I first tuned into Mindvalley in July 2024, just after my sixty-third birthday — at a moment when everything I thought stable was quietly shifting. For many years, I’d been a journalist, a communications consultant, a conflict manager, and I had coordinated international conferences from Buenos Aires for an organization in Washington, DC: sustainable mining, the future of politics, tourism — complex projects where I learned to choreograph crisis, carry other people’s visibility, and make big ideas feel accesible and safer for everyone else.
In 2021 I woke up to a WhatsApp message telling me my father had died two days before. I missed his farewell, and with that loss came a betrayal I wasn’t prepared to metabolize. Months later, my sister — a doctor in psychology in the U.S. — reached out and invited me to join her in telling a story neither of us had yet learned to speak: the story of betrayal, grief, and the slow, rigorous work of reclaiming agency.
A Jeffrey Allen short on YouTube nudged me toward his Duality workshop. That nudge became a practice: daily meditations, cleaner habits, honest inventories of fear. I realized I’d become a professional stagehand — creating the light and safety for other people to shine while I stayed behind curtains, protected by a quiet, well-funded fear that exposure would cost me everything I’d built.
Then, in January 2025, my husband of twenty-six years was diagnosed with cancer. The crisis sharpened everything I’d been learning. The practices I’d adopted kept me present, steady, and available for the man I loved. They also pushed me forward into the spotlight I had always avoided.
A month ago I finished my first book under my own name (no more ghosting for others). For the first time I see my byline on a cover. For the first time I am launching a podcast of my own. I am stepping out from behind the curtain. I am daring to let the light fall on me — not to be seen because I perfected someone else’s scene, but because my life and my learning are finally ready to stand center stage.