Episode Transcript
Hello, my name is Aziz and I'm the son of a divorced mother. She is really my superhero. That's why it's important for me to support women to share their uniqueness, their personalities, perspectives, and emotions about life. Too many women in this world feel alone. They worry about the judgment of others and they struggle with their mental health but when they listen to the rare girls podcasts where empowered women share their voices and tell their stories, many women will feel inspired to live a life of freedom and to overcome all insecurities. They will feel. It is a safe space to find their confidence, to remember their unique beauty and to feel their self-worth. And they will connect with a sisterhood of rare girls who encourage their success and support their dreams. That's what this podcast is all about. My guest today is Federica Trovato. Federica is an Italian tattoo artist working with traditional magical cultures from around the world, using ancient techniques together with modern ones and creating amulets on skin. Her tattoo sessions are real rituals basically. At the same time, she is also a competitive bodybuilding athlete trying to figure out the best way to live both Her passions. Federica, how are you today? Hi, I'm good, thank you. I'm a bit nervous. I feel blessed, I feel happy to have you here, really excited to know much more, and I'll begin with this nice first question, which is, Federica, if your friends and the people who know you best could describe your personality, what would they say about you? That's a good question. I feel like I've changed a lot during the years. So many of my friends, current friends are like childhood friends. I am not one of those people who make friends easily. So I try to stick, I mostly stick to the people that I made friends with a long time ago. So probably what they would say is that I'm very sweet, even too much sometimes. I live by my dreams and I've always done that since I was a child. Basically, I always wanted something. I knew it was for me and I grabbed it and probably they would say, and hopefully they would say that that I'm a kind person. I think that's, if I had to say one good thing about me is I think I'm a very kind person. I try to. - Thank you. I love that. I will ask, and I'm curious to ask about bodybuilding, tattoos, magic, but first you said that from the beginning, you know how to recognize if something is for you and how to go and get it. There are many women in this world who maybe have low self-esteem or self-doubt or anxiety or perfectionism, and it stops them from going through that process. What is different about you that allows you to go through that process, and how can other women learn from that so that they go out of their comfort zone more often? - Honestly, I am one of those people who have many insecurities, like many insecurities always had, But I feel like in time since I was a kid, I have always had the chance to connect to my guts. So I have very strong feelings towards things and people and I trust myself a lot. And I feel like that has been like a very important thing in my life and it led me to where I am today. like the ability to just trust my guts. If I feel that this is not a good situation for me, I'm gonna, you know, slip away. And if I feel that that thing that I want to reach is at my reach, I am just gonna go get it. So it's mostly about trusting myself and trusting my intuition, I would say. And the spiritual work that I've done, like later in the years till now, as you know enhance that even more. - Thank you. And you spoke about the spiritual work. I want to know more about how your interest in rituals, amulets and magic and magical culture started. When did you notice from the beginning that you always have a fascination since being a little girl with like magical things and fairies and all those cartoons and stories. Tell me more about it and how before you applied it to your tattoo, it made a difference or an impact within your life. - Absolutely, I was one of those kids that had like always a very strong imagination. I would find myself in gardens or woods and I would imagine playing with fairies and all magical creatures. It was just part of my way of thinking when I was a kid. So I feel like somehow that even though I grew up, kind of course many things were not part of my beliefs anymore, somehow the feeling of something greater, something that you cannot see still was in me. And so yes, I would say that growing up, I didn't have really the chance to study a lot spiritualism mostly because I have a family that made me study a lot. I was very good at school. I had to be very good at school. So I didn't have time or consideration for those things that I still felt attracted by. The only time I had the chance to start studying that was when I went away from my hometown to study at university. So I went away, I went in another city, which is like five hours from my hometown, and I went to live there to study. And that was when I just detached from my, you know, from my family, from the ideas of my family. And I started to buy books, meet people that would somehow pass me more knowledge about things. And everything just kind of began to connect and set in place for how things are today. - Thank you. That's fantastic. And it makes me think about bodybuilding, which to many people will seem the opposite of magic because it's focused on physical things. Some people will say it's superficial, although I might understand it could be part of your internal growth. You falling in love with your body, designing yourself, becoming your own superhero, but for you specifically to not put words in your mouth, what attracted you to bodybuilding? The discipline required for it is also bringing a lot of masculinity sometimes that is required. But I mean, for you, what does it add to your life, to your emotions, to your self-esteem? Why did you fall in love with it as a competitive sport? - Well, that's right. It's actually, it might be considered the opposite what I do as a job, you know, of spirituality and all. But to be honest, I feel like the idea of bodybuilding as something superficial is like the key to it. It's the reason why I need that in my life, because for my point of view, even in tattooing and in my job, I really like in years, in the years, I started to understand that beauty and vanity are not necessarily bad, inherently bad. I would say they are part of spirituality, like beauty itself to me is like a form of believing in something greater. And you know, when you find something beautiful, there is something that connects you, I believe, to that thing, some, some kind of invisible strings that make you feel like, "Oh my god, that thing is beautiful, that person is beautiful." So there is something that is more than what you can actually see. And beauty, I believe, is a form of God, I would say, is like a way to see God, to feel God somehow, or whatever you want to consider God, a universal force, let's say. So somehow I ended up in the gym. I've always done sports in my life, but like going to the gym and actually lifting weights was not one of my things. I used to do gymnastics when I was a kid. And then in my late twenties, I decided to go to the gym and actually start to connect to my body a bit more and to become stronger physically. I felt like I needed that because I am very, very rooted in my femininity. And sometimes that can be tricky because if you forget one of the two parts of you, which is also masculinity, we have both, you know, that can be of damage to your body, to your mind, to your soul, to the way you are perceived by people. I felt like I needed that to empower my masculine side, to know myself more, and to challenge my body into becoming stronger and into changing, into molding it. That gave me the feeling of having power on my own body and to being able to transform it the way that I wanted to, of course, food and lifting weights. Thank you. I like that insight very, very much is very empowering and the balance of your masculine and feminine. And you mentioned that in many ways you're connected to God or the spirit of the universe, the energy that flows. What are your metaphysical beliefs as someone who believes in magic? Do you believe in destiny? Do you believe that magic is a kind of prayer or a way to take control in the world? Do you believe that you are everything and everything is a part of you and a fragment of your soul, therefore you can impact it? How do you perceive the world from a spiritual metaphysical perspective? I want to start by saying that I love your questions. They are very interesting and I would say it's mostly like the last thing that you said. I strongly feel like the world that we are in is ruled by of course by some rules that we cannot see but still like the connection between nature and us and objects and everything is there is it's actually a scientific thing you know we are made of atoms and the same atoms of this table are the same as my body and this is weird but it's the truth so what I actually believe is that everything is connected we all are connected somehow and this is why we have you know when you meet someone and and you feel sometimes it happens, you feel like you've known them forever and then there's a connection that you cannot really understand why is already there. That happens with animals as well. That happens with objects. As I said, I feel like you see that, I don't know, this ring is beautiful. There is something about that ring that is also inside of you that is calling itself, let's say, like cells that are calling themselves. So this is how I feel this is important in what I do in my job because chanting mantras and chanting katas for the Thai part of my rituals is extremely important. Like the vibration and the energy of sound is one of the most important that I use in my work, in my rituals. When you chant mantras, when you chant katas, prayers, however you want to call them, you are like putting out a kind of energy. So the sound that you make is like equals to energy and whatever you put out comes back to you. So it's not even about words, it's more about sounds, it's more like that let's say. So I feel like this is a very important practice I do even in my personal daily practice, like chanting some mantras or others, like depending on what I feel like is good for me on that day, you know. So I think this is the good answer to your question. Thank you very, very much for that. and it makes me as well think while you spoke about your work, how is tattooing and creating amulets on skin based on tattoos part of your spiritual practice? How do you see it? Is it something like you said that each person has some tattoos that are attracted to them that they should go on their body and then those tattoos level their character up or balance their energy or do something within this universe for them. Tell me a bit more about the whole idea that fascinated you with doing the unique work specifically through tattoos and not any other way because as a spiritual practice and chanting you could have been a yoga teacher or someone who guides people through different chants and meditations but you're choosing tattoos. What's unique about that? What's different was the idea that makes this a powerful ritual and a powerful way to either embody or express the spiritual side of the person. Well, I would say that, absolutely, I could even have been a yoga teacher or something. But I've always been like attracted to tattoos in a more ancient way, I would say. When I started my spiritual journey, I began with northern ruins, so Viking ruins are more common, you know, from Iceland and from Norway. But what really fascinated me about that was how they were practiced back in time. They were used not only as an actual alphabet, but they were like for every letter was a form of energy, as I would say, and they would put them on objects and on people through some kind of tattoo and ritual to change their lives, to set some passage of the person, you know, in the adulthood, I don't know, or into becoming a stronger warrior. So when I came up with that idea, something in that called something in me. And I was like absolutely drawn to that. I knew that I somehow had to find my way to do that. I still didn't have any idea of how because I was still in university and then just few months later I dropped out to become a tattoo artist. But I knew that tattooing has something more than just drawing. When you do something that remains on your body, on your physical body, until you die and even when you are, you know, on the on the death bed, is something very strong. It can affect your soul, it can affect not just the body itself. So what we do with high amulets, for example, is that the Thai culture has this very strong idea that yantras, which is why they're called sakhyant, yantras are these very beautiful geometries filled with some letters of an ancient alphabet that is called kom, or sometimes landa depending on the part of Thailand they come from. And each of these letters is part of a chanting as I said before that when is done to the skin you know we use a micro it's called micro it's a stick with some needles at the tip so you poke into the skin and then and you create the line poke by poke. And by doing that, the tattooer is basically imprinting his own strength on the body, his own belief. So if I do this while I poke and I also chant, what I'm chanting goes right into the skin and it goes right into the person that I have in front of me. So creating amulets is more like understanding the person that you have in front of you, understanding what they think is their need is in that moment, they might say, "I need to find true love. I need to find a man that sticks with me." And then seeing the actual need, you don't need a man. You need to find your own love for yourself so that you can attract whoever is going to be good for you. So whenever I have a client that has an appointment with me, We have a very long conversation through email and through that conversation, I try to understand more and more about that person and that's how I try to create the best amulet possible for them. - Thank you, that's absolutely fascinating. I love the thought process and I imagine the power and the altered states of consciousness that create that human transfer of energy and connection through every experience and every ritual that you conduct. And to finish this, you spoke about how you dropped out in order to become a tattoo artist. You're also doing bodybuilding. Some people might judge and criticize your itinerant, and therefore you travel all over Europe. You're not sticking in one place. You have your own tattoo style and tattoos, which means that you are not following the mainstream or what people say, which to many women, they feel they want to do something like that, but they feel unsafe. They think, oh, society, at least I'm staying within this safe space of doing what is expected because if I go out of it, maybe I will fail and then people will judge me or maybe they will judge me just because I'm different 'cause many people see their limitations and they feel triggered by those who are exceeding their limitations. But for you, what's your advice to women so that they can dare to be totally different and unique and not worry about the judgment of others, but live true to themselves and reach the real potential, live in life on their terms. - I would say uniqueness and being different is what makes you youth, is your strength, is the whole power of you being you, is you being different from everything else, from everyone else. So keeping in mind the fact that what you do is not who you are, it might be the opposite. So who you are translates into what you do. So that has to be kept in mind in my personal idea. I don't think that your job defines you as a person because there are so many situations in which you cannot do necessarily what you would like to do. But for that moment, you have to stick to that. It does not define you. The fact that I do this or that does not define me as a person. This is very important to me, but I feel like the goal should be not necessarily transforming your energy into a job, but transforming your energy into anything that you do in your life. It might be even just the way you are with people that makes you feel like, okay, I am doing my best thing. I am doing me. I am treating people the right way as I want them to be treated. I want to treat them. I am transforming my passion into a side job, maybe not necessarily your main job. I feel like your work is more, is something more. It's not like the main thing. You just need to feel like you are doing something that makes you feel comfortable with yourself. And that could really be anything, even just an obvious maybe. But doing that really brings out even more of that uniqueness in you. And you start to know yourself better and you start to understand yourself better in many ways. And this creates your personality, it builds up your personality even more. So the fact of being different, of doing something different, should not even care at that point, because you are just happy with what you do, with who you are and the way that you do that and you do you. Thank you so much, Federica. It was my privilege and my honor to share your voice, your unique perspective and experience in this podcast. I wish you all the success, the spiritual growth and continuing to impact the world with your amulets, with your tattoos, and in every way and every reinvention and evolution you'll go through. Thank you again for participating. - Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It was really a pleasure, and I love the way that you kept this going. It was really nice to answer to your question. It was not a basic question. It was really nice and very interesting. Thank you so much. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
