Encounter with Cancer
In April 2018 I received a diagnosis of breast cancer. I had a very aggressive six centimeter tumor on my right side. When the doctor told me what I never expected to hear, I felt fear, sadness, anger and confusion. I felt that all my dreams were destroyed.
But, little by little, I was connecting with the certainty that this disease was going to be a great teacher and an opportunity for growth and profound transformation.
Given the aggressiveness of the tumor, I quickly began treatment at an oncology center in Santiago, Chile. At the beginning, everything was very structured: they proposed a cycle of sixteen chemotherapy sessions, then a surgery would come where they would remove my whole breast, then twenty-five sessions of radiotherapy, immunotherapy and hormonal therapy. The doctors told me that in about two years, if everything went well, they could discharge me.
From the first moment, I tried to find alternative treatments, but all the complementary therapists that I visited agreed that I could not skip the traditional treatment if I wanted to heal from cancer.
In May I received my first chemotherapy session. Within a few days all my hair fell out, I had severe pain and other very strong side effects. The medical team considered it necessary to suspend chemotherapy for some time until my body could recover from the strike it caused to my body. Two months passed and I could not recover. The doctors told me I could only wait.
That response frustrated me a lot, because it made me feel that I had no possibility of participating in my healing process, it made me absolutely passive in the face of the disease and connected me with hopelessness.
At that moment I began to take a more active role opening a door towards a healing path centered on my intuition, on the connection with nature and on the guidance of doctors and therapists with an integrative vision.
Healing Path
During the two months of waiting to resume my chemotherapy sessions, I felt a lot of uncertainty and my spirits began to fade.
One day I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen for a long time and she recommended that I explore the possibility of starting a complementary treatment with mistletoe, a plant that grows in forests and has been used for over a hundred years as a complementary treatment for cancer in Europe.
So I came to the consultation of an anthroposophic doctor, who not only prescribed weekly mistletoe injections but also recommended that I walk at least one hour a day.
I started walking in the field near my house every day. In a short time I remembered that a few months before receiving the diagnosis, I had investigated the therapeutic effects for cancer of walking through the forests connecting with the five senses and that there was even a therapy established almost forty years ago in Japan that was promoted by the public health system of that country.
At that moment I felt the call to integrate the deep connection with nature as a fundamental part of my treatment and I decided that I would start doing Forest Therapy.
At the same time, as a complement to my medical treatment, I changed my diet under the guidance of my immunologist father.
All these therapeutic spaces helped me to feel that I had a lot to say and decide on the way I wanted to approach the disease beyond the physical plane.
I understood that, although I had not chosen to have cancer, I could choose the way I wanted to live it.
Into the Woods
Every time I came back from the forest, I felt full of energy and vitality, and at the same time, I felt that the forest supported me and offered me containment in the face of fear and hopelessness.
When I walked and meditated each week in the forest, I was flooded with a sense of being part of a greater whole that responded to a perfect balance. This connected me with calm and confidence in the path I had chosen for healing.
At the same time, being in the forest allowed me to accept death as a natural process of existence. I could see how impermanence, the constant transformation present in nature, is what sustains life and that dying is part of this continuum path.
This was very important to my healing process, because I was able to allow the experience of cancer to transform me profoundly through a symbolic death.
Inner Voice
I started going at least once a week to walk in the woods and my exams quickly began to improve.
However, I could not reach the minimum standards to continue receiving chemotherapy and the oncologist told me that we could no longer wait, that the treatment had to continue. And what was next on the list was a mastectomy, a surgery that would remove my entire right breast.
When the doctor proposed the operation, I told him that the operation was something that I needed to heal from cancer and that I would continue with my treatments from integrative medicine.
I cannot rationally explain what happened at that moment, I simply felt the connection with a wiser inner voice that made me trust a more holistic and less invasive healing path.
The medical team was very concerned and resistant to my proposal; However, they respected my decision and offered me the possibility to start the radiotherapy and immunotherapy sessions, which were part of the original plan.
It was a period of very intense emotions. I felt a deep fear of death and I had many doubts in front of the voices of the doctors who asked me over and over again to reconsider my decision.
The forest was a containment space in those days and a great therapist. It taught me to listen to the voice of intuition that asked me to trust even when the scientific evidence only demonstrated the risks of not having surgery. It was about taking a leap into the void without knowing what awaited me later.
Today I look back and feel immense gratitude towards this disease, because it gave me the opportunity to discover an internal strength that I never imagined existed inside of me.
Embracing my Family Tree
Of all the trees, the most important to embrace in this process was the one that represents my line of grandmothers by the paternal branch.
Lucia Tirapegui, my grandmother. Graciela Berkhoff, my great-grandmother. Joanna Domizze, my great-great-grandmother. We all share the diagnosis of breast cancer on the right side. They underwent mastectomy as part of their treatments and survived the disease for many years.
From the moment cancer came into my life, its presence became constant, as if I felt that I was accompanied and sustained every part of the way. I imagined how it must have been like for them to face the diagnosis, the treatment and the scar that would mark their bodies forever.
As in the Greek myth of the Amazon, warrior women who mutilated their right breast to be better archers; I felt that my grandmothers had had to sacrifice a part of their bodies in their struggle to live a freer and more autonomous life, in a society with no space for different women. They had to be very strong and brave to defend their decisions.
When I rejected the mastectomy, I felt that it was a gesture towards them, like a warm hug in which I told them that we no longer needed that wound in our lineage and that we could begin to write our history without the need for armor to live fully; contacting our vulnerability and sensitivity.
I did it for them, for my beloved niece and for all the future women who will one day become part of our tree.
Message from a Tree
After receiving twenty-five sessions of radiotherapy, I immediately traveled to spend a few days in an ecological reserve in the south of Chile. I would get up early every morning and go for a walk in the forest, going back to the cabin where I was staying just to eat and sleep.
The last day before returning to Santiago, I had a very high fever, which did not pass until a week later. It was seven intense days in which I felt that I was experiencing a healing crisis.
When the fever finally passed, I got out of bed and went for a walk to the garden of my house where since a child, I liked to sit by and be with a tree. Intuitively I hugged it and felt that it delivered a message that filled me with emotion and gratitude: “This is over. You were very brave. Now you will start speaking from the heart and walking with many people in the forest.”
Two days later I went for a medical check-up and the doctor was very surprised that when he examined me he did not find the tumor. He asked me “What are you doing? I don’t understand what has happened.”
At that very moment, it appeared that the tumor, which measured six centimeters in April, had shrunk to two millimeters in less than six months, without chemotherapy or surgery, something unthinkable for traditional medicine.
Upon receiving the test result I cried, filled with a mixture of many emotions. Above all, for feeling deeply happy, grateful and free. There were still a few months of immunotherapy ahead, but I felt that a new chapter had already begun in my life.
To Dream
“Human beings are the space where the Earth dreams. Our personal dreams are not only ours, they are what the channel that the Earth uses to dream through us. The desires of our heart are the desires of the Earth, they are what it asks us to do.” —C. Northrup.
After receiving the result of the test where my tumor had practically disappeared, I began to dream of an organization that would offer ecotherapy to cancer patients for free.
This is how Fundación Floresta was born. In January 2019 I trained as a Forest Therapy guide with the ANFT (Association of Nature and Forest Therapy), to be able to share the encounter with forest medicine and the healing connection with nature with other adults and children with cancer. The methodology created by Amos Clifford really touched my heart and inspires me every day.
At Fundación Floresta we recognize the intimate connection between our well-being and the quality of the relationships we cultivate with our social and environmental surroundings. We are inspired by the reciprocity and interdependence that exists between human beings and nature, promoting the repair of this bond as the foundation for the healing processes of people and the Earth.
We provide free ecotherapy sessions to cancer patients, their families and the teams of professionals who care for them. At the same time, we want to disseminate and investigate the healing connection with nature, especially in the field of public health, seeking to generate a dialogue between science and ancestral wisdom.
Today we are part of the team of a large research center that depends on the faculties of Medicine and Psychology of the most important universities in Chile. I am accompanied in this dream by a group of ten people, professionals in the field of health and ecotherapy.
I hope Floresta is a seed that can be sown in many hearts to see cancer as an opportunity to reconnect with what is essential.
Sacred Bonds
In August 2019 I had an exam to see if there was still the presence of tumors (PET-CT). At that moment I knew that cancer no longer inhabited my body, but that it would remain forever as a gift of learning and encounter with my life purpose.
Through my story I do not seek to make a call to abandon traditional medical treatments. I strongly believe in the vision of integrative health, not in that of exclusion, taking advantage of the benefits of modern medicine integrating them with natural and holistic therapies.
Each healing process is unique. I deeply honor and respect each path of awakening that opens from cancer or another disease, regardless of the treatments chosen to go through it.