Meet Alex

About me and my journey

Born and raised in Brazil, I was a healthy and very active child. My loving grandmother cared for me since my parents worked full time. I was living in my essence - feeling free and joyful. 

Then came the loss of a baby brother when I was six years old, the stressful relationship between my mom and my dad, their complex divorce when I was nine, and the absorption of a lot of anger from my dad towards the divorce. 

My memories of embodying fear and feeling a disconnection from my essence come from that time. As I explored healing my inner child as an adult, I know those were times that I started feeling lonely, angry, sad, and anxious - feelings that got buried for many years. 

We all bury feelings and emotions as a child to protect ourselves and survive. Suppressing those emotions created silent anxiety and anger within me for many years. 

It also created a positive mindset about life and a deep need for adventures and exploration. That is not bad, except when I used positivity to bypass my emotions. I mastered that. 

As an adolescent and adult, I excelled in sports, found a place that I was good at, and dove into many sports like swimming and weight lifting. Later on, I became a strong cyclist and runner. 

Fitness and sports helped me to deal with my feelings of insecurity and enabled me to “fit in.” 

The call for a new life

I moved to the USA in 1996. I moved because I felt like I never fit in Brazil. I loved my family and friends, and at the same time, I felt lonely and disconnected. I wanted a life of exploration and adventures, and everyone around me wanted a life of going to college, getting a stable job, marriage, and children. That was not me. My dissatisfaction and curiosity led me to come to the USA and explore. 

I was 26 years old when I came to the United States with $2k in my pocket and didn’t speak English at all. It was the hero’s journey for me. I had no idea how things would work out here in America. I just knew I needed to come, and now 25 years later, I am here. I guess it all worked out! 

Something changed in my 30’s.

I guess I was trying to grow up and become an adult. I was a personal trainer, and eventually, I became a successful one. Full schedule, I was always studying to learn more, and my work/career was thriving. 

Many failures happened as well, and for some reason, “adulting” gets us to take failures as evidence that something is wrong with us. I certainly did. 

I was “failing” in relationships and finances and became lost in my career life. Over time, training clients to be strong, fast, ripped, and lean became dull for me. Perhaps because using fitness to transform myself was no longer working. I needed to go deeper within. It was time to start exploring those buried feelings of loneliness, anger, sadness, and anxiety. 

I knew it was time because I finally had a “grow up” moment. I was 40+, and I was broke and brokenhearted. I wondered, “how did I get here?” I took full responsibility for my life and my choices. 

Personal growth became my lifestyle

I pivoted my life and career in my 40s. I became a Holistic Lifestyle coach. I taught high performance and wellness to high achievers and the workforce. I studied NLP, Hypnosis, and Emotional Mental Release®. 

I read all the books I could get my hands on about success, personal growth, high consciousness, holistic health, healing modalities, and so on. I opened my own business. I took on a new persona - the high-achiever. I wanted to “compensate” for all my messing up in my 30’s.

Losing myself

In my youth, I took the persona of an athlete - still do, with much less intensity. In my 40’s, a high achiever. I drank the kool-aid. I believed that to be successful, to be valued, I needed to work hard, make a lot of money and prove to the world that I was good enough. 

Taking on a personality is not a bad thing. Being an athlete gave me many gifts and a healthy lifestyle. Being a high achiever helped me to better my financial life and taught me a lot about business. 

There is a catch with personalities. They can take over us and cover up our deep wounds, feelings, and emotions. We compensate for our places of emptiness and pain with distractions, work, and “busyness.” 

I used work, studying, being busy, and achieving more as forms to make me feel important, validated, and loved. We all have those needs. Sound familiar? 

One day you realize that you are doing so much, that you are “doing” everything right to “achieve” that sense of importance, validation, and love. That constant chase for success and achievement leads to loneliness, anger, sadness, and anxiety simply because we look in the wrong places. 

With that constant chase we become imbalanced, disconnected from our hearts, lonely and unfulfilled. 

Returning “home”

“My beloved child, I love you.”

In 2018-2019 I gave in. I decided to work with a great teacher-therapist who helped me start the journey of return - back to my heart, to my essence, and to heal my inner child. 

It was a time of significant turbulence. Healing and transformation is the richest journey you will embark on, a journey of returning to our truth and who we are. A journey of loving ourselves and embracing every part - the ego, the superego, the shadow, the personalities, all! That is how we become whole again. As a newborn, we are whole, and we are complete. We are free from wounds and hurt. We are in our essence. The essence is intact, pure, complete, and whole. 

For me, this was a journey of getting intimate with my loneliness, anger, sadness, and anxiety. I “sat” with my inner child and understood why those wounds were there and how those emotions got frozen, trapped in my body, and caused suffering. 

As a child, we need love and safety. We also need to feel seen, heard and validated. Love is not enough, most of us were deeply loved by our parents and yet, our essential needs were not met. With that we adopted limiting beliefs about ourselves, as a child we never make our parents wrong, we make ourselves wrong. We spend many years chasing love, forcing relationships to meet those needs. With that, we create more suffering, and the day you learn that everything you are seeking, you are; that is the day you start feeling liberated and empowered. 

You become FREE. Free from the prison of childhood trauma, free from your limiting beliefs, distorted perceptions, and from old negative emotions. 

This freedom unleashes energy, creativity, vitality, intuition, and much more. It frees your genius, the brilliance you have within you, the brilliance that the world wants to see. The world is waiting for you to show up in your gift and talents. 

When we free ourselves, we heal ourselves and help the world be a better place. We permit others to heal and to live in their genius. 

“The most loving thing to do for our loved ones and this Planet is to heal ourselves.” 

Courage, Curiosity, Compassion, and Connection

I am no more special than you. I am no better than you. I am not stronger than you. 

If my stories resonated with you, it is because what you see and feel is also you. 

The journey of healing and transformation takes courage. You will face your past wounds, and you will look at the face of that child you were that cried, that was terrified at times, and you will be her hero, the one that liberates her from suffering because she is the one that holds the magic key for your liberation. She is you. She is your magic, your power, your love, your divine, your genius. 

The journey takes curiosity. Become curious about what you will become when you no longer get defined by your past stories and ruled by old limiting beliefs and negative emotions. Become curious about what is possible for you and those around you. 

The journey takes compassion. Self-compassion is a requisite for healing and transformation. Compassion for all the parts of you that you call “bad” or “wrong .”You love it all to transmute those parts. 

The journey takes a connection to the heart. Connecting with the heart is connecting with your soul and your body. It is always associated with the truth because the body never lies. Your emotions are a guide in the path of living an authentic life. 

This journey isn’t easy and yet, it is simple. It isn’t linear, it does not promise rewards. It promises freedom and truth.

This journey is the path to truth, to divinity, to your essence, which is authentic joy, love, abundance, freedom, and peace. 

“You are what you are seeking .”Rumi   

Qualifications: 

M.S. Physical Education - 1994, Guarulhos, Brazil 

Master Sports Training - 1995, São Paulo, Brazil 

Holistic Lifestyle Coach Level 3 - 2001, Chek Institute - CA 

Exercise Coach - 2003, Chek Institute - CA

NLP master practitioner, Hypnosis and Emotional Mental Release® - 2019, The Association for Integrative Psychology - CA

Compassion Inquiry Training - Dr. Gabor Maté - Canada