living the dream with massage therapist and founder of the unlady like lounge Courtney Lewis

Send us Fan MailCourtney is a dirty thirty something entrepreneur from Minnesota with a double major in criminal justice and massage therapy. We know...it didn't make much sense to us either. Until we dove deeper into her back story and got to know the woman beneath the tough girl image. Her father, a Cuban immigrant, was imprisoned when she was born, and spent over 20 of her first 25 years incarcerated. These arrests led to her first encounter with law enforcement--as well as having a duty weapon pointed at her head at 6 years old. Several people in her family were diagnosed with MS quite young, and found that massage therapy was significantly more effective (both physically and financially) than pharmaceutical treatment. This lead her to pursue her associates degree in massage therapy. Growing up in a very small Minnesota town on the Iowa/Wisconsin border, she was subjected to plenty of things growing up, from sexual assault, domestic violence, drug abuse and overdose, fertility struggles/pregnancy loss, racism, police brutality, her own run ins with law enforcement/incarceration, homelessness, and of course the family business of organized crime, etc. Through all of the adversity she has overcome, however, she earned the nickname "Phoenix", as she's somehow managed to continuously rise from the ashes of her own destruction. In September of 2020, during the Nationwide lockdown, she set out to create a safe space for local women to connect, vent and just be authentically and unapologetically themselves. This was the birth of the Facebook group "The Unladylike Lounge". What was intended to be a short lived, tristate women's empowerment group, quickly snowballed, and within it's first three weeks, had a membership of over 1,000 women from all over the country. Two years later, that same group has grown to an astonishing 8.3k women spanning OVER 21 nations across the globe! The "Unladies" as they affectionately call themselves, are the women who don't quite fit the cookie cutter standards for other women's empowerment or mom groups. They're the ones with quick wit, twisted senses of humor, filthy mouths, scars on their knuckles...self described as Crude: with a heart of gold. They don't always agree, they don't always get along...hell...they don't always like one another. But they ALWAYS have one another's back whether a sister is in need of a funny meme, a cute pet pic, tough love or simply someone to remind them that they're not alone in whatever life is throwing their way at the moment.https://theunladylikelounge.com Support the show