The Enterprising Power of Soul Work

Put SOULWORK, STILLWATERS, and VIBRATION together in the same conversation, and you have the perfect ingredients for a beautiful exchange. Add to those ingredients two souls who the spirit of creativity has admittedly knitted together, and the possibilities for inspiration grow exponentially. I can attest to this because inspiration was the undercurrent of my hour-long phone interview with one of Los Angeles’s most prominent enterprising couples.

Brother Oshea Luja is an award-winning poet, producer, and cultural architect. Dr. Melania Luja, his beautiful wife, is a highly sought-after self-care, wellness, and integrated medicine practitioner. California-born and bred, the Lujas don’t just teach SOULWORK; they live SOULWORK. They don’t just encourage their students to vibrate at the highest frequency; they effortlessly vibrate at the highest frequency themselves.

For more than two decades, the Lujas have been serial entrepreneurs who simply could not see the value in allowing anyone to profit from their gifts, knowledge, and love for humanity. Becoming serial entrepreneurs meant seeking the Most High’s direction for a sustainable and purposeful occupational path. Subsequently, beginning in 2002, Brother Luja started and co-founded business entities such as his own jingle writing company, Lyrical Jinglist, then StillWaters Network, StillWaters Experience, and StillWaters Writers Workshop, while Dr. Luja started and co-founded entities such as her own marketing and productions company, her day spa, a full line of natural skin and hair care products, and Subtle-tiyes self-care and wellness company. 

Upon uniting as one, the couple’s enterprising endeavors expanded, and their reach multiplied. Their union gave birth to their Southern California private practice Internal Balance Universe in 2016, which was an outgrowth of Vibrations Holistic Center and The Balance Portal.

Whether teaching cultural classes or workshops on life-purpose alignment or leading self-love retreats worldwide, this husband and wife duo believes that constant engagement with one’s soul raises our vibration and attracts one’s purest desires by default. “It’s the spirit inside of the body,” says Brother Luja, a 2015 and 2017 Village Award Recipient from the Villagers Hall of Fame Awards Foundation.

When asked to describe their body of work in one word, Dr. Luja retorted, “Water. It has memory. Water is over 80 percent mass in our bodies, of course. The memory of water is able to influence our thoughts.” Then as if he knew precisely where his wife was going next, Brother Luja asserted, “Luja means of great depth. Still, waters run deep. We wanted whatever we do to have great depth and to go as deep as possible.”

Going deep was essential to the Luja's work because they were well aware of trauma’s capacity to live deep within us. Excavating their own trauma taught them how to help others excavate theirs. The same SOUL WORK that drew the two together is the same SOULWORK that helped Brother Luja prevail over the trauma of growing up in Watts, where he had no resources to deal with losing over twenty-five of his childhood friends before his twenty-fifth birthday. “I wasn’t expected to live past twenty-five. It was an open secret. Sadly, my friends and I were okay with that.”

After rapper Tupac Shakur was killed in 1996 at the age of 25 during a drive-by shooting, the very next year, in 1997, Brother Luja vowed to live life to the fullest. At 26, it became clear that the Most High had His hand over his life, and he was destined to live long enough to impact the world significantly. During this same time, Dr. Luja worked in Def Jam Records' marketing and promotions department with the likes of rapper Jay-Z and later in the marketing department of Columbia Records with the likes of Destiny Child.

Dr. Luja, creatively known as Queen Socks, has also shared the stage with other influential writers such as the Watts Prophets, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Angela Davis.

Though not as severe as losing a host of childhood friends, Dr. Luja’s trauma to confront was identifying her listening process and distinguishing her own voice and convictions from what other people were saying. Why? “We get told clichés all the time, and we regurgitate it without really thinking about it, or without saying who am I and why was that told to me,” shared Dr. Luja. These clichés mattered more and more to Dr. Luja as she came to an understanding that “Words give birth to a fertile universe. Words can build an army that fights for us or against us.”

And so, for these two cultural architects, writers, and SOULWORK practitioners, the work of healing the soul started inwardly long before it evolved into a conjoined effort to create experiences they could invite people into. Brother Luja recalled, “We looked out into the world, and instead of putting other people first, we thought about what we needed to experience. We know that we can attract energy to us. There are other people out there with the same energy, which allows us to co-create.”

The 2020 Pandemic proved to be a time of exponential growth in the Lujas’ efforts to co-create with others. When the world shut down, people were forced to sit in their homes and be with themselves. The idleness and confusion triggered people to log onto their computers for answers and comfort. This search guided people to the programs and workshops the Lujas were offering. The couple showed people in real time how to create a vision home — instead of a vision board. They taught people to walk into their homes and manifest their purest, grandest desires. “People had beautiful homes that they finally got to enjoy,” remarked Dr. Luja. 

The Lujas did something else during the Pandemic: produce an inspiring project called “The Lightworkers.” Not only was this project produced by Brother Luja, creatively known as Mr. Food4Thought — full of truths we needed to hear, but it also featured a cameo by their then adorable five-year-old daughter named Love. And when I probed about why it was important to have Love’s voice included, I learned that the youngest of the couple’s five children is always with her parents. Watching them perform is all she knows. Hence, her desire to be involved was organic. I also learned that the Lujas feel strongly that parents should include their children in what they do.

Speaking of organic, Love’s parents, who ascribe to moments, not the traditional calendar, were in their own words, married in other dimensions where they re-attracted themselves to each other over seven thousand years. Both believe that “People will try to box you into a comfortable frame for them. But we transcend time and space. Quantum-entanglement is what we exist in. It means we were entangled in a spiritual realm before we came together in this natural realm. We were able to go back in time where we remembered each other spirits and souls.”

Just as the couple’s intimate relationship organically came to be through unorthodox means, they have carried this out-of-the-box philosophy into their healing work. The Lujas want us to know that healing starts in the mind with what we tell ourselves. Dr. Luja brilliantly says, “If you go inside, you will know what’s going on with you. We’re beating down the door of doctors to get answers that doctors don’t necessarily have because they’ve never been taught. This is why we go by the word practitioner. We’re not the healers. We guide people to their healing through meditation, through yoga, through our teas, through wheatgrass, through supplements, and through our Spontaneous Healing teachings.”

The Lujas’ work has deepened even more by offering an internal balance hair follicle analysis that allows them to identify what one’s cells are saying. The substratum of their work in this space is the science of Epigenetics, which is where science and spirituality intersect. Epi means to override; genetics means gene expression. This, too, is SOULWORK.

Although open to everything the Universe has in store for them, the Lujas are incredibly excited about their wellness ranch in Georgia, the land they have been gifted in Ghana, their sold-out retreat in July 2023, and Brother Luja’s one-man stage play coming in the fall of 2023 titled, Purple People Who Dance Barefoot. The couple is also excited about continuing the non-traditional healing work of their ANN Foundation (Alternative Natural Nurturing), founded in 2020, where they conduct internal balance hair follicle analysis.

Connecting with the Lujas is a step in the right direction for anyone who longs for a better quality of life spiritually and physically. To get started, log onto their website at thebalanceportal.com. You can also follow Dr. Melanie on Instagram at @Melanie_luja and Brother Oshea on Instagram at @stillwatersnetwork. If you are a reader, you can also treat yourself to one of the couple’s many published works, which include Internal Balance - Would You Marry You?, which is also a podcast, In Your Kitchen With Melanie: For the Amateur Herbalist, Sounds from the Waters Poetry Anthology, and Purple People who Dance Barefoot.