#1 My story: orphaned, beaten and abused

[MUSIC] >> Hello, gorgeous soul. Welcome to the Sex and the City Hippie Podcast, the podcast for high achievers looking for motivation, inspiration, and raw vulnerability regarding healing, mindset, and manifesting. If you want to break free from societal expectations, heal unwanted subconscious patterns, and manifest a life that sets your soul on fire, then you are at the right address. It is my mission to teach souls like you, heal, and manifest from their hearts, and not from their heads. I am Daniela Cuda, and as your host, I will bring harmony between our spiritual side and our rational side, because I believe that we need both, like a true sex and a city hippie. I was always a high achiever, and coming from a rough and traumatic childhood, I always made sure to work as hard as I could to achieve my goals. And even though I was living the life, I was feeling dead inside. I got myself out of that rock bottom, and now I want to take you with me on this journey. I am so excited that you are tuning in to today's episode. [MUSIC] Today I want to talk to you about the proof that I have that manifesting works, and that is my story. I am not telling you that manifesting works because I read it in books, or because I went to seminars. Obviously, all of this helped once I started becoming a conscious manifestor. But we are always manifesting, you are always manifesting as well. You are constantly creating your life, and everything that you do every day, every second of the day. But I want to tell you today my story, because if we go back to where it all started, you will not believe, or might find it hard to believe, that the life that I'm living now, I manifested it whether it was unconscious in my early years, or now that I am consciously creating it. It's just exploded, and my life has become literally the life of my dreams. Right now, I am recording this podcast from Mexico, because I wanted to skip the winter. I hate cold weather, and I just thought, you know what, I'm going to manifest in a year. So I quit my job, and now I am building my amazing business. And the first time that I launched my CUDA manifestation program in January, I got 28 people that invested about 500 euros to come and learn with me, without me having a website, a sales page, without them even knowing what I was going to teach them, because I was creating it for them at that moment. And this goes to show you that it really does not matter what your desires are. You can always have them if you follow that intuition, if you follow your purpose. You don't have to be a product of your past, a product of your wounds. Those are just wisdom, those are just lessons, and they are hard to heal. I am not here trying to gas like your emotions or your experiences. I mean, I have PTSD myself, and it's something that I will have to work on daily. But I'm here to tell you that your past is not the final future. And with this, I want to thank you for allowing me to be vulnerable with you, because I'm going to go as deep as I can, as the time allows me to, and I hope that you find inspiration in my story, and that you find nuggets of wisdom on things that have been difficult for me in my past. And also the reason why I have complex PTSD. I want to already thank you for taking the time and holding space for my story. I was born in Colombia way up in the jungle in the mountains, where you cannot even get there by car. And I remember that my family, we used to have a lot of cattle, and we used to have a gold mine, and we used to have a sugar factory. And those are like one of my most fond memories. However, we were not rich, obviously. So a lot of the houses in this little village were made out of wood. And my father made the first house of this village out of bricks for my mom, because my mom came from Medellin, which is a big city in Colombia. Our kitchen, my grandmother would wake up very early to make the meals for the gold mining, people that worked in the gold mines. And I remember waking up one night, and my grandmother telling me, "Danny, go back to bed," and my grandfather telling me, "No, it's okay, come." And it's one of the most fondest memories. If I would close my eyes right now, I would see my grandmother stirring this big, big pot of soup on top of a couple of bricks, because the kitchen is obviously not a modern shade, the kitchen that we know right now. It's just a round of bricks on top of a fire in a big, big pan. And I remember the smell, and I don't know if you love the smell of rain as much as I do, just the smell, not the cold. But the smell of rain, it's just so, so soothing. And if you've ever been to the jungle, you know, how the combination of rain, soil and jungle is just like, it feels so much like home and on the far end. I would hear the chickens and announcing that it's becoming morning. And this is the place that I call home. And before my healing journey, I always had a trouble finding my home, grounding myself during meditations. And until I went back in one of my healing sessions to this very moment, I realized, "Oh my God, Mona, which is the village's name, is actually my home, and now every time during meditation, I envision myself putting roots in that ground." However, when I was three months old, everything that I knew that saved Haven, everything that I knew just became very, very dark, my father got killed by the FARC. He got shot three times, and because my father was the kind of the boss in the area, everybody started running around like, "Oh my God, oh my God, we need to leave." And everybody just picked up and left. And I remember as a baby, I don't know if you know this, but baby trauma is a thing. This pain unresolved, unhealed pain, I had been carrying it with me for a long, long time until my first ayahuasca experience in December last year, that I could finally heal it. And I will go deeper in my next podcast episodes about this ayahuasca and everything that I saw. But it was just so impactful, the fact that you lose your parents, you're one of your parents in such a young age, I mean, it was three months. And then seeing your whole family crumble, literally, I have two half sisters in Colombia that unfortunately, I barely speak with because my life had been so tumultuous ever since as well. And right now as an adult, I find it a little bit difficult to connect on a deeper level. You know, I have so many sister wounds in that area that just holds me a little bit back on going there and hopefully one day I can heal this part and feel a little bit more connected to them as well. And I even had a sister that popped up out of Facebook, yes, I am not kidding, like one of those, yes, this person is looking for their family. And we didn't know that my father had met this woman way before he met my mother and this woman was an indigenous woman and maybe I don't know, my parents are not alive so I cannot ask them, but it was quite shocking to me and until this day I don't dare establishing that connection. When my father got killed, my mother moved back to Medellin and if you watched Pablo Escobar the series in Netflix, you know that Medellin was not the safest place in Colombia back then either. I mean, we're talking about 1990 and the drug cartels and you know, the city was just out of control and we were living in a really bad neighborhood and I remember one day I had to literally step over a body that was laying on the ground because we needed to get to safety. And my mother used to work at a supermarket and obviously my mother wanted a better future for us and that's after three years she, when I was three years old, she left to go to a rubat to, you know, hopefully give us a more stabler and better future. When she did that, we stayed with my grandparents and my uncle and in this house I did not feel welcome a lot because, you know, it was a full house and right now from my perspective and if you are a family member of mine and you're listening to this, I want you to know that this is my perspective and that you might have experienced this in a very different way than I did. Unfortunately, I didn't feel loved in this house, even though it was filled with family. I have some beautiful memories but the memories are like dots on a very, very deepened, abandoned mend and unloving feeling and remember we used to live in front of the library and I would go there almost every afternoon to read, yes I learned to read when I was three years old and I used to play chess and I would go in these books and these fiction books and when I was in the library I was in the balcony reading on the balcony because inside of the house it just did not feel safe and one of the, yeah, most heartbreaking memories that I have is that they separated my sister and I and since I'm getting a little emotional as I tell you this is that my sister was living at another house with my aunt and we called each other and I remember following the telephone line which back then was study on the wall, right? Following this line to see if my sister was on the other end of this line and I was three maybe four, not understanding anything that was happening, missing my mom every day and not really being able to go to school because I think the time that I was in my grandmother's house was only temporary until we went to my aunt's house and live with my aunt. And this period is when something terrible happened to me, I was sexually abused when I was three years old and the most awful thing happens when you're that age is that your subconscious mind takes over and your brain is like a computer, everything bad that happens to you, your brain kind of pushes it away, right? It compartmentalizes it into a virus like something that's going to hurt you so it just pushes it as deep as it can for you not to feel the pain of these things that happen in your life. So it wouldn't come to a surprise to many people that a lot of their childhood they just don't remember, not because they just don't remember but because so many things happened that felt like a virus for their brain, that their brain kind of pushes it away and once I knew this, once I found this out, I found it in my subconscious mind and this is obviously one of the big reasons why I love working as a coach and in my programs with your subconscious mind because I know that there is so much healing to be gotten out of there and I found this out just a year ago and puzzling the pieces together, I have so many clues that my subconscious mind was not letting through but my conscious mind knew that this happened, like there is no doubt in my mind that this happened but this is a healing journey on its own and it's something I want to share with you in another podcast episode about how I got to know that I was sexually abused and how that healing has been up to then but I will try to give you a brief overview of my story because it's just sometimes in my perspective it's so complicated and complex, so when I was five my mom got married to an Arabian person, my stepfather which back then I used to love so so much because obviously I was a little girl, you know, always wanted to have a father figure and I was small enough to accept any love that I would receive and you know just not let my ego get in the way of really building a connection and they got married and we moved to Aruba and I had like about two to three years that I felt so happy, I started going to school and I love, used to love school, I love, always love learning so remember the first day of school I set out my whole outfit, I told my mom how I wanted her to do my hair and I was so excited I couldn't sleep for like hours and hours and telling my mom like when am I going, when am I going and always making my mom go to the building of her school to show me where I would be going to school and these were like such blissful years of my life because school has always been like a safe haven for me, my hobbies and my school have always felt like a safe place where I could just be myself and not worry about all the awful things that were happening in my life and then when I was eight my mom got cancer and it was just devastating because I had no clue what was going on, she got a ovarian cancer and she left to the Netherlands and I was very little, I was eight years old and I didn't even understand because I was just happy that I got to stay with a friend of mine when my mom was away and I didn't really comprehend what that meant and obviously as my mom crying a lot because her whole, because her whole womb got removed for the cancer not to spread but she came back and you know we were kind of happy and I didn't really understand that the cancer could come back or that there was any danger but then when I was eleven years old my mom had a lump on her collarbone and she went to Columbia because she had been having these really bad, bad back pains, lower back pains and in Naruba they were telling her it's an earlier, it's an earlier but she was not feeling great and when she went to Columbia the doctor told her that she had about three months to live and this is when my whole life got turned upside down because even though my mom fought every day and I remember her not giving up in three months my mom unfortunately passed away and I want to tell you some of the painful moments that I experienced in these three previous months is that I remember wanting to lay with my mom on her bed all the time in being with her and I remember that when she told us what was going on I went to bed, we had this double story apartment and I went up the stairs and I just looked at her and she was talking to her friend telling her what was happening and I had an idea like she didn't see me that and had this big, big urge to get down the stairs and hug her just one more time and that to me felt like I could buy the funny thing is is that when I was younger and I know that I was younger because I was living in a different apartment I got woken up middle of the night screaming because I had a nightmare that my mom had died and I know that my intuition has always been very very strong but now as an older person obviously you piece these puzzles together and now I realize how important my intuition has always been because there has been so many things in the past that I've seen or dreamt about and they all come true so this is me telling you you should always listen to your intuition you know nightmares are nightmares and they are fears and some things that feel so so true are telling you about a fear but it can also be a message from the universe I was so happy that the universe always puts angels in your way and there was one particular angel that God put in the way of our family back then to help us go through this this period and not only through that period but ever since she has been in my life and I call her Ma and her name is Karen and I call her like my my God mother my mother and the funny thing is is how we met her is that my father my stepfather obviously he used to work at a bar at a beach bar in Aruba in a hotel and there was this couple sitting at the bar and when my mom called my stepfather from Colombia to tell him the news obviously my stepfather started bawling his eyes out and then this lady Karen Ma told him I don't understand what's happening they cannot do anything for her and this lady just met my father and she's like you know what I'm going to go and dig in in the States in Boston in the Boston bringing women's cancer institute to see what they can do for your mom he took my my stepfather's number and email and you know you're in the middle of a whirlwind so you don't expect for the universe to really align things this way and at least give us this fighting chance because in Aruba they kind of told my mom that they couldn't do anything for her and just this this light of hope just makes it made it that much more bearable for all of us you know to our surprise this lady actually did what she told us that she was going to do and we went there I think within the weeks we all left from Aruba to Boston to stay at this lady's house that none of us knew and this is why I always say that a kind gesture can go so long I mean I'm telling you a story that is 20 years old and to this day it still impacts me like how could if someone showed so much kindness to a family that they didn't even know and they had no reason to do it they had no self-interest you know we were a poor family we didn't we couldn't even pay for any any of it and she just gave it from the bottom of her heart of her heart and that's how my bond with her started and you know I'm still I'm still super close with her thank God but this whole process of my mom being sick just did so much for me because I remember that I felt like I needed to take care of my mom and take care of my father and take care of my sister and that's when I started my high-achieving journey like okay I'm not gonna let this take me down and not really processing as a child should have processing all of these things that have that were happening then my mom fought tooth and nail for three months but unfortunately after this three months she passed away and the worst part of this is that my mom passed away one day before my own birthday on the 12th of February you can imagine that my 11th birthday was not the happiest birthday for a child and it was excruciating and if I tell you the story of the day that my mom died it was also a spiritual experience because I had seen my mother suffer you know she was a healthy woman curvaceous woman Latina woman and in these three months this illness got her so so sick so thin she was yellow she was happy that her hair didn't fall out so that was something positive that she really liked but she got so thin and she was constantly in pain laying in bed and I was done seeing my mom like this and I remember we taking down a trip around the week that my mom died to see my stepfather's family in New York and they took us to this big big cathedral in New York and in this cathedral this was this beautiful ceremony and I remember praying to God from the deepest core of my heart like every time that I think about it you can probably feel it or hear it I get this emotion because I really pray to God for God to please take my mom I was so done seeing her suffer I was so done seeing her go through all of that pain and it was like a miracle happen because the moment that we got out of the church I was on the steps of the church my stepfather got a call from the hospice where my mother was translated after the Boston Brigham Institute Cancer Institute couldn't do much for her as well and they told my father that he should rush or go to as fast as he could back to Boston which is like a four to five hour drive and I remember he like taking my hand and we were like rushing through the streets getting to the car and I had to pee really really bad like really bad and he telling me like no no you have to hold it in you have to hold it in and I was just trying to not pee in the car I mean I'm still a 11 year old girl and the moment we arrived at this hospice there's what there was this none in front of us because the hospice where my mom was was run by nuns and this none was in front of me and before she could say anything I told her please please please can I go to the bathroom and I went to the bathroom you know finally this really evening and then when I come out I see my father and the nuns standing next to each other and my father had clearly been crying and then my father told me that my mom passed away and the weirdest thing is is that her room was across where the toilet was and I looked at my right and I see my sister on a chair heartbroken and everybody's dealing with their own feelings and I'm like okay so what do we do now and I didn't cry and looking back I now realized that was not healthy but at that moment I wanted to comfort my sister comfort my stepfather and you know think of action plans of all things I mean your mom just died in your 11 little girl like give yourself some healing time but I didn't because I knew that that's what I asked God for that's what I wanted to manifest I wanted my mom to go and have peace so I wasn't peace once that happened the moment I entered her room I felt her spirit leave the room it was like a have you ever had like a breeze go through through your hair and you're closing your eyes and feeling that bliss that's exactly what I felt the moment I enter my mom's room however I saw her body laying on the bed but I felt so much bliss and all I could do is comfort my stepfather and comfort my mom and then I remember going again to the chapel and I'm not Catholic or religious but I do believe in God and back then I believe in God and there was a time in my life that I was very angry at God and luckily right now I feel more connected to source to a universe however you want to call that energy that is so loving and so pure and then I went to the chapel and told this energy thank you thank you for liberating her from her pain and then my mom got cremated my brother who was previously in Colombia flew in for her cremation and we had this fear her funeral and her cremation and now there was this debate should we stay in in the states or should we go back to Aruba because in the states my mom obviously knew that my stepfather was an alcoholic so she wanted us to stay with my aunt one of my aunts that lived in the states let's call this aunt Jessica we stayed for a little while at my aunt Jessica and this is where I manifested becoming a cheerleader like fastest lighting because I only lived there for like two months and I did the tryouts and saw myself doing these jumps and actually learned to become a cheerleader obviously not super advanced but it was a really cool experience however the school system there I really didn't like because obviously the American school system is very very expensive and I knew that if I wanted a better future I could have not stayed there and I didn't like that I had to work so hard to kind of get my GPA at the level that it used to be in Aruba for me to be able to have a scholarship with that knowledge I decided to go back to Aruba because I knew that if I studied in Holland it will be way cheaper and I could actually get a better future for myself so I decided to go back to Aruba and from Aruba we started living with my stepfather me and my sister and this was a very very tumultuous times because like I said my stepfather just lost his love of his life and he was an alcoholic and it only got worse and worse from there he would make us clean the house every day you treated us basically like maids and when I went to high school I would need an agenda you know like to write down my homework and he said there was no money for an agenda but then he bought like a brand new car which looked like fast and fast and furious like the blue car the white car with the blue and I was like how is this possible so I took a notebook and I took a calendar and made my own agenda and remember that when he didn't allow us to go to our dance classes at Popcorn Club Aruba so we kind of snuck out me and my sister when he used to go to work we snuck out to go to the dance classes and did all the chores make sure that all the chores were done before we left and the day that we left his house was like very bad day because we had to do the laundry so all the laundry was folded I had done my homework because I just entered high school and we went to dance practice by the time we came back we were in the car being dropped out by our friends of us and the car was jammed back with teenagers and we saw our stepfather outside with a belt on the one hand and a coffee cup on the other hand and we're like duck duck okay keep driving keep driving and we called his girlfriend to help us out you know because we knew he was gonna beat us up and we wanted to wait for her but she worked at a at a club so she would finish even later but we needed to go to sleep to go back to go to school the next morning so we kind of snuck back in and try to find him and when we entered the house all the clothes all the laundry that we had done that day were on the floor like as if a savage came in the house all my homework all my books were like laying on the ground and our the clothes were on the ground and we're like okay something definitely exploded here when we went upstairs we saw that he was you know laying in the bed just knocked out and we thought like okay if he was drunk or drugged we could just snuck back in our beds and not and say like hey you dream date or what is wrong with you kind of like pull out the I don't know what you're talking about card right and me and my sister had two beds that kind of formed a tea like her on the right side towards the wall and mine on the left side towards the wall and the door was in the middle of the two we tried sleeping and then he brushed in the door with a belt and he didn't ask questions he didn't say anything and he just started slapping as if we were lions being trained one to my sister one to me one to my sister and one to me and like he helped no anger back he helped didn't even held his strength back I mean at this point I was 12 years old and my sister was 14 years old and one of those belts swings got my face and I had a scarf or like weeks on the left corner of my eye but my sister got the worst of it because obviously she was the older the eldest and he jumped on top of her and he started hitting her with his fists obviously my sister all of a sudden woke up and you know grabbed his hands and pushed him away and she ran away literally ran out of the door and I stayed behind like what the fuck is going on and then he called the cops to tell them that my sister ran away and I remember yelling at the background like no she didn't run away you beat her up and that's why she ran away the cops came and they talked to us separately and I remember telling the cops like hey we are in very or we are in brough glass and look I even made my own agenda he told me he didn't have money to buy us our agenda and we did the laundry look the laundry's all on the floor he made it me make us he treat us like maids and all of this and then they talked to him separately and I don't know what they talked about the only thing that I remember is the cop the cops coming to us and telling us asking us like okay is there anywhere else that you can stay and we looked at him and we're like okay we have an aunt in a rubah let's call this aunt gg and my aunt gg she was a a live in maid right so she lived with people and cleaned their houses and all of that so that was not a really viable option at that moment we thought so we were like okay we can find some place to stay for a couple of nights and we'll figure it out from there and the cops said okay so but whatever you do never ever come back and that's what we did and from that point on we bounced from house to house and from friends to friends and I don't want to make this story longer than it should even though I told you in the beginning of this podcast that my story is quite complex and quite complicated but the reason I tell you this is because I want to show you that this is where I started this is part of all my wounds and I'm only in my 12 because from then my whole life was a roller coaster I had to work every day after school when I was 13 14 I even left my sister because we were fighting way too much and you know the patterns of violence were repeating itself between us and I just didn't want to live in that environment and I moved out from I was living with her to live on myself when I was 14 and I didn't speak to her for like five years so I was so lonely and I had one goal in my mind is that I know I knew that my life was not going to be that I was working so hard not just to pay the bills or eat I was working for my vision I was working because I knew I was going to go to Holland I was visualizing that every day I was actually visualizing me in cold weather clothes like imagine now but because I knew that that that was like my number one goal whatever I do this is not my life I worked in everything that you can think of besides prostitution I never ever had to do that I'm so grateful and lucky that I never had to do any of that I worked in stores shoestores I worked as a restaurant hostess I even worked at the airport as a ground stewardess but every work that I did every job that I did I'm like okay Danny this is not you this is not what you meant for you're going to keep working so that you can study the funny thing is is that my grades were really high but I didn't go to school every day and obviously the teachers knew that I didn't have parents and they didn't have anybody to complain to so I could literally do whatever it is that I wanted sometimes I went to school sometimes I didn't if I had like an exam I would go and make the exam and they were all baffled like how how do you even get these grades and I'm like well I guess the universe is making all of this possible I also had some really really sweet friends one of them is Ashina and she would tell me a lot of the she would be like okay did you do this did you learn this I'm like nope she okay whatever it is remember this this and she would always before an exam in the morning she would tell me everything that I had to learn and then I would skip the regular classes until the exam and then just go in the exam and you know have my swing at it with the knowledge that she told me to learn and I would just concentrate on those so I also had a lot of angels that helped me but telling you the story and I might in my upcoming podcast I might tell you more of you know go back to some of these stories in other perspectives or more in detail but this is for me to show you once again that my life was not easy I was an orphan since I was eleven I always had to fend for myself but there comes a time that you have to believe that it is your life and that you can create it because when all of this was happening on the parallel life that I called the life that didn't choose there was also a lot of beautiful things happening in my other life like imagine I was an orphan but I loved modeling I love presenting for TV I loved doing pageants you know being socially active like really get myself out there and do the things that I love so I remember that I was a presenter for instance for Aluba Scott talent I entered this monologue competition which is a very important story for when I tell you about my ayahuasca experience because it's it's very crucial to that part but I entered this monologue competition which is making theater and being an actress and I love to do theater I love to dance you know I want the youth queen of my school of Kolehiobak then so I manifested all of these beautiful things and imagine all of these things cost a lot of money and I never ever ever doubted it I'm just gonna sign up and I'll see from there how I'm gonna do it and I always had people that believed in me that wanted to sponsor me in a way for me to do these things one of them is focus of Ruba and I am a columnist for this magazine for a year now that I write about mindset and motivation and trying to teach people or the people of a Ruba about manifesting but they sponsored me to go for Mistin and you know they they paid a lot of everything that I that I did or at least gave me sponsorship deals that I the people could put their ads in the magazine if they gave me if they sponsored a part of of of my journey right so imagine this it does not matter what it is that you are going through right now as you're listening to the path to this podcast it doesn't matter how dark how painful what it is that you're going through now feels at this moment because believe me when you learn to manifest when you believe that there is a better life for you already there all you have to do is align your energy with it and heal those wounds that are blocking you to get there to physically let it present itself you can be where I am now going from I don't know worst case scenario I could have ended up a prostitute or a drug dealer worst case best case scenario I could have ended up with five kids and not have studied and you know live a happy content life but not the extraordinary life that I'm living right now and it is possible for you and this podcast has been a long one for my doing and this is just part one of my story because I have so many stories to tell you but I think that the core message of this podcast is to tell you that when you learn to manifest you can create the life of your dreams and it does not matter what you went through your wounds do not determine your future your past don't determine your future your wounds can become your superpower I want to remind you that I have a manifestation program where I teach you all the ins and outs on how I manifest how I go from pain to wisdom from wounds to healing from dreams desires to reality how I teach you to get rid of these traumas in your body because compared to other manifestation coaches or you know colleagues manifestation can be a very practical thing like okay write things 55.5 times and it will come out but it's way more complicated than that it's about healing all of these core wounds it's about believing in yourself it's about raising your vibration and all of that that's where my expertise is I can give you all the books that you can read I can give you all the movies I've watched but none of that will matter because you need to put in the work to heal those blockages and that's where as a coach that's what I can help you with I can help you integrate I can help you heal those subconscious patterns because I have a lot of techniques that I can help you go inside of your subconscious mind and rewire it so that these patterns and pains physical or not or otherwise don't have to decide or define in your future all right that was it for today thank you for gifting me your time I love connecting with you so if you found this episode inspiring it would mean the world to me if you left me a review and let me know that you listened by tagging me on Instagram @danielad.kura this way my message can reach more and more souls if you don't want to miss any future episodes click subscribe it's time to create a life that sets your soul on fire this is the sex and a steady hippie podcast see you next time