Posted on Leave a comment

I had a terrible habit to blame….

Blame other people…

Blame my circumstances….

Blame my “bad luck”

Blame the person who is driving slowly in front of me when I am late

Blame the car park that was too tight because I am such a bad driver to park the car…

Ya know how it goes right?

You have a habit to blame and you blame everything…

It is easy…

It makes you feel you are right….

And the world is wrong…

But when I made a decision to take full responsibility of my life…

I had to undo the “blaming” habit…

And in every situation I started asking myself questions like:

“What can I learn here?”

“Is this happening with me because I need to see something that I couldn’t see?”

Taking responsibility is a little more challenging…

It requires practice….

It requires discipline and persistence…

These are the main lessons I learned when I start taking full responsibility of my life

Taking responsibility empowers you even when it hurts…

Blaming leaves your powerless…

When you take responsibility, you can change anything in your life because you are in control…

Blaming makes you feel you can’t change anything…

Taking responsibility is a practice that gives you energy…

Blaming is a practice that drains your energy…

Taking responsibility of where you are at and who you are is an important step towards changing your life but again it is a practice and habit.

“Accept responsibility for your life. Know that it is you who will get where you want to go. No one else” Les Brown

Posted on Leave a comment

Living with and beyond cancer

After my cancer diagnosis at 38 years old, I knew I needed to act quickly…I needed to change every aspect of my life if I wanted to live a long life.

Turning up to chemotherapy wasn’t going to cut the mustard…I needed to do a lot more than that…

Cancer recurrence is real…and after you have had it…that little voice on the back of your mind is always trying to play with you….

Nobody told me I needed to do anything other than turning up to chemotherapy…in fact doctors told me I was going to be tired and I wasn’t going to be able to do much during treatment…treatment was going to last at least 6 months – mine lasted 7.5 months with the delays.

I decided I wasn’t going to sit around for 7.5 months

I started with changing my physical body, changing my diet and introducing exercise. Very quickly I knew that I needed to do more…so I started taking every piece of my life a part so I could heal completely: in and out.

I once met a cancer survivor who had also done the inner work as I did. We were talking about how many people try avoiding the inner work…she then said…

“They avoid it because it is HELL”

Yes it was HELL…to open up, to feel vulnerable, to sit with my pain even though I thought I had safely placed that inside me as deep as I could…it needed to come out…when it did…I felt I vomited out all that pain. I couldn’t believe I had lived like I did for so long…in fear, in pain, prisoner of my own story, my own believes.

My husband once said ” We have spent our lives up to now to trying to conform, to fit in. We are now trying to get rid off everything we have done to fit in so we can find who we really are.”

As I lived in different countries and travelled around the world, I always tried to fit in but it wasn’t until recently that I discovered that it is not a matter of fitting in, it is a matter of finding who I am regardless of where I am, it is been content with who I am regardless of what it is around me.

When you make a decision to take your life a part to discover who you are, you embark on a beautiful journey of self discovery. Even with all the pain that I had to relive and redefine, my self discovery journey was the biggest gift I received from cancer.

Life is all about the meaning you give to things…how can you redefine the meaning to whatever it is happening in your life right now?

Posted on Leave a comment

I had never meditated before until…

As ashamed as I am to confess this, it is fair to say if cancer hadn’t hit me I would still be living a life where I would be mostly running away from myself.

Isn’t that crazy? 

I know now it is crazy….but it took me to reach rock bottom…with my health…I almost lost my life to realize that.

So when I started opening up my heart…

I started listening to some meditation…

I remember exactly where I was and the feeling of my first full deep breath…

I didn’t realise that I had been living without breathing deeply…

I am not sure if you know but cancer cells live in an anaerobic environment…instead of using oxygen for energy like healthy cells, they use glucose. They need the healthy cells to survive, think about a parasite living of its host.

That gave me a good enough reason to breath…to breath deeply…but when I first did it…I felt again how uptight I had been…how much ‘stuff’ I had been holding on to…how ‘heavy’ I felt…

And the more I focussed on my breath, the lighter I felt…

the more connected to my body I started feeling…

I could almost feel my cells thanking me for breathing…deeply…

Slowly meditation started becoming a daily habit for me….

I was learning how to be by myself…with myself…I was learning how to slow down…to listen to my inner self…

And it all starts with breathing….a physical action that changes your physical state.

Changing your physical state of being on alert, on flight and fight mode, uptight, upset, angry…

to becoming calmer, more connected to your inner self, lighter, happier, at peace….

I know right? Just by breathing we can get all of these benefits and yet we don’t take the time to focus on it.

Today I invite you to breath…deeply… just try it…inhale to the count of 4 and exhale to the count of 6.

Do it 3, 5, 10 times if you can.

I would love to hear from you…let me know what you have felt…wasn’t it magical? Didn’t it make you feel calmer, lighter, less uptight?

But hey you’ve got to do it at least 3 times on the count of 4 – inhale and on the count of 6 – exhale. No cheating…

If you want to try a meditation, click on the link below as I have recorded a couple of meditations for you:

Meditation 1 – to connect to your inner body in times of uncertainty

Meditation 2 – to cultivate self love

Posted on Leave a comment

What is your “why”?

I come from a culture where you just get on with things…you kinda of have to.

The government is not there to help you, corruption is the norm and money talks so people just need to get on with it.

This is what I remember about Brazil…I left 18 years ago…

In my case I can’t complain about my childhood….

I grew up in upper middle class…but as a result of that my path was already carved for me before I was born.

As a female you were bound to follow the “unread” rules of a chauvinist society where girls were expected to behave in one way and boys could do whatever they wanted….

By behaving according to society expectations, as a girl you would hopefully find yourself a ‘man’ who was from a ‘good’ family meaning same social economic level as you or better.

And after finishing school, you were expected to go to university, get married and have kids.

Part of me feels that I decided early on unconsciously that nobody was going to carve my path for me.

So I was indeed the ‘black’ sheep of the family…the first one from a large extended family who left Brazil without a plan at 21 years old.

All I had was a Spanish passport, €1000 and a strong desire and naivety that I was going to prove to everyone, one could do something else other than what was expected of them.

I lived one year in Spain, 3 years in Belgium, 4 years in England, went travelling for 1 year through Central and South Amercia, lived 6 years in New Zealand and have been in Australia for 3 years.

I never went back to Brazil ( a couple of times on holidays)…I have never asked helped from anyone.

And yes I am super proud of this as I worked very hard for it.

But it wasn’t until recently that I did an exercise with Dean Graziosi that shocked me.

The exercise is called the “Seven Levels Deep Exercise”.

You ask “why” questions 7 times, moving progressively deeper into answers.

Why do I wanna gain capabilities? Why do I want more success? Why do I wanna achieve more? Why do you want financial freedom?

For example in my case I started by asking myself:

“Why do you want to be successful in life?”

My answer was “Because I want to prove myself”

Then I asked again

“Why do you want to prove yourself?”

to which I answered…”because I want people to think I am capable, honest, independent”….

then you keep going asking ‘why’ questions for 7 times.

By question level 3, something came out of my mouth that I had never said before…I said:

“I never thought I belonged anywhere”

That hit me and my husband who was next to me, like a brick wall…

when I said it, I realized that I had never felt I belonged in Brazil either, in my own country.

Previous to that I thought I didn’t feel a sense of belonging because I lived in different countries, I was a foreigner after all but truth was I never felt I belonged to where I came from either.

And my last answer shocked me even more…

I simply said…

All I wanted was to feel safe…it wasn’t money, power, a nice house, a nice car…it was simply because I wanted to feel safe.

As I write this, I actually feel deep inside that my answers are a reflection of my life, what I have worked for, what I have always craved for…a sense of belonging, feeling accepted and safe wherever I am.

It sounds crazy that such a simple exercise can have such an impact on people’s lives.

Most people really don’t know their ‘why’. They might know on the surface level. But when you go from a surface level, from thoughts on why you wanna be successful or why you wanna something, to anchoring it in your heart with feelings and emotions, things start changing.

There may not be a more powerful motivating factor on the planet than knowing your true “why”.

When you know; in your soul, why you get up every morning and fight for your dreams, you’ll never let anything get in your way of becoming the person you are meant to be.

If that is where you are right now…you are not sure about your ‘why’, you are looking for purpose and meaning in your life, I would strongly recommend you to check out Tony and Dean’s training that started changing my life:

Click now