I know what it means to begin again.
I was born and raised in Brazil and came to the United States in 1999, after a difficult divorce, with my 11-year-old son beside me. We were starting over in every sense of the word.
San Francisco gave me the opportunity to begin again. I healed parts of myself there that I didn't even know needed healing. It was also where I met Todd, the man I would love and share my life with for nearly 20 years. We built a family together and experienced a loving, healthy relationship that would later influence the direction of my professional life.
But my work with women had begun years before.
In Brazil, I studied NLP and spent years working with women through numerology and personal development. Later, while living in San Francisco, I opened Venus Bodywork, a Brazilian spa in the heart of the city. I studied acupressure and energy healing, and much of my work brought me close to women who struggled with their bodies, their self-image, and the way they saw themselves.
I wanted to understand more.
When our family moved to Florida in 2011, I decided to deepen my work. I studied coaching at the University of Miami and trained with the World Coach Institute. Over the years, my education expanded into EFT, hypnosis, Timeline Therapy, Breathwork, neuroscience, grief, and other approaches to emotional healing and human behavior.
I have had the privilege of learning from extraordinary teachers and mentors in different fields, including Alina Frank, J.P. Crimi, Dawson Church, David Kessler, Tad James, and many others. Learning has never been something I considered finished. It continues to shape the way I work and the way I live.
Since 2011, I have worked extensively with women in Brazil around love and relationships through private mentoring, workshops, programs, and Pronta para o Romance, a program I created to help women understand the way they experience love and make more conscious choices in their relationships.
Then, in 2018, life changed me in a way no training ever could.
Todd died.
Losing a great love changes something inside you. Grief changed me as a woman, and it changed me as a professional. I could no longer do the same work from the same place.
I began studying grief more deeply and immersed myself in Breathwork. The knowledge I had accumulated over years of study was now meeting lived experience. I began to understand the body, loss, love, and healing from a very different place.
And life continued to surprise me.
In 2021, while going through my own Pronta para o Romance program, I met Samuel.
At 55, in Paris, Samuel asked me to marry him.
We later married in Cancun, surrounded by the life and family we were choosing to bring together.
Sometimes I think about the young woman I once was in Brazil, and the woman who arrived in the United States with her 11-year-old son and had to build a life from the beginning. Neither of them could have imagined this chapter.
Today, Samuel is my husband, my partner, and a great love in my life. What we have built together has taught me something just as important as what grief taught me: the heart has room for the love that shaped us and for the life that is still asking to be lived.
Loving Samuel does not diminish what I lived with Todd. And honoring Todd has never required me to stop living.
I believe I honor him, my children, Samuel, and myself when I give life the best of me.
This is why my work today is different from the work I did before loss.
I am deeply interested in what happens after the world around you begins moving again. When everyone assumes you are doing better. When you have put many pieces of your life back together, but quietly know there are still parts of you asking to be heard.
I continue to study because I genuinely love learning. I learn from books, from some of the best teachers and mentors I can find, from my own life, and from every woman who trusts me enough to let me into hers.
After more than a decade of working with women, I don't believe my role is to tell someone who she should become after loss.
I am here to help her look inward, listen to what has changed, reconnect with herself, and discover what she wants her life to hold now.
Because one of the things life has taught me is that we cannot always imagine, from where we are standing today, how much life may still be waiting for us.
And we don't have to find our way there alone.
