Me... in a tiny nutshell

My story... in a not-so-tiny nutshell

As from a very young age, I have always felt a calling to help others. When I graduated high school, I enrolled in Medical School, but I quickly realized that becoming a medical doctor was not for me, as I could not, for the life of me, picture myself taking a scalpel in my hand and cutting someone open, not even to help them heal. I also gave the field of Nutrition a try, but finally ended up studying –and absolutely loving– Biochemical Engineering, a branch of science dedicated, among other things, to developing pharmaceutical products from biological materials (as opposed to synthetic ones). Back then, my intention was to continue on to graduate school to specialize in Immunology and work on developing a vaccine or a cure for AIDS, as my uncle and Godfather had passed away from this disease.

After graduating college, however, life took me down a different path and blessed me with two wonderful souls who I have the privilege to call my children. Being a native speaker of both English and Spanish, I put myself through college working as a freelance translator, so instead of going on to graduate school or getting a job in research as a Biochemical Engineer, I continued to work as a translator, as this gave me the opportunity to make a living, while staying at home to raise my two sons. Naturally, the bulk of my work as a translator has largely been in the medical and pharmaceutical fields, and even though I felt (or rather, tricked myself into thinking… more on that later) that I was indirectly being of service by helping potentially life-saving medications and medical devices reach a larger audience, I still felt like something was missing. I also worked for 12 years for a publishing company that mostly published books on alternative healing methods, so I learned quite a lot about alternative medicine, herbology, home remedies, and nutrition through my translation work as well. In early 2023, however, I quit my job as a translator, as I physically, energetically, morally, or ethically could no longer continue to support the pharmaceutical industry in the current state of our world, and I started to speak up by recording and posting a video entitled A Public Apology.

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While attending college, I also went to Music School to learn how to play the cello, and 15 years later, I became a Certified Suzuki Cello Teacher, so in addition to translating, I also started giving cello lessons in the afternoons to both kids and adults, my two sons included. As it turns out, I have quite a knack for teaching. Shifting from being glued to a computer with no human interaction whatsoever, to taking a few hours every afternoon to interact with kids as young as three all the way up to adults in their seventies, was a mentally and emotionally life-saving change in scenery for me. But even though I knew I was helping create moments of pure joy for myself, my students and their families, sharing my appreciation for beauty of art, and helping them take advantage of the physical, mental, emotional, and psychological benefits that come with learning how to play musical instrument, I still felt like I was not fulfilling my true calling.

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So how did I end up practicing Shamanism as a spiritual path? Let me give you a little bit of context. Ever since I was a child, I have been what I now know is termed a highly sensitive person (HSP) and an intuitive empath. I was fully clairvoyant and frequently had paranormal experiences. I was so terrified that I slept with my security pillow, my security blanket, and a pacifier until I was almost 10 years old, and I would lull myself to sleep by silently singing love songs by a Mexican singer and songwriter, José José (those of you who are familiar with his songs will appreciate how funny this is), thinking that if I went to sleep thinking about love, bad and scary things would not happen. Nighttime especially was such a terrifying experience for me that when my Mom heard about a conference by a paranormal psychologist, she was the first one in line. After the conference ended, she approached him in private, told him about me, and he instructed her to roll up a newspaper, open all the windows in our home, and start walking through the house, hitting the walls with the rolled-up newspaper, and yelling “Get out! You cannot touch my daughter!”, with me surreptitiously following closely behind her. And when she was done, she closed all the windows, and threw the newspaper in the trash. If my memory serves, this happened when I was around 7 years old, and my constant state of terror gradually subsided, until I was finally able to fall asleep without the bathroom light on, almost 6 years later. Consider that what I am talking about happened back in the seventies, when this subject was even more of a taboo than it is now. 

Another important piece of context is that I was born and raised in Mexico, a predominantly Catholic country where all things energy and non-ordinary reality are deeply rooted into the culture and belief systems, regardless of religion. Back home, when your baby cannot seem to fall asleep or keeps crying inconsolably after you have tried every single trick in the new parent instruction manual and every piece of advice from your pediatrician, your best friend or simple common knowledge and practices will have you adding some lettuce leaves or chamomile tea to your baby’s bathwater, or buying a bunch of herbs at the market and “sweeping” your child with them, or rubbing an egg all over your baby’s body to give your child a “limpia de huevo” (egg cleansing). Every single market in Mexico has at least two or three stands selling all kinds of herbs, oils, ointments, candles, incense, etc., to heal every single physical, emotional, and spiritual disease known to humankind. And why is all of this common knowledge and practice? Simply put, because it works. And so, you grow up knowing that there is more to us than meets the physical eye and more to healing than can be accomplished by conventional western medicine. So much so, that even medical doctors will suggest trying alternative avenues before resorting to surgery. Case in point: After a couple years of recurring and extremely painful ear infections treated with course after course of antibiotics, I came across an ENT specialist who said: “You have two choices. You can either schedule your son’s surgery, or you can take him to see this homeopathic doctor.” I chose option #2. End of ear infections.

As far as religion goes, I was born into a bilingual/bicultural home and “sort of” raised as a Catholic, meaning I was baptized, went to Sunday school (where I especially enjoyed learning the Parables of Jesus and the Golden Rule of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”), and received my first communion, but never, ever attended Sunday Mass. I also had sprinkles of Judaism here and there, as my Grandmother, who was widowed when my Father was three years old, remarried a French Jewish man fleeing WWII. She converted into Judaism, but she secretly kept praying to all of her favorite saints, every single night. She was also clairvoyant and I remember being fascinated by her stories, as every single house she had ever lived in had been inhabited by earth-bound souls.

I remember having a really hard time trying to come up with a list of sins for my pre-first-communion confession, and memorizing the prayers I needed to recite, and the phrases you are supposed to answer when the priest says something during mass, as I was not aware of this requirement until the day before my first communion. I was able to memorize the prayers, even though I did not understand them, and I did my best to babble through all of those other phrases during the ceremony. I was so nervous about screwing up that I barely slept the night before, so all of my first-communion photos have me looking half-asleep with huge dark circles under my eyes, and by the time it was over, I was drenched in sweat and my beautiful, white dress was soaking wet. What I remember most vividly from my first communion is that after the breakfast offered by the nuns to all of our guests, we stayed behind until everyone had left and my Mom was taking the gifts to the car. I went outside of the convent and saw the priest, dressed in civilian clothes, walking out the church with two very attractively dressed women, one on each arm, and they all got into an olive green Cadillac. I clearly remember thinking, “Something is very wrong with this picture”, and mind you, I was nine years old, so I essentially had no real understanding of what the vow of chastity meant. I was, however, made to memorize the Ten Commandments, so I definitely knew something was off with that whole scene. Right then and there, I decided I was never, ever again going to make up a list of pretend sins to offer my confession to a priest who had just asked nine-year-old, sinful me if I was willing to renounce Satan. Please do not take this to mean that I am disparaging all Catholic priests. Like people in every single other profession or occupation in this dual world, there are really, really good ones, and there are really, really bad ones, with all the shades of gray in between.

As I came into my teenage years, I broke up with my boyfriend of almost 4 years, and when I found out he had started dating one of my best friends, I went into my Mother’s drug cabinet, took a bottle of sleeping pills and held it in my hand for what seemed to be longest time, and with tears rolling down my cheeks, I thought to myself, “There HAS to be something better than this”, so I put the bottle back in its place, curled up in bed, and cried myself to sleep. This boyfriend had been physically, verbally, and psychologically abusive. Every time we had a fight, he would repeat over and over again that no one else would ever love me because I was already “damaged goods”. 

After the break-up, I was still in love with my ex-boyfriend, but I started dating a guy, who was 7 years older than me, and very, very Catholic, so in an attempt to fix my “damaged goods” status, I decided to give Catholicism a second try. Besides attending mass together every single Sunday, my new boyfriend tried really hard to convince me to switch to an all-girl Catholic school, because his Catholic definition of a “good girl” required not attending the laic, co-ed school that I had been enrolled in since pre-Nursery (conveniently enough, this definition did not include anything about not having sex before marriage, so he did take me quite often to cheap motels… hmmm). I finally agreed because I knew I was not going to do well in school if I had to see my ex and my former best friend together, kissing and holding hands, every single day. I found an all-girl Catholic school who took me in just before classes started, and boy, oh boy… that was an experience for a whole chapter in the book about my life story, if I ever do come around to writing one. Anyway, during my entire Junior year of High School, I tried really hard, but simply could not find a way to pair up the teachings of Jesus that had resonated so deeply with me as a child, with the concept of a judgemental, punishing, and vengeful God who I was required to fear. Needless to say, that was my second and last attempt at finding my spiritual path through Catholicism, and I settled for considering Jesus’ teachings as inherent truths that all humans with even a modicum of a moral compass should innately follow, and decided they were completely separate from and unrelated to the man-made Catholic Church as an institution and religion. 

After this whole experience, I made the mistake of equating God with the Catholic Church and became a self-pronounced atheist, believing that God was a concept made up by man simply to explain the unexplainable. Also around this time, I woke up one day and said to myself, “Reincarnation is the only true form of justice in this world”. And so it was for me. Just one of those “aha” moments, but didn’t really give it much thought for a very long time after that.

Despite my newfound religious status as an atheist, a couple of years later, I resumed my search for the meaning of life, and in my early twenties, I had a brief encounter with Buddhism. When I heard about Nirvana —a state of transcendental bliss that may be attained during life or at the end of it, as explained by Gautama Buddha—, I said to myself, “Now this is more like it”, but I did not follow through with it at the time. I was a night owl, so getting up at 4:00 AM to go to the temple to chant, while very uplifting, was something I simply could not keep up with at that age. Back then, I was not aware of the fact that spirituality was something I could actually pursue on my own, so I pushed it aside, once again, and my main belief system shifted towards science –also one of my life-long interests– as the only source of real knowledge. I went to college and started studying Biochemical Engineering, again thinking of myself as an absolute atheist that somehow resonated with Jesus’ teachings… and then something absolutely amazing happened. 

I was at a Biochem 101 lab practice to learn how to extract DNA from liver. I was beyond upset because, with no heads-up whatsoever, our professor announced that we were required to sacrifice this unbelievably cute, tiny, beautiful, white mouse with red eyes, whisking its tiny white whiskers while sniffing around the table, so lest my perfectionist, overachieving self failed to get anything other than a perfect grade on anything, including a stupid lab practice, I screwed a pair of ovaries on, and forced myself to stop myself from crying uncontrollably and running out of the lab to never come back. Amidst this insanely overwhelming moment, I did wonder silently why we needed to sacrifice this beautiful creature, instead of just going across the street to buy a liver at a supermarket (which I later found out was what they did with the other Biochem professor… uugghhh!!!). My overactive mind came up with the “answer” (or should I say “excuse”?)  that if I truly wanted to become a researcher, I needed to get a grip on myself, as I would eventually need to learn how to do this as part of my desired future job description. I realized much later in life that this was probably one of the Universe’s first attempts at teaching me four major life lessons all at once: 

1. The end does not justify the means. Period.

2. There is always another choice. Period.

3. When something you are being required to do by a person of authority makes you question your Self and just feels in your gut like the wrong thing to do, a) speak up, and b) do not comply, no matter how harsh the threat of reprisal may seem to be. Period.

4. If something does not feel right, do not trick yourself into thinking that you are doing it for your, someone else’s or humanity’s greater good. If it doesn’t feel good, it cannot be for anyone’s greater or even lesser good. It’s not good. Period.

I clearly did not learn any of those life lessons at that time, since I stayed and pushed myself to complete the entire lab practice with a huge lump in my throat and hiding from everyone so no one would notice the tears in my eyes that I was trying really hard, albeit unsuccessfully, to hold back. When we were finally done, I held a tiny flask with the DNA extract, and our professor instructed us to take a glass rod, dip it into the extract, and lift it up. I followed her instructions (something I excelled at) and to my utter awe and amazement, when I lifted up the glass rod, I could SEE the strands of DNA hanging from the rod with my bare eyes. My heart started beating so loudly I could not hear myself think. And it was at that precise moment when I knew, I just KNEW, that we could not be this random sac of molecules that coincidentally happened to work together in such perfect harmony. But more importantly, I just KNEW there was no way on Earth that we could be random sacs of molecules that can “coincidentally” laugh, and cry, and love. In that very moment, I just KNEW, in my gut, that there had to be something beyond us, something far greater than us, something that animates us. And that is the exact instant in time when I found my faith in God, or what I then called LOVE. [It’s 11:22 AM as I write this with chills running up and down my body, and my eyes filling up with tears. This happens every single time I tell this story.] 

This was one of the most life-altering events of my life, a true before-and-after moment, a turning point there was no coming back from. There was no longer any doubt in my mind that there was some-“thing”, some kind of “energy” beyond all beings, that I could only describe as unconditional love. But going beyond that, there was an even deeper, hidden message: I found my faith in this “thing”, or “energy”, or “unconditional love”, through science. I realized, right then and there, that the separation between science and spirituality was a false construct of society, and that I had to start questioning everything I had been taught or had been made to believe as fact. And so I resumed my forgotten spiritual quest for the true meaning and purpose of life. 

I was still an “atheist” in terms of not believing in the concept of God that I had been taught as a child, but ever since that moment at the Biochem 101 lab practice, the existence of something far greater than us became, and continues to be, an undeniable fact for me.

As a part of my resumed spiritual quest, I joined a Sufism group, read a lot of books on the subject and did all the practices, but it never quite resonated with me, so I ended up leaving after a couple of years. By then, I had already graduated from college, I was still working as a translator, and I was still studying music, so a great part of my spiritual experience was about connecting to the beauty and the deep emotional experience of playing the cello.

A few years later, I married a Catholic man, but we did not get married in a church, as he had been married before and his request for annulment was denied. We had two sons and they were baptized, but on my part, it was really only to keep a societal facade and not ruffle my husband’s feathers, as I have never understood the concept of original sin. I did tell my husband that I would agree to have them baptized, as long as he would agree to not have them go through the whole process of receiving their first communion, as I wanted them to be the ones to choose whether or not they believed in the Catholic understanding of God and I wanted them to have the freedom to decide which religious or spiritual path to follow when they were old enough to start being curious about their own spirituality, instead of us pushing our own views down their throats. Honestly, I simply didn’t want them to grow up believing that they were sinners just for having been born.

Instead, I would talk to them about this energy that was made of pure love, and about angels and dwarfs and dragons and all kinds of magical light beings. Come springtime, we would go in search for dandelions growing from the cracks of sidewalks, because all those little white petals that you can blow away were actually fairies that were in charge of taking our wishes to wherever they needed to go so our wishes would come true. We made a tiny little house in our garden for a dwarf that lived in our house and loved to play sometimes not-so-funny tricks on us, and we offered him water and popcorn and gummy bears on a regular basis, in exchange for not turning up the volume three thousand times while we were watching TV. We bought one tree for each one of them, and they named their own tree and planted them in our garden. When their father and I got a divorce and we had to move out of that home, I remember that the thing they both said they were saddest about when we moved out of that house was that they would never be able to go visit their trees and watch them grow.   

And the reason why we got divorced was a life-changing event that led me to choose Shamanism and energy healing as my spiritual path. To make an unbelievably long story short, my ex-husband got involved with a woman who practiced black magic, and because he kept breaking his promise of divorcing me and marrying her, she became intent on ruining him financially, making him ill, and even have him die in a car accident. He found out about this shortly after we separated, when a few of his employees, who knew this woman and had started to notice profound changes in his personality and even in how he talked and dressed, took a photo of him to a “brujo”. This brujo passed his photo over the flame of a candle, and her face appeared on the back of the photo. He then proceeded to inform them of her intentions. Two days after my then husband relayed this information to me, I had an early morning rehearsal with my cello students, and my sons were also part of the ensemble. I arrived at the school, took them out of the car, crossed the street, and asked the security guard at the entrance to hold their hands while I went back to my car to get our three cellos out of the trunk. It was very early in the morning and there were no cars passing by. As I was opening up the trunk of my car, I suddenly heard a car slam the brakes, I turned around, and I saw my younger son standing not even 5 inches in front of the car. I swear an angel must have stood in front of him to save his life. I picked up my son and carried him to the sidewalk, got the cellos out of the car, went into the rehearsal hall, and tried really hard to pull myself together, but I just couldn’t stop shaking. My students started to arrive for our rehearsal, and one of their moms approached me and asked me what was wrong. I told her about what the brujo had said about this woman wanting to have my husband killed in a car accident and what had just happened with my son. This could not be a coincidence. Living in Mexico City, my son KNEW never to run out into the street. It was really early in the morning and there were no cars around to be seen.

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This Mom, who later became one of my best friends, and who I owe a debt of gratitude for having dragged and pulled me through my entire divorce, offered to take my kids and I to see a very powerful Shaman she knew. This happened on a Thursday. The following Saturday, we went to get a cleansing with this Shaman, who was teaching a group of students. All of her students were standing around in a circle, and she started to do the clearing on me. She pulled out two entities out of me: one that was stuck in my throat and another one from my genitals. She explained that black magic was being done to me as well, to make me fall ill as a result of not being able to swallow, and so no men (including my husband, first and foremost) would ever again be attracted to me. She threw these “beings” on the floor and enclosed them in a circle of light, and then asked her students to go feel their energy. Most of them started to cough and gag, and one of them even went to the bathroom to throw up. Oddly enough, for many months before this event, I had been feeling a lump in my throat and I was positive it was cancer, but I was too afraid to go to a doctor to find out for sure. I had also had a very unpleasant smell coming from my private parts, even though I had not been sexually active, AT ALL, for many years. So I KNEW she wasn’t making this up. After that session, the lump in my throat and the bad smell were completely gone… like magic. At the end of the session, I asked her, “What do I need to do to study with you, so I can learn how to protect my children?” She looked at the palm of my hand and said, “Come next Saturday. I just started teaching a new group, so you can catch up by asking someone for their notes”.

I arrived early to my first class, and as soon as she started to talk about God, and Jesus, and power animals, and dragons, and angels, and Buddhas, and Hindu gods and goddesses, and ETs, and all sorts of magical beings and experiences, I immediately thought, felt, and said to myself, for the very first time in my life, “I am finally home. THIS is where I truly belong.”