“Being with Life”

What happened to me — and how do I come back to myself?

Being With Life is the name I give to this orientation — a way of relating to oneself and to life that does not rely on force, future-self construction, or manufactured emotional states. It describes what becomes possible when presence, boundary, and a sense of entitlement to exist are restored, allowing life to be met as it unfolds rather than managed or manipulated.

I have never lived my life by visualising a future version of myself or trying to make things happen through effort of will. I did not rehearse emotions to attract outcomes, nor did I hold mental images of the life I wanted and wait for reality to comply. What guided me instead was something much simpler and much quieter: a deep sense of being in relationship with life itself, and an inner question that has accompanied me for as long as I can remember — does this choice allow me to remain at peace with myself? Can I go to bed with my conscience clean and my body settled?

From very early on, life was not something abstract to me. It was immediate, relational, alive. Even in difficult circumstances, I carried an embodied knowing that what was happening was real, but not fixed — that life moved, that experience changed, that nothing stayed exactly the same forever. I trusted movement. I trusted temporality. I trusted that life, when met honestly, responded.

This orientation did not arise from ease or safety. I grew up in an environment where boundaries were often erased and where instability and fear were present. Yet even within those conditions, something essential remained intact: my capacity to stay in contact with myself, with others, and with the wider world beyond the family system. School, friendships, curiosity, learning, and connection remained alive for me. Life was always larger than the environment I was in.

When things were overwhelming, I did not escape into fantasy or dissociation. I learned to calm myself by remembering that what was happening belonged to now, not to forever. That sense of movement — of life as dynamic rather than static — protected something fundamental. It allowed me to respond rather than collapse, to remain present rather than disappear.

For many years, however, I lived in ways that were not fully mine. I carried responsibilities that were not appropriate for my age. I adapted. I coped. I functioned. On the outside, I appeared capable, social, and connected. On the inside, something subtler was happening: I was living other people’s lives for them. My own boundaries were blurred. My entitlement to live my life — rather than manage the lives and needs of others — was gradually compromised.

Eventually, this became impossible to ignore.

When I began to consider leaving Brazil and moving to London, it was not driven by ambition or escape. It was driven by relationship. I understood something very simply: if life could not meet me where I was, then I had to go and meet life where it was. An old phrase came to mind — if Mohammed can’t go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed. For me, this was never about forcing life to change. It was about restoring contact.

I have often said that I left to find myself, and that language still makes sense. What has become clearer to me very recently is something more precise: I left because I could no longer abandon myself.

Leaving was a relational movement — a step toward life, not away from pain. It was the moment I stopped negotiating my presence and began inhabiting it again. What followed was not a sudden transformation, but a gradual, grounded unfolding: learning a new language, building a life, forming relationships, studying, working, and eventually becoming a therapist. None of it came from trying to become someone else. It emerged from staying present, responding honestly, and allowing life to meet me as I was.

This orientation — being with life — sits at the heart of my therapeutic work.

My approach is not about fixing what is wrong with you, creating a better version of yourself, or bypassing difficult emotions in the pursuit of positivity. It is about restoring the relationship you have with yourself so that you can relate to others and to life from a place of presence rather than performance.

When people lose their sense of self, it is rarely because they are broken. More often, it is because their boundaries have been compromised, their needs sidelined, or their right to exist as they are eroded over time. In these conditions, the nervous system adapts for survival. We may function well, but we are no longer fully inhabiting ourselves.

Healing, in my experience, does not come from forcing the body into calm, overriding emotions, or sustaining artificial states of gratitude or positivity. Those approaches often reproduce the very patterns that caused harm in the first place — teaching people to suppress what is inconvenient in order to be acceptable or worthy.

Any method that requires overriding the body, suppressing unwanted emotions, or maintaining manufactured states in order to deserve healing, love, or belonging misunderstands human development. Coherence cannot be performed. It can only be lived.

The work I offer is relational and embodied. It involves learning how to be present with what is actually happening — in the body, in emotions, in thoughts — without force or judgment. It is about rebuilding internal boundaries so that emotions can move, settle, and integrate naturally. From this place, people often find that their relationship with life changes: decisions become clearer, self-trust strengthens, and the future unfolds without being chased.

This is not manifestation.
It is availability.

When we are present, boundaried, and entitled to exist, life responds — not because we have controlled it, but because we are finally in honest contact with it.

Being With Life is not something to achieve.
It is something to return to.

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