When I was 12 years old my mother came into my room and sat next to me on the bed to tell me what many others reading this may have heard before.
“I have cancer…”
When those life-altering moments arrive, you expect the floor to fall out from beneath you or the wretch in your stomach to form, but I clearly remember being both curious and numb. There wasn’t really a part of me that could grab onto the truth or weight of that moment.
It wasn’t til months later, during a particularly emotion-filled night at the local church group, that the cracks burst, and the fear, confusion, and reality flooded out.
As this shift out of my childhood began to crash over me like waves, there was a shift occurring. One that I would not have the ability to process or even understand until my early twenties. Our family unit became tighter. Our perspective on healing altered.
When the first whisper of death knocks on your door, especially at such a formative age, there are pathways formed deeply in the back of your mind that become your new blueprint for living.
My mother began to take walks around the block barefoot, our fridge of sodas quickly turned to pitchers of iced tea, the expectation in the house shifted from performance to experience, and truthfully our lives became richer.
Fortunately for my story, my mother went in for surgery a few months after breaking the news, only for them to find no cancer in sight.
We all had our own levels of belief for how this could be, but for me, especially the part of me still learning to believe, there was something magical in the holistic nature of it all. The ability to understand the value in modern medicine but even deeper, the understanding that healing runs through us and around us.
In balance, nutrition, exploration, honesty, movement, and, greatest of all, LOVE, there is a heartbeat of healing.
It would be a few years following this seeming miracle before I would walk my own journey with my own body and her trials. From uncontrollable bleeding to excessive weight gain in seasons of high stress all the way to a PCOS diagnosis and years of feeling defeated by the only cycle I ever truly wanted to understand.
This ebb and flow with knowing and not knowing, believing and doubting, trying and giving up have spanned over a decade, from doctors to teachers to spiritual guides, and always back to my own mind.
Within these years, the tinder that began to glow at the age of 12, when my mother sat at my bedside, only continued to grow into an inner fire. The knowing that I was put on this Earth at this point in time to care deeply about healing. To care deeply for the spirit and the mind.
Not only to care for it but also to practice it, teach it, hold it, and share it.
My name is Ady Brady, and I am a Mind-Body practitioner who helps holistic-minded people nurture their overall well-being by balancing mind, body, and spirit for sustainable growth, empowering them to succeed in their aligned goals, create supportive communities, and thrive in their pursuit of healing.
Hi, it’s great to see you on Substack! I enjoyed your newsletter a while back (also, I believe we took part in a group prom thing together in high school once lol). Best of wishes with your studies and your writing! :)