My Journey
I am originally from Brazil, from the beautiful city of Sao Paulo. I also have roots from Spain, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. I honor all this diversity, creating my global citizenship, and accepting that I am broad, vast human that belongs to the world, and the world is within me.
I was fortunate that my parents gifted me with an international education in my beloved country, attending British and American schools. A gift, I later passed on to my children. From an incredibly young age I learned what it is to ADAPT. I was only 6 years old when my Spanish entrepreneur father, decided to move us to Canada. Little did I know at that time, that the universe was starting to prepare me to what my life would become, a series of adaptations, losses, and mountains of resilience.
A brief year in Canada, with much learning, adaptation to new foods, new school, new friends, new culture, and new family dynamics, going back at 7 to my home country. Couple years later, at 12 years old, I returned to Canada. This time a hugely different scenario, attending four schools in a space of 2 years, adapting to all those changes plus the fact that my dad had terminal cancer. This we found out a couple of months into our arrival. All these changes and adaptions had a tremendous impact on me. Those two years I bounced around from school to school, lived with my elder sisters, and saw my parents from time to time.
When Papa passed away, I was 14 years old going on 40. A sickness can unite a family or destroy a family, unfortunately mine was the later one. After his death, my mom took the decision of putting me in a boarding school in Canada while she went back to Brazil. I had many loses in those previous two years, and many more in the next 3, but they magically turned into tremendous gains for my entire life. I learned resilience, I learned what it is to be alone with grief, I learned to turn my new friends into family, and I learned that if I concentrated on doing positive things my pain became smaller. I was 14, making decisions by myself for myself. These all were gains for my future life since the universe blessed me with an expat life. I married a foreigner and his work moved us from country to country. The skills of adaptation, loss, and resilience at 14, helped me adapt to every country we have lived in, and helped me share that wisdom with my 3 children. I made friends easily and all of them became family.
I am fortunate to have this family scattered throughout the world. During all my expat years, I managed to have three kids, study a BS in Exercise Science and Health Promotion, have various businesses, compete in bodybuilding competitions, work as a fitness/wellness coach for 28+years and became the backbone for my family and their adaptations. I developed through all those years a love for humans and what makes us tick. I listened and heard many personal stories from clients. By living amongst different cultures, I observed how some humans can adapt easily to new outcomes and others have such tremendous difficulty. I developed a level of awareness that drew people to open their hearts to me. They felt comfortable, and I in turn increased my humility, compassion, awareness, and empathy skills. I love humans, how they think, what makes them who they are , how we can be so different and so the same at times. How some of us can go through terrible experiences and ride the wave with calmness, less drama and solution focus. How some of us can be optimistic, realistic, and determined, and how some of us have difficulties adapting and working with life’s challenges. My nerdy self and passion for humans led me to study the mind and spirit, I already knew about the body, I trained them. Many courses and certifications on the human mind and spirit taught me that what we most need in life is to be able to dominate our minds, embrace our souls and accept with curiosity and resilience the cards that life gives us.
This awareness led me to further study almost obsessively meditation, mindfulness, different religions, different thought processes, and different viewpoints from the eastern and western traditions. Learning and diving into spirituality, energy medicine and all forms of alternative interventions that could bring clarity, ease, grace, joy, happiness, resilience, wisdom, and awareness to humans. I became my own experiment, through that learning I developed intuition and healed deep areas that needed attention within me, and then helped others do the same. In my 40’s, life gave me another painful lesson, but this time I was prepared academically and emotionally. This time my toolbox was full of knowledge, wisdom, experience, and I put it all to the test, what I learned formally and informally. Turmoil is part of life, but how we digest it and how we expel it, creates the lesson from it. I know I can deal with grace and acceptance what is given to me, and I wish the same for all humans. Life is a school, a university and all in one learning center. My motto is “If life is a school, then I am the biggest nerd”, I want to learn from the good and the not so good”.
At times though, I am human, and must remind myself of my possibilities. As we say in Positive Psychology, Permission to be human. Talking about Positive Psychology it was the last sprinkle, (maybe not, who knows what I will learn next) to my formal education. Positive Psychology brought on the applied science to what I had been practicing for years. Being resilient, dealing with negative emotions, choosing positive emotions as my go to, meditation, right nourishment, right thoughts, spirituality, and all of it science based. Scientifically tested, tried, and approved. I decided to become a certified Positive Psychology coach, I was already a coach all my life, I believe we all can be coaches to ourselves, sometimes we are not able to see that, and a formal coach can open that door for us.
Today, I am blessed because I continue to do what I have always done, I coach, I help people, I hold people, I embrace people and I believe in people, this is my passion and my purpose. I am a global citizen of the people, a peacekeeper of souls and their journeys. My philosophy is, if I can reach one person, help one person in the smallest form, I am complete, I have done and left a positive mark on Earth. As I say, I have only one shot at being Mary, who knows what or who I will be next, so let me make this Mary the best she can be. She is human, she will make mistakes, but she chooses to learn, learn, learn, adapt to all that is, and all that will come. The ping pong of life is that, sometimes we take roles of teachers’ other times of students. Honestly, I enjoy both sides of the table. Thanks for being here and reading a small part of my “Mary” soul story.