Self care & inner expansion
Angélica Cabrera
Healing doesn't always feel like peace.
Sometimes it feels like discomfort, boundaries, and choices you never thought you'd have to make.
Who I am
I was born in Ecuador and raised in Colombia. The rest I've been learning.
I was born in Ecuador and raised in Colombia, into a family that is still my safe place: my parents and my sister. That's where I come from, and where I go back whenever I need to remember who I am.
I studied international business administration. For a long time I thought that side of me ran on one track and the rest of me on another, until I understood they're the same: structure and boundaries are what hold any process together, including the one inside.
I'm still learning to heal, and I say that in the present tense. Not as someone who has arrived, but as someone who practices: trying new ways, listening to my body, holding what the science says against what actually feels true.
Simple things fill me up: learning something I didn't know, taking up a new hobby, being around people on the same frequency. That kind of energy isn't meant to be kept; it's meant to be shared.
That's the cycle I try to sustain: learn from myself and my body, learn from others, build myself with it, and give it back to whoever needs it. All of it with discipline and consistency — not glamorous, but the only thing that makes anything last.
Today I walk alongside other people on that same path. No shortcuts: practices you feel in your body, and a mechanism you can actually understand.
The process
What follows are five stages, the same ones a butterfly lives through. Each one is a pillar of my work, and none can be skipped.
- 01Stillness
- 02Digestion
- 03Dissolution
- 04Emergence
- 05Flight
Egg, stillness
Self care
The container comes first.
Somatic practices
Nothing grows without ground to grow from. Before any transformation there is something simpler, and harder: holding yourself.
Somatic practice starts there. In the body, not in the idea.
What if taking care of yourself stopped being a reward and became the starting point?
Caterpillar, digestion
Emotions
What you feel has to be processed.
Process, don't skip
Skipping an emotion doesn't resolve it. It postpones it. What isn't digested comes back — under another name, at another time.
There are no shortcuts through pain.
What are you trying not to feel?
Chrysalis, dissolution
Mind
The material was already there.
Imaginal cells
Inside the cocoon, the caterpillar doesn't simply grow wings. It dissolves almost completely and rebuilds itself from clusters of cells that were there from the very beginning: imaginal cells. The material already existed. What changed was the organization.
Your brain works in a similar way. It's called neuroplasticity: you don't need to become someone else — you need to reorganize who you already are.
That's why I talk about the vagus nerve, regulation and the nervous system. Understanding the mechanism takes the mystery out of the process and gives the power back to the person living it.
What in you is already ready to be reorganized?
Emergence, wet wings
Inner expansion
Nobody tells you about this part.
The vulnerable moment
When a butterfly leaves the chrysalis, it doesn't fly right away. Its wings are wet and folded, and they need time to open.
Expanding is that too: feeling exposed, clumsy, new. It isn't the triumphant moment. It's the vulnerable one.
What if the discomfort were the sign that something is actually changing?
Flight
Conscious evolution
Living differently, not just understanding differently.
Living differently
Understanding your story is one step. Choosing differently when the story repeats itself is another.
Conscious evolution doesn't show in what you know. It shows in how you respond, in what you no longer tolerate, and in what you finally allow yourself.
What would you do today if you already were the version you're building?
Some things the body understands before the mind does.
Heal and Glow · on the outskirts of Bogotá