A HAPPY BIRTHDAY STORY
Just last week I realized Laila Goddess turns 10 this year. The on pause years of Covid made me think of her as 8 because I couldn’t create anything new and shows were all cancelled, but here we are 10 years after the first tentative collection. Time to share the many rambling epic roads that brought me here. When I was 17, I met a woman who used to go to Indonesia on buying trips and come back to resell her found treasures. My mother would buy batik fabric from her to sew dresses and I bought my mom a beautiful batik landscape. The intrepid solo world traveller left a profound impression on me that unfolded dramatically as decades went by. It was also the time I first heard the magical word, Kathmandu, and promised myself one day I'd go there. After my mother passed in 2008 I found the batik gift, and it alerted me to a full circle I myself had traveled without awareness, which I’ll explain later. |
Art was always a passion and pastime, often using textiles in multi-media projects. I won high school awards and studied Fine Arts at University, graduating with B.FA in Visual Arts and B.Ed degrees. A huge landscape painting commission I finished by embroidering and beading details on the shoreline. In the last school years I paid my tuition with my first entrepreneurial venture- Lovely Silks by Laila in which I batiked silk scarves and sometimes sewed them together to make draped tunics shown below in Saint Marco square in Venice 1986. It was a lucrative part-time job! |
In 2013 at a business mastermind in Miami I was prompted repeatedly to create a clothing line based on my custom made and personally designed wardrobe I was sporting. It took a lot of convincing and after sitting with the idea for several months I thought, perhaps I could begin by creating silk pajamas I had had made from silk sarongs that were elegant enough to wear out. I also thought if I can help women feel good in their clothing, then it’s meaningful work.
Following fashion isn’t really that interesting to me. I like classic timeless garments. It’s the self-expression without rules and trends that I’ve always leaned towards since starting to sew at 10 years of age. Laila Goddess Feel Good Silks was born. At another conference that same year I brought my private custom made silk pyjamas, which ended up modeled by kind encouraging participants.
The intention was to find gorgeous silk sarongs with which to make the kimonos and pants as I’d done before. However I didn’t know at the time that the quality of silk and workmanship had dropped considerably and would not support my vision for high quality beauty.
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ABOVE: first spark for Laila Goddess: My private custom-made silk pyjamas made from sarongs.
Upon arrival in Bali in winter 2014, the production owner I was introduced to assured me that I could print my own silk if I wasn’t happy with what I could buy ready made. When I said I was a painter not a textile designer, he told me they could help. I’d brought a favourite sarong and we scanned it and from there I started to transform it into my own design. Unread Oprah magazines were packed in my suitcase and I found an article about Sarah Jessica Parker starting her own shoe line, adding her signature with a ribbon on the back seam of the shoes, a loving tribute to the days of childhood when her mother would put ribbons in her hair. That inspired the idea to include my own signature printed right in the fabrics. The first fabrics printed were coordinating textiles for Kimono and pants that had a lovely border in which the first Laila Goddess signature appeared. I didn’t know at the time that although a border made for beautiful garments, it was also difficult for efficient pattern layout and ended up with a lot of waste…. I reconfigured my retreat company logo to work for Laila Goddess. During the early years I was both a traveling therapist under Aziza Healing Adventures as well as neophyte textile and clothing designer. |
Above: Bali silk sarong that was scanned to kick off the original first collection, A weary Laila wearing the first Kimono hours after it was complete, first LG logo taken from AHA logo, Laila wearing another Kimono 1st collection, Signature logo in the silk border
In 2000 I designed and sewed a gorgeous millennium celebration-worthy outfit made of antique spring green/turquoise silk taffeta finished with crushed sapphire blue velvet, and matching shawl. That year I turned 40 and marked the occasion the following winter with a sea kayaking/camping adventure in the British and US Virgin Islands. Later that year an intuitive woman said to me, “Laila, what if you put your art, kayaking, travel and healing passions all together and create something.” The idea was fantastic, but what would that look like? Finally I figured out I could create a retreat company which utilized the 14 years I’d spent part time studying Gestalt Therapy, Expressive Arts therapy, and (Usui Reiki which I’d been practicing since 1988). Aziza Healing Adventures was born in 2002 and when a Gestalt therapist in Brisbane Australia found me on Google that year, he was intrigued with the combination and invited me to create a retreat in Australia, and co-lead a therapeutic art conference in Bali where he had contacts. Although that conference fell through I was eager and decided to offer my first Bali retreat in 2004. So began the unfolding for my evolution of creating clothing there that took me stylishly through peri-menopause and menopause, landing me at the Miami mastermind in 2013 in which another intuitive coach told me to start a clothing label because I’d figured something out I wasn’t even aware was a problem in the market. |
Above: Homemade Millennium dress, sea kayaking USVI, AHA retreat company, Bali healing journey
Ten years after my first trip to Bali, which has been an annual pilgrimage except during covid, I arrived with the intention to begin Laila Goddess Feel Good Silks. The stress was profound because I didn’t train for any of it although I’d had a lot of transferable experience. As fate would have it I contracted a tropical illness from a tiny mosquito bite called Chikungunia virus. The tropical disease clinic in Toronto told me it was the wimpy cousin of Denge Fever. Still, while in Bali I was in bad shape during the fever and the joint pain that lasted for 2 months gave me a whole new compassion for common geriatric complaints. It was during this time I had to make the critical colour decisions for printing the first fabrics. Strange to have to surrender to “good enough” rather than fussing, and just trust it would be OK in the end. The first Laila Goddess Feel Good Silks pyjama collection was made up of 8 fabrics, 4 colour pallets, and only Kimono, pants and shorts and bias cut nightgown/dress. Where to sell the new collection? Somehow I thought since Toronto was hosting World Pride it would be a good idea to get a booth because of the hundred thousand international crowd attending. Oh I was so wrong! Inexpensive T-shirts and sex toys surrounded my booth, there was nobody shopping for silk garmens that cost a few hundred dollars. One man walked by thanking me for adding some class to the vendor line up. I made one sale, a nightgown dress. My rainbow banners were stolen overnight, but I was smart enough to empty the tent till morning. This first show was the first of many huge and expensive learning experiences. |
Above: First ever booth and first show, passerby wanting to try on the dress and shawl, one and only sale at Pride-Nightgown Dress.
Romanticising the idea of pyjamas you can wear day into night was the marketing plan, His and Hers, wedding gifts or travel wear. I wanted to show the pallet inspirations from my Bali photography. Balancing this new venture’s tentative experiments with my AHA retreats and workshops was a handful. It was a slow steady start. |
In my early 30’s I discovered I loved cycling and was determined to have a grand tour somewhere beautiful. I decided to fly out to Calgary to meet a woman I’d never met who also wanted a cycling trip to tour the Canadian Rockies. We were very well matched travel companions and she knew the area, had a car and tent.
She suggested a day trip to Moraine Lake. We had no idea there would be a 2.5 hour gruelling uphill ride to the mountain lake. Just before every turn of the endless road we thought, this must be the top!, but no, just another length of pavement before the next blind turn up.
Eventually we made it to the breathtaking mountain vista that graced older $20CAD bills. It was only on the long way back down, braking for a full 20 minutes, that I realized the accomplishment, and more importantly, that I NEVER would have begun the journey had I known the physical challenge ahead because I simply would not have believed I could do it.
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Above: Laila cycling on flat road after the climb up to Moraine Lake, Alberta
The experience awakened a pivotal insight into my automatic limiting mindset and self-doubting assumptions. Alerted me to how wrong my self-perception could be and all I could miss out on if I listened to a NO in my head before even trying. Since then I’ve increasingly nurtured the idea of considering what’s possible, rather than thinking about my ability. Certainly I am aware of some limitations that I should respect, but this experience set the ground for pretty much every significant choice and dare and risk I’ve taken since. A year later at the age of 32, I embarked on a life altering trip to Nepal to trek the Himalaya in a small international guided tour group of wonderful people. The richness of that experience is a book unto itself. I saw the moon rise over Annapurna, rafted the Trisuli River, rode elephant in Chitawan jungle, looked upon Mount Everest, and played volleyball amongst the rock giants, heard Sherpas sing, bathed in frigid glacier fed rivers, and changed the course of the rest of my life. It was in Nepal I was encouraged to follow my dream to be a healer. Shortly upon returning home, I discovered the Toronto Gestalt therapy training program which I enrolled in, and after that, an Expressive Art Certificate program I studied concurrently while working full time. It was this training along with my Reiki background that lead to the leap of creating Aziza Healing Adventures (AHA) 10 years after the cycling trip. |
Above: Laila looking down on Namche Bazaar at the concluding decent of the Himalayan trek
My first international AHA retreat was in Australia in 2003 where I reunited with my Nepal trekking pals who showed me so much of that amazing country after I completed the sea kayaking/Gestalt/Expressive art retreat I was facilitating. It was a crazy wonderful unexpected start to that entrepreneurial venture…and which lead to my first retreat in Bali the following year, setting the stage for all that unfolded in an entirely new and unforeseen venture. The stepping stones, the leaps, the "invisible helping hands" Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers speak of when you FOLLOW YOUR BLISS, they are not always easy or comfortable and can also hold deep heart ache alongside the profound satisfaction of self-determination, this woven tapestry has brought me a rich life culminating at this moment in the expression of Laila Goddess. I had no idea that’s where I was heading. 2024 is the tenth anniversary and who knows what the future holds?! As promised, here’s the miraculous full circle: The batik landscape is a mirror reflection of the photo taken of me in Nepal with same hat, red backpack, and walking stick (umbrella) looking down into the mountain river valley from a rocky perch. I still shake my head when I see them. |
A solo female world traveller whose unusual adventurous lifestyle and beautiful Indonesian treasures crossed my impressionable teenage path in the late 70’s inspiring a string of choices, not all conscious, that delivered me around the world and ultimately to Bali for an annual pilgrimage where I've transformed, among other things, into textile artist and creator of Laila Goddess. Thank you for helping me arrive! Laila |