeling high, like euphoric. Like I did a drug or something.”
“It’s the sweet spot, it’s the place where nothing happens, but everything happens. That’s where the healing is.”
“I would wake up stiff, could barely open my hands,” she recalls before she started practicing meditation and stillness. Soon, she began to wing herself off of all her prescription drugs. “I started removing my medication one by one. You aren’t supposed to do that. When you are on that type of medication, anything could happen to your body, but I had this power in me. I’m like, ‘I am so powerful.’ It was really the holy spirit coming through.”Credit: Mecca Elliot
Fast forward four months, she removed herself from all medications. “I went back to the doctor and it wasn’t easy because I went through withdrawals. I should have been in rehab to be honest with you. I went to the doctor and they asked what you are taking. And I said I’m not on anything. They checked my blood and they could not find the disease. They thought it was remission in my body and they dismissed it.”
She was now a believer in her very own power to create change in her life. “I was doing affirmations, mirror work, removed myself from TV, radio, no social media. I went to work and came home to mediate. I was vibrating, all while going through a divorce. Maybe like a month after he left, he filed for divorce. We were in divorce court and everything, but I was at peace.”
While telling her story, Mecca shares it with grace, but it’s clear she’s not emotionally attached. Not in a careless way, but in the way of acceptance. She has surrendered all of the details and the outcome to the universe. However, there was a noticeable shift when we began to talk about her aunt, whose passing Mecca and Michael shared on Black Love and attributed to saving their marriage at the time.
“We were splitting assets and then my aunt died,” Mecca tells me before picking up a Kleenex. “This woman helped raise me. She was like a mother to me. It was a hard loss because the day before she passed away, she called me and I didn’t answer. She saw Michael on TV for one of his other businesses, and she said I am so proud of the two of you. She used to write books and long text messages about love. She died the next day.”
I needed to remove this pain, shame and fear.
“I cried so hard. I was thinking [about] how I was letting her [my aunt] down. And not telling anyone [about the split.] I needed to remove this pain, shame and fear. I didn’t want to let her down,” she remembered. “I cried that night. It was the longest cry.”
From there, Mecca says she decided to take full responsibility for her life, her healing and even the dissolution of her marriage. “There were two people in the marriage and I knew I was different.”
While Mecca and Michael decided to give their marriage another try after her aunt’s death, they eventually made the conscious decision to uncouple with honor, respect, family and friendship. It’s a change she describes as “transitioning out feeling healed and whole, versus broken and bitter.”
“In addition to my health, this was probably one of my greatest achievements to date,” Mecca says of their authentic uncoupling, a term she coined and uses in her practice to help other couples navigate separation. “Our growth individually and collectively is nothing short of a miracle.”
Since conquering her health crisis, emotional block, and spiritual awakening, Mecca says her life is all about “true authenticity.”
“I am practicing being authentic in my life: period. I’ve been doing it internally for a little over a year,” she shares. “Nobody gave me the tools to know how to process this, and every relationship I’ve seen was so unhealthy and so toxic. Trying to find myself in another individual, so much is how I showed up in all of my relationships. For me, learning and going through this spiritual shift — which was not easy but so worth it – was all about self.”
“And it still is,” she adds. “It’s all about making sure that I’m in alignment and I’m authentic with self so I can show up for everybody else in my life in a form that I’m supposed to, and how I am supposed to share my light with them.”
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