How Spirit Drives Health - A Healing Journey with Tanya Abreu

Welcome to the Wellness Sherpa Podcast, where we engage with passionate leaders, holistic thinkers, and disruptors who courageously share their personal journey, mission, and wisdom with you. Together, we create a safe space to empower you to live your best, most vital life. Thanks for being here. Hello, everyone. I'm so excited to be here with the beautiful Tanya Abrou. Tanya wears many hats, and she is a mover and a shaker in the holistic health industry. I had the privilege of meeting Tanya last year at a conference, and we immediately became fast friends, connected at the heart. And I'm so grateful to have you here with us today, Tanya.

I am so happy to be here. And, you know, it's funny, the connected at the heart is really the way I try to live my life right now because, you know, before COVID it felt very disconnected, but Covid just reinforced it cemented the deep loneliness and pathos of not being connected to other human beings. So I kind of have made it my personal and professional mission to connect with people that I want to and not connect with people that. That don't want to connect with me. And so I hope anybody that's watching this immediately says, who don't I spend time with that I want to connect with? Because holistic health, that's what it's about, finding a wholehearted pattern to living. So thank you for having me here today, Jen.

Yeah. So excited. So one of the things that we really connected on was our own specific health journeys. So our health journeys led us down deep paths of our own personal healing and also became, I think, part of the foundation for our missions. So will you share a little bit about your healing journey and how you've come out on the flowery, beautiful garden side and. And where you are with that, what you've learned from this?

There's still a lot of weeds and storms in the garden.

Always right.

Imperfection is the only true way to beauty. Let me say this. My Ph. D. Was in poetry and communication. I have always loved words, and I never expected to be in healthcare. But when I was teaching grad students at Carnegie Mellon University, I got a Fulbright scholarship to Moscow, Russia, and I happen to speak fluent Russian. That's my bilingual. And so I went, and it was under Gorbachev, so it was still very much Soviet. And the healthcare system there was such a testimony to tyranny and abuse, especially of women. And when I came back after my fellowship there, I shared with my graduate students, and one of my graduate students went behind my back, bless his soul, and went to the Largest women's hospital in the country, McGee Women's Hospital, and said, look, my professor wants to apply for a grant to help revamp women's wellness in Russia. And they called me and said, well, let's do this. And Amazingly, there were $450 million available for the revision of women's health care in the Eastern Soviet bloc. I went with McGee Women's Hospital hoping for 10, 15 million of it. And we were awarded 250 million of it. And that started my healthcare journey. But I wanted to say that as a part of it, I was a 340 pound woman. I had never loved myself, could not believe that I had a husband who loved me, was worked all the time because that was the only self worth I had was education and work. And when I got started in healthcare, I realized that the very best healers, including the best oncologist that I have ever met in my life at McGee Women's Hospital, it was all about helping women find confidence. Health is about helping you find your sense of balance, your sense of purpose, your sense of self value before anything else happens. I would volunteer at McGee with last stage ovarian cancer and realize that one thing that these women lost along with their lives was that they had never, I'm not saying all of them, but a lot of them had never felt good about themselves until they were going to die and then they figured out what meant something to them. So getting into healthcare took me down to a normal weight, normalish, and changed my life forever about what doctors and hospitals should be about. And I lived that world for a long time. And I actually started my own business called Spirit of Women, helping women find their spirit because it's the spirit that drives health. Then about 17 very, very successful years into that, I was diagnosed with fourth stage cancer. The oncologist who sat right across from me said, aggressive with treatment for months, no treatment. I mean, no treatment. Is it aggressive cancer, four months with treatment, six months to a year. Those odds just suck.

And what year was that?

That was 15 years ago. So that was 2000. Oh my gosh, we're in 24. So it was 2000. Help me with my math.

15 years ago.

Yes, 15 from 24.

Years ago.

You know what, that's hysterical because I have custody of my guardianship of my grandchildren, 12 and 8. And I help them do math and I can't do anything in my head. And the 12 year old is really genius. He's like super, super smart and he doesn't need to do anything out in longhand like, wow, you're like a first grader. You have to do everything. Longhand 2009.

Okay.

So it's been a while, so I, I just. Whoa. That was like a wake up call. First of all, no one's going to tell me, right? Yeah.

I was going to ask you. I was going to pause for a second and say in that moment, because I had a similar experience in that moment. When you got that information. Four to six months, regardless of the path you take, how did you, what did you do with that information?

I got angry. Yeah. I got angry with a healthcare system where somebody could sit across from me and give me a death sentence when I knew from my own experience that there were not miracles. You could call them miracles, but there were so many walking billboards for what holistic health could do, what diet could do, what prayer could do, all the things that, you know, because it cannot be quantified is not accepted as traditional allopathic pathways. So I was angry. How were you?

Oh, I was pissed.

Yeah. I think that's why, like, wait a minute. Yeah.

You know, when I got the information, I think mine was 23%. You know, you can do treatment, but you've got a 23% chance of living. And that's the average. And my first thought was, wait a minute, I'm not average. I've never been average in my life. So. And second.

Right, right.

And second of all, where do you get to decide that that is my. My future? No. And so I literally took that information and I had to pull it out of my. I literally took it out of my consciousness and threw it out energetically, emotionally, spiritually, all of them, to say, that's not the path. And I knew it, luckily, because I had a strong core and I had prayer and meditation and spirit, as you said, I. I had connected to my spirit. I said, wait a minute, there's so much more happening here.

Yeah.

This is, this is a wake up call, as you said, and it's me to step into that.

Yeah. And it's. Step into what I call consciousness. Right. I just read. Oh, come on. It's not. Who's the Indian doctor? The amazing spiritual guru out of Arizona? Dr. Not. Okay, it will come to me. But he just released a newsletter where he talks about consciousness being like gravity and that it's scientific forces and it has nothing to do with anything you can control. Right. And when you understand that consciousness is like gravity and it's a force of its own, only then can it work for you. And I would say that After I, you know, called every oncologist friend because, remember, I was in the business, right? Best hospital for women's cancers in the United States. They had deep connections at MD Anderson. And I. I use Cancer Treatment Centers of America. I wanted every opinion possible about this cancer that had spread outside of my uterus, outside of my fallopian tubes, into the intestinal cavity. And I got a lot of research and I took a sabbatical that ended up me selling my company. But, you know, I sold it at a big loss because I thought I had maybe a year or two. So I just needed to keep moving. And through all of the research I did, you know, you said holistic medicine. I haven't heard holistic for a long time, right? Because I work in traditional medical practice, right? Everything that comes out of my mouth, I have to stand in front of the most conservative, stubborn doctors and be credible. So I use integrated, right? We're going to integrate gemotherapy or aromatherapy and herbology and nutritional supplementation into whatever you think is best. That's that integration with the allopathic model. But I had to step in and say, no. The consciousness that I had learned and I had, fortunately, like you, had access to people that I used to roll my eyes up a little bit. They were like energy healers. They were miracle lightworkers. They were all this stuff. And I'd kind of roll my eyes and say, oh, there's some science behind it. I mean, when I was in Russia, I was invited to Siberia to see these experiments of magnets, right? But the magnets were human hands that could pick up something and just do this and then be able to do. I kid you not, this was 20 years ago. Resonant magnetic resonance of the body with their hands to be able to see where there were problems. I saw all this. It defied science. So I said, you're not going to tell me that I need to be cut, radiated full of toxic chemicals, laid in bed, my hair, which has always been a little bit of a vanity point for me. No, no, no, no. And I was alone. I was not married. I don't have children of my own. I raised my nephew, and it's his children that are my grand. And I said, no, you know, if the buck is going to stop here, it's going to stop my way. So, long story short, I was blessed with having a little bit of money to do some testing. Now they do this testing, which is to see if the cancer has. Is actually cellular. It actually can go into your lymph system. But at that point, it cost me 18,000 do. The only place that did it was Israel. So I did all that I could. I have to give a shout out to cancer treatment centers of America for their second, third, and fourth opinions. And to all of my oncology friends that said to me, you know, we've demonstrated that it cannot be bloodborne, so don't do chemo. Let's just get you radiated, get you surgery, and then let's kill any cancer cells are left. So what helps kill bad things in your body? Proper nutrition, Good sleep? Fasting. Because when you fast and you fast, especially from glucose, cells that are bad die off first. All cells will eventually die, but it's the bad guys that die off first. Exercise, but not go to the gym, lift the weights, but swim and hike and be close to nature and all that. All that green. And, you know, when I think about what you do with gemotherapy and plant therapy, I can almost swear that my blood test results. Because I did allopathic with this, right? I did radiation. I did surgery. I did. But when I would do wheatgrass three times a day, my body cleared itself of every toxin that I ever knew. And I walked as if I were on a cloud. When I stopped eating anything that challenged my body physically, like meats do now, I eat chicken today. I'll eat fish today. But then I made a very deep commitment to just giving my body things it didn't need to work at so that it could really heal the cancer cells. Long story short, I discovered what true holistic integrated medicine was, and it was living your life as naturally and as lovingly to yourself as possible, and taking not just the toxins out of your body, but removing the toxic people, even if it includes your own family and closest friends or husband or whatever, because those energies affect every cell in your body. Those things are separate. So that's what I did. And it took me about a year before I had the. The cajones to go back and to do a. Because I was alive and I was. And I was looking good. I. I lost. I had. I gained a little weight from all these. What is it called? Cortisone. Yeah, cortisone. Steroids that they were giving me so that I could be strong through the radiation. Then just eating well and sleeping well, I took off another £50, and I was like, whoa. I've never looked or felt this good in my life. So if I'm dying, it's okay. So I scheduled another surgery. Another surgery. What is it called? Biopsy surgical biopsy. See? And I did that, and I didn't even tell anybody was outpatient. I went to work because I had started a mini spa in all this process. I went to work and my best friend, who was also worked with me, we got the call together and it was a call on the biopsy. And they said, we're sorry, it's been a week, but we don't have the results. We're sending out the original tissues to three other labs. Like what? We have the pathologists. We get another call back a week later. And they said, well, obviously our earlier pathology was wrong because there's not a single atypical cell, not cancer, but not even atypical, in your abdominal cavity. You know, they did, you know, I had a complete hysterectomy, but there was all this other stuff and it was totally gone. And I said. And they said, we're going to textbook this. This is pretty amazing if, you know, we don't know what happened, but we're really happy that. That we were wrong. I said, well, thank you. And I remember crying, literally. I don't know what, Jen, how your healing process went, but I had known that I was healed. I had known that loving myself and using God's plants and love. I mean, that sounds so. Oh, it sounds so wimpy. I'm so sorry. Scientists who are watching. But using kindness as an energy to heal the human cell, it works. It works.

Well, everything is energy, right? And to your point, you know, when we get out of balance, it always starts in our energy field first, right? Who we are surrounding ourselves with energy is contagious, right? The thoughts that we have running through, you know, the programs a thousand times a day that we're not even conscious of in many cases. And. And then, you know, how we feel about ourselves, how we view ourselves. Do we love ourselves?

You've heard of psychoneuroimmunology, right? It's a science that's been around for a while, but only 20 years is it now a subject. And I went to a conference at Johns Hopkins about 20 years ago on it, and it blew me away. You can be born with genotypes for diabetes, for heart disease, for obesity, but through mental gymnastics or neuro acrobatics, as it's now being called, and changing your diet, changing your thinking, your self thinking, you can not just not have that risk, but you can change the actual genetic code.

Yeah.

Okay. We're not talking, just. Okay, I'm not going to get heart disease.

No, you can upregulate Your genes.

You're changing your genes. It's crazy. Yes. That's psychoneuroimmunology.

Yes.

And you can change the actual genotype that you were born with by your lifestyle and your mind. And if that isn't wowser science, I don't know what is. Yeah.

And I love the fact that, you know, you talk about things, Sonia, like nutrition because, you know, I work with a lot of different practitioners and some are, you know, traditional MDs, and we work with veterinarians and nurses and, you know, many in the allopathic model and they continue to share that even today they don't get a lot of training in nutrition.

Right. It's.

Right, it's. They're getting maybe a class, maybe an eight hour class. They're not even getting a series of classes. And yet, you know, when, when I look, when I think about the expense. Right. You mentioned the expense of getting the test done. I know I paid a lot out of pocket for my, my treatment, that I did more on the natural side. I did, I did integrative. I did a little bit of both. But that's free. Changing your diet. Right. Shopping at a different part, buying from your local farmer's market, knowing where your food comes from, what's in your food. Things like that are such simple, free things.

Eating young, fresh vegetables.

Yes. Which is exactly what the demo therapy is. It's that new growth on the plant, the sprouts. The sprouts are so powerful and you can grow them in your home. They grow in a week where you can consume them and work with them.

Yeah. And Asia and India. Right. So these are the cultures on our planet that so far exceed our civilization. They go back so much longer than we do. They're based on sprouts.

Yes.

Young plants.

Yeah. Sprouts are not condiments. It's actually part of the meal. Right.

Human contact massage. Yeah. All of those things just blow me away. That were systematically eradicated from our health system. Right. Systematically eradicated. You know, I, I mentioned that I was in Russia. I remember I witnessed my first birth there. And the baby was born and taken away. It wasn't breathing right. Bad agpar. Wrapped in a blanket, put in a room and left alone. And I asked, what are you doing? Aren't you mucus, you know, the baby, take the mucus out. And they said, oh no. The baby has two hours to survive on its own. If it survives, it's a living newborn. If it dies, it was stillborn.

Wow.

And that's what medicine has become. Maybe not so graphically in this country, right? But if you can't cure it with a pill, right? Or if you can't cut it out of the body, it's going to kill you, right? The human body does not want to die.

No, it's, it's, no, it's always trying to reorganize to be healthy, right? We have a new body every seven years. The whole cellular structure turns over every seven years. And even pain.

People say pain is something they can't get over, right? They can't get through it without opioids, they can't get through it without medical marijuana, they can't get through it without ruining their liver and kidneys on high dose ibuprofens and other anti inflammatories. But the truth is pain is just your brain's response to wanting you to balance. And it's saying something is swollen, something is inflamed, something is out of whack. Please fix me, right? Not medicate me, but fix me. I have a great love and appreciation of chiropractic for that reason. Let's put the channels back, the nerves back in line and let the body fire those healing signals out that cures pain. I have a very good friend, Dr. Alba Rodriguez and Dr. Ramon Nunez, who founded a therapy called Somatic Functional Therapy which just retrains your brain to get rid of pain. And so I can get hit like heck and have a huge bruise and a lot of pain. And I understand the pain is my body saying, tanya, pay attention. Are you going to be okay? But I can also just use what I know to decrease that pain, using my brain telling my body that it's going to be okay. And even with serious illnesses, diabetes, cancer, heart failure, copd, you can do things by drawing on nature, by drawing on the kindness that exists in abundance. Don't watch the news. I didn't watch the news for a year of cancer treatment in abundance around you. Because your body wants to live, right? I mean, my favorite is a dog that has cancer that will go for years until that cancer shuts their lights out in their eyes and they need to be put down. But you don't really tell. They might be a little more tired, but they, they conquer their pain. Yeah, they conquer things because they want to please the world. They want to live, they want to jump, they want to wag their tail another day. And that's how I felt. And that's how I feel every day. I want to wag my tail another day. And I got a big enough tail to Wag. So.

No, no. And I. I think, Tanya, something you said, which is so important, and it requires mindset shift, right? We've gotten especially around the words cancer. It's like the war on cancer. You gotta fight it, right?

You're a victim, right?

These very agre. Aggressive. Aggressive. Oh, yeah. I was a cancer survivor. You know, all of these things. And it's really shifting our mindset to giving thanks to your body every day. You know, I don't even really think about cancer. I just think that I have learned to love myself, right? I've overcome the not feeling worthy, not feeling good enough. All of those things I've connected to my spirit, to my vitality.

We do share that. I didn't know that till right now. Jen. Yeah. Of heart. Yes.

Right. Total. And. And just simple things. Like I wake up in the morning and I remember when I was diagnosed, somebody said, oh, your body betrayed you. No, my body was like, hello, something's out of balance. Pay attention.

When are you. Billboard.

Billboard, right? And so it's really been about, I give my body thanks every morning and every night. Thank you for holding up, holding me up, getting me to where I need to go, for loving me, for being spectacular, for thriving for the better.

People say it's like cancer. Okay, cancer is obviously the bad word, right? And all. And I love men, Trust me. Probably too much, but all the language around cancer is masculine. It's war. It's courier. It's Victor. So I talked to an amazing pastor at Cancer Treatment Centers of America who had written a book on the amazing recoveries of cancer patients. And he had a theory that he documented in case study after case study, that when a patient learned to forgive things that were done to them and learned to forgive themselves for doing things unto others, the cancer often had remission like that. How do you justify that? But it is a part of being able to love the body. So just like, okay, you get struck with a hammer on your thumb. Immediate pain, immediate throbb. Your body's mind is saying, go, tend to this. Stop what you're doing. Make sure you're okay. Cancer is the biggest freaking hammer you can ever have. And it hammers you. Not because you deserved it, not because you're a bad person, but because you can be so much greater than you were at the moment of that cancer. And although I was doing things for tens of thousands of people in the hospital world, in the world, it wasn't exactly what my purpose is, right? And so cancer was that big hammer that hits you that makes you shift and when you make that shift, the cancer cells become less dominant. We always have atypical cancer. I had one oncologist when I first had an atypical cancer in my uterus, not cancer, atypical cells in my uterus and said, I said I have cancer. Said, no, you don't have cancer. You have cells that are atypical. That's not going to kill you. And neither is cancer. Cancer, and this is an oncologist cancer are cells that either need to be corrected or taken from your body. And that's how, that's what got me through. Cancer wasn't a death sentence. Like the one doctor who sat in front of me, I took him to court because I really believe that language is a weapon and that was an incorrect weapon to look at me and saying, you have four to six, six months to live without options, without couching it in anything decent. Right.

Well, it plants a seed right into the consciousness. And I, you know, I still today meet people that come into the healing center that say, oh, I was given, you know, 12, you know, 12 months to live and my first comment is throw that out. Nobody gets to decide that but you. Right?

Yeah.

Out of the consciousness. So where, where can people find out more about you? You're up to some fabulous things. You've got, like I said, you wear many, many hats and you are.

We connected and are going to continue to connect is through a program that is a passion project of mine. I'm still very much in traditional health care. I do chronic care management, remote patient monitoring and digital health for our elders who really need connectivity that's caring and kind. But my passion project is called power up nursing www.powerupnursing.com and while it's designed to prevent nurse burnout and while it's designed to help nurses reverse chronic disease, reverse self pity, reverse self deprecation, it's good for everybody. So please, you can go online, you can subscribe. Like I said, it's www. PowerUp Nursing. We do events, we support organizations like nature provides and others gaia healers that really bring to nurses and to general public an immense, an immense solution to the disease centric healthcare model. You can find me personally, I'm really easy. Tanya Abreu on Facebook Tanya Abreu on LinkedIn and I have no problem telling you Tanya abreuotmail.com or 561358, 5230 that's 561358, 5230. I'm here to connect with you and if you have a question, if you're mad about something I said, if you have a suggestion or an idea, text me, call me. That's my, that's my purpose right now is to connect people to hope and healthier approaches to their pain. Not just physical pain, all of it.

Right. It's all connected. Well, you are just a beautiful woman, a beautiful soul and a kindred spirit. And I am so grateful that we have met and that we are off on a new adventure together. Are we are in this 8th year of 2024 and I look forward.

Here is a dragon I love. Yes.

Year of the dragon. I look forward to what's next. And see I have little reminders here that says joy is the ultimate creator. I always have little reminders around myself. Love, you know, because we need that. We need those Rem.

I have this. This is so such an odd thing. I believe that my 8 year old granddaughter got this at like a dollar store for my birthday. I gave her like $5, sent her into a store and. And of all the stuff she could come out with, she came out with a mug that has the tarot card, the empress with a black crow. It blew me away. Talk about synergies between spirits and an eight year old girl giving this to me. But this is the kind of reminders that I have that, that we are all royalty in this kingdom. Just like a, like a bird, you know, like these birds that I go out every morning and they don't know if they're going to get a worm. They don't know if they're going to survive. They don't know if a hawk is going to get them. But they warble and sing their heart out to let the world know they're alive and well and seeking more. And that's what especially anybody that's watching this that is fighting cancer in themselves or someone else or a degenerative disease like Ms. That I was diagnosed with seven years ago that didn't accept that diagnosis and I won't ever accept it. And then I was going to, during COVID I said, oh, maybe I'll just get a disability and get a couple grand a month to get me through this hard time. I went, got the MRI and they said, wow, all the white spots on your brain are gone. Must be I. We must have made a mistake.

Yes.

I love it. You know, your brain can recreate itself well into your 90s. The cells of your brain want to regenerate. They don't want to degenerate. You allow your brain to degenerate and we have enough science and we have enough information on Google to help you with your brain. And I know, Jen, nature provides, has wonderful, what I call neuroprotection products.

Absolutely.

So we need to get that out there, girl.

Yes, we're going. Well, thank you again so much. It was such a pleasure. I adore you. I appreciate everything about you, and I look forward to what's next.

Me too. Bye, everyone.