For decades, I believed - as we are taught to believe - that our bodies are weak, our minds unreliable, and our only hope lies in test, pills, and procedures. But then, I experienced another truth.
I saw patients survive through faith when medicine gave up.
I saw the spirit fight disease more fiercely than any drug
And I saw healing come trhougha cupuncture, through touch, through presence, throuth knowing.
This is a space for remembering what the system forgot: Our bodies were not built to break. They were built to heal.
I began not as a patient, but as a researcher in Havana’s oncology hospital. I entered young, unsure, terrified even — not of failing the work, but of catching cancer itself. I asked too many questions. The doctors, with a mixture of humor and weariness, assured me: “No, you can’t catch it like a cold.” But their faces said more — they had seen too much to be flippant.
There, in the clinical hush of state-funded medicine, I began to notice something that no medical textbook ever mentioned:
Time and again, the one who lived was the one who wanted to live, who laughed, who believed, who kept something — a flame, a thread — alive inside. And the ones who didn’t? Sometimes they’d already let go.
That realization came before any theory or training: Hope changes outcomes. Despair is a force as real as chemotherapy.
One day, a patient in full remission threw himself from the top floor of the hospital. Not because of metastasis. Not because of pain. Because his family refused to take him home for fear of contagion.
We had healed the tumor. But not the wound of rejection. And that was the day I stopped believing that science alone could save anyone.
In Cuba, we rarely told patients the full truth. Not because we were cruel — but because we believed in mercy. Truth can heal or it can kill. The system I worked in, for all its flaws, chose hope over horror. We’d tell the family the truth. But not the patient.
And you know what? Many lived longer. Laughed longer. Because they weren’t dying from the diagnosis itself.
Then I came to the United States.
Here, the contrast hit like a slap.
What I heard between the lines was: “You were badly made. Fragile. A miracle you’ve lasted this long. Only we can save you.”
There was no room for hope — only surveillance.
Years later, working at Miami Dade College, a colleague told me a story that still haunts me. Her niece was studying medicine in New York. They were Cuban, but had lived in Colombia for years — a country where medicine still carried the emotional care I’d seen in Havana.
The niece was disillusioned. “I had to take a class,” she told her aunt, “called ‘How to Become a Millionaire Your First Year as a Doctor.’”
Maybe it wasn’t the official title. Maybe it wasn’t a formal curriculum. But it didn’t have to be. The spirit of it was everywhere.
There was a time, in Havana, when pain wrapped itself around my neck and shoulder so tightly I thought about leaping from a moving car. It wasn’t just pain — it was despair with a pulse, the kind that eats sleep and clarity.
My aunt Rosa, always clear-eyed in emergencies, saw what I couldn’t say. She said, “Let’s go see a friend of mine.”
It was late at night. This poor woman, heavily — and I mean heavily — pregnant, opened her door to find a stranger in tears. Me.
She didn’t blink. She didn’t hesitate. She ushered me in, laid me down, and pulled out silver needles that glinted like starlight.
She was an acupuncturist, trained not in some sterile clinic but in the old way — through hands, heart, and lineage.
She worked in silence, her swollen belly an emblem of life, her fingers precise as scripture. She moved the pain, thread by thread, needle by needle — and as it left, so did I. I passed out cold. When I woke up, I could breathe again.
It wasn’t the end of the pain — not yet. I saw her for a few more sessions, this time at her clinic. And then… I was healed.
Completely.
That pain — the one that almost drove me to throw myself out of a car — vanished into the Havana air.
When I came to the United States, I thought I was entering a land of medical miracles. Machines that blinked. Tests that predicted. Pills that prevented.
But instead, I found a theater of terror.
Waiting rooms played commercials about the hundreds of diseases waiting to claim you — from shingles to stomach cancer. By the time a nurse called your name, you were already halfway convinced you were dying.
The doctors confirmed it. “You need a mammogram. A colonoscopy. An endoscopy. An MRI. A blood panel. A genetic screen.”
Every visit came with the same unspoken message: “It’s a miracle you’re still alive. Your body is defective. And only we can save you.”
This wasn’t medicine. This was fear marketing.
I turned back to what I knew: Ayurveda. The science of life. The Vedas — not superstition, but science older than science. Ayurveda tells you what to eat, when to eat, how to sleep, how to breathe — all based on who you are, not some generic chart. It tells you the body is not a machine, but a landscape.
But here in the U.S., Ayurveda was labeled quackery — the same word they used for acupuncture, for herbal medicine, for any healing they couldn't bill for.
When I sought out care, I had to become a human guinea pig at a local acupuncture school just to afford it. Later, I found an Indian doctor — brilliant, intuitive, masterful. He read my chi like an ancient scroll. But the herbs he prescribed each week? Impossible to afford. And of course, no insurance would cover a single leaf or drop.
Then came the carpal tunnel — a gift from overwork building software infrastructure for a program we were funding. I worked through weekends, coding late into the night, and eventually my right hand said: enough.
The pain was unbearable. I couldn’t sleep. I went to a doctor.
“Oh,” he said, “I don’t specialize in hands.”
(He was an orthopedist. Apparently hands are a subclass of limb?)
The next doctor specialized in — you guessed it — the right hand. Thankfully no restrictions by gender or glove size. He looked grave. “This is very advanced. I can’t help you. You’ll need a surgeon.”
The surgeon did, in fact, specialize in hands. He looked at mine and said, “It’ll be a very difficult procedure. I can’t promise you’ll be able to use it afterward.”
That was the end of that road.
I had no faith in the system. I knew too many who went in walking and came out unable to speak. I wasn’t ready to roll those dice.
And you know what? I’m writing to you now, aren’t I?
My hands are working. Not just functioning — creating.
No surgery. No prescriptions. No insurance code.
Just Grace
Just the body reclaiming itself from fear.
There is a power we’re born with. Not taught. Not granted.
It comes coded into the soft breath of infancy, into the wide-eyed wonder of children who speak to trees and see faces in clouds.
But then, little by little, we are trained to disbelieve it. We are told that reality is solid, that outcomes are mechanical, and that wishing is for fools.
And yet — in quiet corners of our lives — the power speaks anyway.
Years ago, I had an intuition. A knowing, really — not quite a thought, not quite a voice.
It said: What you believe, becomes. Not in a poetic, metaphorical way — but in the real way. The bone-deep way. And I knew it was true.
But when I shared it, a friend — a psychologist — waved it away. “Stop believing in magic,” she said. As if belief itself were a disease.
And so I did what many of us do: I placed that knowing in a quiet box in my soul. I didn’t throw it away. I just didn’t touch it.
The dream came in Prague. A Buddha’s face — gentle, golden, luminous. I woke with it etched in my mind, not expecting anything, just holding it. And then, walking the streets later that day, there it was. In a shop window. That exact image. Waiting for me.
I wouldn’t have gone into the shop. I wouldn’t have even noticed it — except the dream had already prepared me.
So I bought it. I brought it home. And the Universe whispered, “See? I am listening.”
Then came the encounter with Guanyin. First her presence, then her name — later, her image. The realization that she had been guiding me before I ever knew what to call her.
Books, too. Always the right ones. Pema Chödrön, falling into my hands at the exact moment my soul was unraveling. Her words didn’t just soothe me. They restored me.
This wasn’t magic. This was alignment.
This was serendipity born of readiness.
One morning, over coffee, I stumbled across a Gregg Braden video. The Lost Gospel Reveals All. I saved it. Watched it later, snack in hand. And there it was — everything I had once intuited, now spoken aloud.
The essence of prayer: not asking, but feeling as if it has already come.
Not pleading, but embodying. Not magic — conscious participation in the fabric of reality.
And there it was again: If you build it, they will come. The message that had followed me like a ghost all my life. The power I had known. The one I still… hesitate to use.
That’s the hardest part, isn’t it? Knowing something sacred — and still walking past it.
The reasons live in shadow:
I’ve used it only in rare moments. When the heart quiets. When the need is honest. Not for wealth. Not for fame. But for clarity. Peace. Survival. Truth.
So here I am now, writing this with a hand that was supposed to fail me. With a body they told me would collapse. With a soul that still listens when the world is quiet.
Maybe I don’t use this power every day. But I no longer doubt it. And I no longer apologize for knowing it exists.
The Universe is not a stranger. It has always been listening.
And now — so am I.
Conclusion