In 2020, my life cracked open.

I was diagnosed with aggressive triple-negative breast cancer — a kind so fast-growing and relentless that multiple doctors didn’t think I would make it. The pathology was off the charts. One integrative oncologist called it a “monster,” another a “freight train.” I was told holistic treatments wouldn’t be fast enough.

And that was a reckoning.

I had lived a deeply holistic life. I was a healer, a yoga teacher, a woman who always said, I’ll never do chemo. But suddenly, the very foundations of what I believed and built my life on were shaken. And I wasn’t willing to make a decision from fear. I needed God. I needed clarity. I needed truth.

So I got still — or tried to, in the middle of my tears and terror. I prayed. I wept. I listened. I consulted doctor after doctor, from New York to California. Two integrative oncologists and a Chinese herbalist I trusted deeply — all said the same thing: you don’t have time. Not one of them recommended skipping chemo. And slowly, with God’s grace and deep spiritual guidance, I made the most difficult decision of my life.

I chose chemo. Consciously. Spiritually. Reluctantly. Powerfully.

I made it mine.

I prepared my body with herbs, acupuncture, breath, and nutrition. I visualized Christ Light moving through the port, guiding the medicine only to what needed healing and bypassing the rest. I turned those terrifying sessions into sacred ceremonies, listening to mantras, guided imagery, and Dr. Joe Dispenza meditations. My mom renamed the infamous chemo drug “Red Devil” as the “Blue Angel.” My nurse, Armand, gently administered each round with prayerful presence.

This was during COVID — so I sat alone. And I was glad. I needed solitude to be in devotion, in surrender, in constant conversation with God. But it wasn’t just hard — it was brutal.

I lost my breast, my hair, my eyelashes, my eyebrows — and at moments, my identity. I remember collapsing on the bathroom floor, sobbing from a place so primal it terrified me. I didn’t recognize the woman in the mirror. I looked dead. And for a while, I was.

The physical battle was only the beginning.

After the surgeries and chemo, I turned down the final round of the Red Devil, and I refused radiation. My body had had enough. I thought the hardest part was over, but what came next was even harder: the long, lonely crawl back to life. One full year of physical recovery left me mostly homebound, exhausted, bed-ridden, and stripped bare. Then came the mental and emotional healing — a whole other year of darkness, terror, disorientation, and extreme PTSD.

I was doing everything “right”: supplements, mistletoe shots, infrared saunas, red light therapy, vitamin C infusions with B17, juicing, Reiki, therapy, spiritual counseling, and more. But I was in survival mode, and I was manically trying to heal myself while my nervous system was completely fried.

And then the breath found me.

Through a cancer support nonprofit, I joined a six-week breathwork series. I almost didn’t go — I thought I already knew breathwork. I was a yoga teacher. But what I experienced cracked me open in a new way.

When all I could do was lay on the floor...
when walking up stairs felt impossible...
when both shoulders were frozen and my brain barely functioned...

I could still breathe.

That breath began to carry me back to life.

Soon after, I found Alchemy of Breath and began their weekend sessions. The work spoke directly to my soul. This wasn’t just breathwork — it was a full initiation. Half the training wasn’t about facilitating others — it was about going deep into my own inner terrain. I breathed my way back to my birth story, my childhood, my earliest closures, all the places where I had once stopped feeling and trapped my light.

And there, I met her.

All the little Tina’s I had abandoned along the way.

With every session, I reunited with lost parts of myself — not through reliving trauma, but through feeling what had never been felt. Breath became the bridge back to my heart. This was trauma healing at the soul level, a return to innocence and integration.

With this sacred program, I was literally breathing myself open. (It’s why my work now lives under the name Breathe Open with Tina.) The breath, paired with the mind-body medicine I later studied with Dr. Kim D’Eramo, became the alchemy that started to rewire my life from the inside out.

I wasn’t just recovering.
I was rewriting my story, one breath at a time.

Between the two programs — breathwork and mind-body healing — I experienced a true rebirth. I went from being terrified of my own body to living inside it again. I went from a concept of self-love to the embodiment of it. I went from shattered to whole.

I entered the darkness. I met fear I wouldn’t wish on anyone. And I found the light inside.

It wasn’t an idea. It wasn’t a pretty affirmation. It was real.

It was me.

The light I had been searching for all my life... was mine.

I share this story not for sympathy — but as a living testimony of what is possible.

Of how trauma doesn’t have to be the end of our story.
Of how the breath can become a lifeline — and a doorway.
Of how healing doesn’t always look graceful… but it is always sacred.
Of how God never left me, not for one moment.

And of how, no matter how dark it gets… you can return.
To your body.
To your breath.
To yourself.