We’ve all experienced varying degrees of the phrase Time Heals while recovering from surgery, grieving the loss of relationships or the passing of loved ones. In my experience, if time is the wise agent in the healing process, love is the medicine that seals our wounds thereafter.

How can it not?

Go back to the last time you were sick or recently operated, alone or in company. Hopefully, time and medication made you feel better as the days passed by. Now think of how you felt when you heard from those who cared for you. The company they dedicated to you changing their life just to be next to you; the daily texts and calls to check on you; the get well cards in the mail; the acts of generosity; the consideration of your work mentors; the Instagram messages to a story that suggested recovery; the words of encouragement to remind you who you are.

This is even more evident if you are an independent woman head of your own household.  In medical recoveries, after all is said and done, and as you pass your worst days of pain and fear, your space now frames the acts of caring that keep you floating in grace, lifted by the presence of those who took time to let you know you are loved.

Count me among the blessed ones who experienced the healing effects of this love medicine.

Now go back to the first or last time your heart broke to pieces.  The formula applies.

If you are a committed to doing the work  – self growth via spiritual or psychological mastery – no matter how trying or how painful the road or the experience was, your recovery can lead you to an unexpected form of love.

The kind that will transform you, leading you to compassion, forgiveness, appreciation, and more love for all they did, including what they could not do any better.

The kind that will find you wiser, lighter, happier.

I call it a filter of intentions, and not every person or love interest will pass it or come close.

But you know who met your heart, with all their failings, adding yours.

And as in medical interventions, when you look back at the experience, you should not look back at what healed you physically or made you evolve emotionally with disdain or regret.  Try a wall mirror, face whatever needs to be faced, and get ready to welcome more love. Self love.

My favorite quote from Mother Theresa comes close to this reflection  – “I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.”

It’s this kind love that makes us grow into someone who honors everyone involved in the most important decisions in our lives.

And the day your loved ones cross the bridge, it’s this kind of love that will seal their bridge to you forever.

This awakening is so prevalent, that the popular serie And Just Like That lands its on a podium for all us to contemplate: “My sadness never shrank but I grew, and grew until I was so large, the grief just felt smaller.  You don’t move on because you’re ready to. You move on because you’ve outgrown who you used to be.”

If who you used to be is one who lives in regret ignoring unhealed or unforgiving wounds of all kinds, take a look within.

And let love in.

 

 

 

Messages come to us in many ways. This one came through the coffee window of my Latin Cafe.

In April 2019, I started a corporate opportunity that everyone thought had potential, even if it was below my professional experience and I was overqualified.  Surprisingly, it ended abruptly right in the most questioning of circumstances.

The day after this demoralizing experience, and regardless of how broken I felt, I headed to my holy grail of morning glory, the Latin Cafe in my neighborhood where I order my daily dose of Cuban coffee.

I placed my order as usual, and the woman manning the window asked me how was work. My reply was as brief: “Over.”

She told me to sit in one of the tables across the window, and that she would be happy to serve me.  I insisted that there was no need for her to to go out of her way, but she was resolute.

Minutes later, she approached my table, placed my cup of caffeine octane on its center, and told me to be positive, not elaborating much in case I did not want to engage. I thanked her and thought that would be the end of it. Not a chance. I was out of work, but my new friend had just found one – Me.

“I don’t know if you know about me,” she said. Time stood still as she focused her eyes on mine.

“See those buildings behind you” she said, pointing to the high-rise Brickell skyscrapers in construction right behind my back.  “I used to work there,” she said. “I managed construction projects, I had a secretary, and a big stack of papers on my desk. I worked so hard managing offices but things also ended for me.”  Nobody cared about me there, she continued, until one day I said enough of this.

My eyes were watery. My heart in my throat. Her story resonated.

Does it ring a bell? A fire alarm?

Read on, don’t run for cover.

“You see me doing coffee here?” she pressed on.  “I don’t care what people think of me because I come here every morning happy.  I like working with my people, and my customers are very generous with me. I work half-day, then I go swimming, and at home I do my own thing!  It may be a bit less money, but I am free.”

In my case, years of successful corporate experience with outstanding reviews seemed like an illusory past after my dismissal. I recall the moment as an emotional tsunami at the core of my “not good enough” fault zone. This fear is among the most dreaded and irrational by the majority of the population, “The Impostor Syndrome” – to be found out, to be good at nothing, the labeling of one’s strengths as non-existent.  I felt my body sank, drowning into the depths of insanity, all of it questioning if I had gone mad, if I had made my years of professional seniority, sacrifice, and glory all up.

I did not. My corporate history and my stellar recommendations available on Linkedin speak for me. My formative years with brilliant mentors reached its summit bringing me to a hostile arena — a much needed ego crush, a life-kicking fracture, yet a jump-start to my intentions which had been on life support in a financial toxic culture, trapped in a cubicle, accepting the unacceptable, smelling the backstab.

Little did I know that the dismissal that felt shocking, embarrassing, humiliating, and shameful, came to land me at my purpose.

“Look at you Mami!,” my waitress smiled as if questioning my wistful look. “You are a beautiful elegant woman, do something creative — go for art — you are probably very good at it, write a book girl!”

All of it prophetic, particularly knowing that what I love to do is precisely what she mentioned – what you see in this website, in the words of those who know me and motivate me – an eye that beautifies. I am a visual poet, a story teller. I am an artist.

I am no longer the woman settling for the cubicle.

And just like that, I remembered a favorite teaching from Gary Zukav’s The Seat of the Soul :
“When the personality comes fully to serve the energy of its soul, that is authentic empowerment.”

Shouldn’t we all? Isn’t this one of life’s best friendly reminders?

Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the campaign held every October globally to increase breast cancer awareness and raise funds for its cure, just ended. For most women, the fight to fight the disease never ends. Fear fuels it.

To this date, I have been fortunate not to have breast cancer. And I have been blessed to know women who have faced the disease with the guts it takes to hear the news firsthand while empty-handed.

I don’t have a family history of breast cancer, but I grew up with a fear history of breast cancer.

This is why I am here, to share my race away from breast cancer fear.

I met breast cancer in my childhood.

Growing up in Caracas, Venezuela, I eavesdropped on conversations between my mother and our family’s best friend, our beloved Antonia Cotelo, nicknamed by all as Totó. In her 50s, she was diagnosed with a brain cancer that quickly metastasized into breast cancer. And during her arduous fight, I overheard the daily telephone calls my mom had every afternoon that included hopes, fears, and tears. They did not know, but I heard it all.  And I feared it all.

My parents welcomed Totó into our home every weekend. From those memories, her musical voice asking for “las niñas” (the girls) still echoes in my heart, particularly because there was not a single moment where she let her sorrow show when my sister or I were around. She was the epitome of love in joy. Until the day she parted, she held her breast cancer sentence with the grace of a white swan. Her dignity and emotional intelligence in the midst of her devastating disease are to be honored and revered.

My last memory of Totó is the face of an angel lost in time as if searching her way of out hell. An impeccably ivory complexion framing eyes no longer symmetrical and frozen, a wandering expression as if hoping to find focus in the fog of fear. All of it, below a head stylishly wrapped in a colorful scarf, honoring what was still a beautiful mind hoping to get her life back. That’s what breast cancer looked like to the girl in me.

Totó left us one rainy Sunday. Years passed by, my life went on, and my womanhood showed up. All of it with full-grown fears of breast cancer well into my 40s, intensified and out of proportion every time I had any hormonal breast pain, mammograms, thermography, sonograms, biopsies, the many roads to breast health. I knew how to know but I did not want to know. Sounds familiar?

Then I took charge.

Sick of worrying sick, I saw a renowned specialist in Cognitive Therapy who nailed the source of my breast cancer fears and healed it with a resounding closing argument: “That’s not your story. That’s not how you will go.”  So what was I to do? Pass the page? Not a chance.

An empowered girl becomes a brave woman who helps those who have the story, anyone living in fear, the ones who are afraid to check, the ones who wished they had checked, everyone and everybody so that no woman ever goes that way again.

I propelled myself into the subject fearlessly forward.

I now go to my yearly mammograms knowing that whatever technology and medicine find, we will do our best to cure, because this is now and that was then.  Medical treatments and protocols have come a long way, and so has every woman I’ve known who has fought the disease and won. All of them.

We take preventive charge. And we run for more.

Last October 14, 2017, I ran the 5K Susan G Komen’s Race for the Cure.

I raced against fear, convinced that what men, women, and girls don’t know can kill us.

I sprinted for the women who have faced the news and the disease like champions of life. Kelly Jenkins tops my list.  I ran the race as if guided by an angel – Totó flew next to me.

We took off and became mean- freaking- cancer-curing-healing machines. And we won the race.

Ladies and gentlemen,  the race to win starts with the F word to face – Fear.

And this is what we can make most breast cancers look like: Fearless. Alive. Gone.