I was 26 when my dad was diagnosed with brain cancer...and 29 when he died.
By chance, I was home for both.
Working remotely as a senior developer, I would travel home to visit my parents. One day, in the middle of a team call, my sister burst into the room screaming. Dad had had a seizure.
I stayed there for the first four months of his treatment, when the medications made him manic. It was the most stressful time of my life.
And I was there again, 3 years later, the morning he didn’t wake up.
Nobody cried that day. Not me. Not my sister. Not even my mom.
It wasn’t a lack of love for the man of the house. It was something deeper.
We were numb.
Our nervous systems had been in survival mode for so long. Stuck somewhere between fight-or-flight and shutdown...a state I now know as functional freeze. There was nothing left to feel with. But I didn’t have words for any of this back then.
Little did I know, my dad’s illness was only one event of a perfect storm...one that would change my life forever.
On paper, I’d made it.
Let me back up.
I grew up doing everything right. I made Eagle Scout. Earned a Computer Science degree from UC Berkeley. Worked in Silicon Valley for Amazon, Apple, and Pandora...the kind of résumé people spend years chasing.
I was good at it, too. I got promoted, others looked up to me, and eventually at Alliance Laundry (a Billion dollar company) I was the only mobile engineer on the team: the person people came to when something was broken and nobody knew why.
Going remote opened up the world to me. I wrote code from coffee shops in Florence, Italy, a catamaran in the British Virgin Islands, from a beach town in Costa Rica. If you’d seen my life back then, you’d have thought I had it figured out. (And so did I!)
But here’s what you wouldn’t have seen...I had chosen a career that was expected of me, not because I wanted it.
Then...the perfect storm.
It hit right as my life was finally becoming mine.
First, while in Costa Rica, I had a fresh-water infection my body couldn’t seem to clear out.
Then came my dad’s diagnosis, and those four months that wired my nervous system in ways I wouldn’t understand for years.
Months later, I got sick in Mexico and took an antibiotic (Cipro) which, on top of the stress, deeply damaged my gut, energy, and immune system.
In attempt to recover, I moved to Puerto Rico...which unfortunately was the start of me living in (unknowingly toxic) mold for 7 years.
Any one of these would have been a lot. Together, they pushed a nervous system, that was already running on empty, past what it could carry. My body started breaking down in ways no one could explain.
I did everything I was supposed to.
I went to the doctors. They ran tests, questioned symptoms, but found "nothing wrong with me".
I went to therapy. I meditated. Some helped, some didn't. But neither touched whatever was happening in my body, so I kept going.
Since 2017 I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on coaches, therapists, and bodyworkers; countless hours in meditation, breathwork, and alternative therapies; and endless nights and weekends researching one question:
How do people actually let go?
The one bug I couldn’t fix.
Here’s the part that was hardest to admit.
My whole identity was built on one skill. Give me a broken system, any system, and I’d find the core problem. It’s what made me good at my job. It’s what made me, me.
And it didn’t work on the one system that mattered most: my own.
I could debug code for a living. I couldn’t debug myself. Every fix turned out to be surface level, and the bug just kept coming back.
For the first time in my life, being smart wasn’t enough.
So I started experimenting on myself.
With nothing left to try, I did the only thing I knew how to do. I treated body-mind like a system. I ran experiments on it...I debugged myself...and paid close attention to what changed.
Slowly, something started to work. Stress I’d carried for years began to dissolve. I’ll be honest: I didn’t know why it worked...it was hard to describe. But it was the only thing making a significant difference.
That practice became the seed of what’s now Mind Mastery.
I was fascinated, and so curious. I kept searching for answers, reading books, listening to podcasts, and trying every therapy I could find. I wanted to understand the science behind what I was doing, and why it worked.
But I still had a question I couldn’t answer...
The teachers who saved me.
I found Don McCann, founder of Structural Energetic Therapy, after moving to Tampa, Florida. I was his client for years, and we became friends. I learned his theories and philosophies, how the body holds tension and trauma, and how releasing it can transform a person. For the first time, I started to understand.
And then came Dr. John Amaral. Everything Don taught me, John took to the next level. I began training under him in 2025 learning somatic energy work...an even deeper almost mysterious way to help someone's body-mind heal and evolve.
