I decided I was going to get my family out of poverty when I was six years old.

I don't remember it the way you'd remember deciding something as an adult — weighing it, choosing it. It was more like a switch. Something in me went quiet, and something else took over, and from that day on, everything I did pointed at one thing: make sure we're safe. Make sure we're okay.

Maybe your six-year-old moment looked nothing like mine. Maybe it wasn't poverty, wasn't a country you had to leave. But if you're here, some part of you probably already knows this feeling anyway — the one where everything on the outside looks like it's "all good," but something quieter underneath has been asking for your attention for a long time now.

A deeply seeded feeling that something is off. And no matter how much "better" your life gets, it doesn't go away.

Here's what mine actually looked like.

I loved learning, but I was top of my class out of duty. It was the only thing I could actually do, as a child, to take me — and my family — out of poverty. So I left Venezuela in 2012, when it wasn't safe to stay anymore. Florida. Spain. Eventually Facebook, building teams from nothing across Ireland and California. I was good at it. Every performance review came back higher than the last.

And every single time, it wasn't enough.

There was no achievement, no circumstance, that made "the pain" go away. It didn't matter how "good" it looked on paper. I felt like there was no escape — like I was going to be "broken" forever. I felt ashamed for not being able to truly be present in my own life. Ungrateful, even, for not being able to celebrate everything I'd built. It was all here. I'd made it all happen. So why was I still feeling this way?

Maybe you've asked yourself some version of that same question.

At six, I'd assumed the anxiety came from the poverty. Now I was starting to understand it had never really been about that at all.

Then I had my first son, in the middle of what looked, from every angle, like "the dream life." Good job. Good marriage. A beautiful son. Nothing missing at all.

Five months after he was born, I was sitting in a meeting when pain took over my body so completely I couldn't move a finger without crying. Doctor after doctor. Most of them didn't believe it was as bad as I said. Eventually: a ruptured disc in my lower spine. I couldn't hold my son for years after that.

Until one day, something shifted.

Not a solution. Not a fix. A feeling of being done fighting — and underneath it, the realization of how exhausted I actually was, from a lifetime of hustling and surviving and pushing through.

Lying there, in pain I couldn't move through, I saw the truth of it clearly for the first time: I could not allow my body — or myself — to need this. I couldn't let it need rest. I couldn't let it be unable to do all the things "I had to be doing." I couldn't let it just stop.

I had given myself away my entire life to "whatever needed to be done." No questions asked, no negotiation. And my body had had enough of that.

So the surrender, when it finally came, came on its own. And it was one of the most empowering moments of my life. It didn't feel like weakness. It felt like I was finally being true to myself. I felt this truth deep in my bones: I was not going to push my body again to be, or need, anything different than what was truly present.

Then a quiet voice said, in tears, with a deep love and a sense of being held for the first time in my life: God, if this is what needs to be for me right now, I fully accept it.

The most unexpected thing happened, the pain dropped by half. Immediately. In that instant.

That was when my body started to tell me the story of everything I did that took me to that point. And that's when I actually started listening.

What followed wasn't quick. It took years to learn a language nobody had taught me — that emotions are energy, and energy needs somewhere to go. That my body had been keeping a record the whole time, of everything I'd pushed down just to keep functioning.

I started noticing something specific: when I made a choice that wasn't actually mine — when I said yes out of obligation instead of truth — the pain would come back. Not eventually. Right away. My spine became something I could measure my own honesty against. The pain wasn't punishing me. It was guardrailing me — telling me, immediately, whenever I'd drifted from what I actually knew to be true.

I made art during that time — the first time in my life I did something purely because I felt called to it, not because it served the plan. The same image kept coming to me: my spine, covered in crystals and flowers. So I finally put it somewhere.

It was an act of love toward my body. I know now it helped me heal. And building it, piece by piece, felt genuinely good — maybe the first thing in a long time that did.

My body had become an open book. And what it was teaching me was this: the thing I'd spent my whole life treating as a problem to fix — the pain, the anxiety, the days I couldn't function — was never actually the enemy. It was the most honest messenger I had.

A few years into this, I met Dr. Brian Thomas Lumb and trained in what's now called Elemental Embodiment — Elemental Embodiment Exploration, to give it its full name.

By then, I'd already spent months lying in that bed, learning to listen to my body — training myself, without knowing it, into its innate intelligence. Elemental Embodiment, as a somatic practice, reinforced what I'd already discovered on my own. It gave it a new structure: a way to guide someone else through that same listening.

Here's the part that took me longest to understand: none of this works by talking about it. I'd already tried therapy, coaching, more books than I can count — real tools, and none of them were what actually moved the pain out of my spine. Maybe you've tried some of the same things. The untrained mind is good at a lot of things. Metabolizing what the body is holding usually isn't one of them. Left to itself, it tends to analyze, explain, and try to fix — and all of that, however well-intentioned, gets in the way of the body's own process.

So this work leaves the thinking mind mostly out of it. Being through feeling, not through mental definitions. The body leads. I just hold the space and listen, the way I finally learned to listen to my own.

Here's what a session actually looks like.

We start with a few minutes of you sharing what's present — nothing you need to prepare, nothing you need to explain perfectly. Then we move into breath. Guided, simple, and yours to shape — not performed, not forced into any particular pattern. The breath is just how we start listening to what your body already knows.

From there, your nervous system leads. As it finds enough safety to settle, deeper layers get room to surface — sometimes as stillness, sometimes as movement, sound, or sensation you didn't expect. Nothing is required to happen. Whatever your body is ready to release is exactly enough.

Sessions run sixty minutes: up to forty-five together, guided by what your body needs that day — sometimes shorter, your body will guide us here. Then I step away from the call. That time is yours alone, without an audience, to let whatever wants to move finish moving — sound, stillness, tears, realizations, new ideas, actions, readiness. All of it is exactly what it needs to be. Remember, your body is leading this process. I check in with you over Telegram after the call, to see how it all landed.

Everything happens at the pace your body can actually hold. Nothing is forced. Nothing has to look a certain way to count.

If any of this is resonating — if some part of you has been waiting for permission to stop pushing through — this is an invitation, not a prescription. You don't have to know exactly what you need yet. You just have to be willing to be met.

Founding rates

While this first cohort takes shape, sessions are offered at founding rates. These rates won't stay this way once the founding cohort fills. If this is calling you, now is the time.

A few things worth saying plainly: this isn't medical care, psychotherapy, or emergency mental health support. It doesn't diagnose, treat, or cure anything, and it's not a substitute for professional care where that's needed. I can't promise you a specific outcome — only that I'll meet you exactly where you are, with everything I have.

That six-year-old girl is still in me. I don't try to talk her out of what she decided — she got us through more than I could ever thank her for. She just doesn't have to run the whole show anymore.

Water changes form endlessly — river, rain, mist, ocean — and never once stops being water. That's what this work actually is, underneath everything else I've told you here. Not becoming someone new. Just finally letting yourself take the shape you were always going to take, once it felt safe enough to stop holding so tightly.

If you're ready, I'd love to meet you there.