How She Cleared Three Diseases Doctors Couldn’t Heal

There is a particular kind of tired that sleep doesn’t touch.

Not the tired of doing too much. The tired of holding together a life you’ve quietly outgrown. You have the title. The track record. The room where the real decisions get made. On paper, you built exactly what most people only dream about. And still, in some quiet hour, usually late, a question rises that you can’t quite silence. When does it finally get to feel like enough?

I asked Celinne Da Costa to sit with me this week because she has lived on the other side of that question. She is a master coach, a TEDx speaker, and the author of the USA TODAY bestseller The Burning Ground. She was born in Rome, raised between Italy, Brazil, and the United States, and reshaped by more than sixty countries and the strangers who became her mirrors. But none of that is what makes her rare. What makes her rare is that she walked away from the life she was supposed to want, on purpose, to find out who she’d be on the other side of the fire. And she came back with a map.

This is what she gave us.

When Achievement Stops Being the Answer

Celinne calls herself a collector of extraordinary experiences. But there was a version of her asking a very different question. What can I achieve? For most of us, that question runs the whole show for a decade or more. The degree. The city. The title. The number in the account. We are taught that these things are the door to a good life, so we keep stacking them, waiting for the moment they finally satisfy something deeper.

The moment never comes. Celinne named it plainly. The external achievement always pales next to what becomes available when you actually choose to listen to your soul’s calling. Not one eureka moment. A series of them. A decade of falling on her face and getting back up before the question quietly changed from what can I achieve to what does my soul desire to experience.

Here is the part I want you to feel. That shift didn’t announce itself. It arrived as discomfort. As restlessness that no achievement could soothe. As a tight sweater that used to fit and suddenly doesn’t. If that is you right now, you are not falling apart. You are outgrowing an old identity before the new one has fully arrived. The despair is only the gap between the two, and the gap is proof you are moving, not proof you are broken.

The Monkey Bar and the Bar You Cannot See

Celinne offered an image I haven’t stopped thinking about. Picture yourself hanging from a monkey bar. To move forward, you have to let go of the bar you’re holding and reach for the next one. There’s a breath in between, that thrilling, terrifying moment where you’re holding nothing at all.

Most people, she said, aren’t just afraid of the leap. They’re living as if the next bar doesn’t exist. So a fear that could be a three out of ten, the kind you would shake off and simply try again, swells into a ten out of ten. Existential. And so they hang on to the old bar until they’re exhausted, gripping a life that’s already draining them, because they don’t trust that anything is waiting on the other side of the reach.

But blindfold yourself on a set of monkey bars and the next bar doesn’t disappear. You just can’t see it. That is faith. Not the absence of the leap, but the trust that the structure holds even when your eyes can’t confirm it. And here’s what I added, because I’ve lived it. The bar you’re on right now is where you’re building the muscle to reach the higher one. The struggle isn’t punishment. It’s the pruning. It’s the metaphysical muscle forming for a level you can’t hold yet.

Is This Happening For Me?

For Celinne, the turn came in a brutal couple of months. A trip to Cambodia that broke her heart open. Her grandfather’s death that same week. The promotion she wanted, gone. A breakup on her birthday. Any one of those could flatten a person. All of them together could have made her a permanent victim of her own story.

Instead, for the first time in her life, a different question haunted her. What if this is happening for me, not to me? She got obsessed with it. And as she asked it again and again, one thing became undeniable. If she kept living the life she was on track for, she would die inside. Not literally. Soul death. She knew she wanted to live. So she started asking the world what she needed to do to change, and the world began to answer in synchronicities. People, encounters, accidents, all arriving to wake her up.

I know that season because I lived my own version of it. I was in Detroit, working myself to the bone inside a company I had founded on my own hair story, and I had handed half of it to a man who was living off me. The relationship was toxic. Then my father passed away unexpectedly. Then one of my closest friends, my roommate, was murdered. And a single sentence rose up in me with total clarity. If I stay, this will kill me. I left everything. The condo, the company, the man, the city. I went home. I told myself it was to take care of my mother, and it was. But the truth underneath is that I needed to take care of myself. That was my burning ground. Every one of us gets one.

Ambition Is a Clean Word for Avoidance

The most quoted line from Celinne’s book is this. Sometimes ambition is a clean word for avoidance, and stability a clean word for fear. Sit with that one. We reach for the noblest sounding words we can find, ambition, freedom, stability, focus, and we use them to justify why we don’t have the very thing our heart is asking for.

Because, as she put it, you get who you are, not what you’re doing. If your heart’s desire isn’t showing up in your life, it doesn’t mean you can’t have it. It means the version of you living right now isn’t yet a match for it. Not a flaw. A frequency. And frequency is something you can shift.

She drew a line I want every woman reading this to hold. There is freedom to, and there is freedom from. Freedom to live your mission, your dreams, the future you actually want. And freedom from, which is just running away from what you don’t want to face. Both get called freedom. They are opposite textures. The freest people she knows aren’t the uncommitted ones. They are the most devoted, the most disciplined, the most structured, deeply committed to the path that frees them. Freedom is accessed through commitment, not around it.

And the reframe that landed hardest for me. Ambition is best achieved by slowing down. Not spinning your wheels through twenty anxious little actions that keep you busy, but slowing enough to take one true action that actually moves you. Most of the time, the productive thing is the opposite of what your default, anxious thinking is screaming at you to do.

Let Her Cook

So much of this work is learning to watch the ego instead of obeying it or shaming it. I told Celinne about the long walks I took through my hardest season, ranting in my own head, furious, and finally learning to just let her talk. That’s not me, I’d think. But she’s never had the space to speak. So let her cook.

Celinne challenged me, gently, and I’m glad she did. What if that voice is you, just the part of you that got shoved into the corner while you were surviving? The part that got silenced in the toxic relationship, in the grind, in the years of proving. For you to step into the next version of yourself, she has to come too. Nobody gets left behind. No part of us gets abandoned on the cliff to starve.

She pointed to the idea of the bus. Every part of us has a seat. The one who doubts us. The one who says we’re not enough. The furious one on the long walk. They all belong on board. The work isn’t to throw them off. It’s to set the rules. Nobody screams, nobody gets thrown out, and everyone learns to communicate. Because underneath every complaint is a desire. When you can hear the desire beneath the grievance, you stop reinvesting in the old story and start voting for the future your soul is building. And you can’t hear that desire until the part carrying it finally feels seen.

You Don’t Have to Burn It All Down

Here is where Celinne surprised me, and where I most want to protect you from a misreading. Her book is called The Burning Ground because she did burn it all down. She quit, she left, she couch surfed the world for nine months. But she was clear. She went through that initiation so she could also learn to transition gracefully. She has both in her repertoire now, and she wants you to know you get to choose.

Changing your life does not require a dumpster fire. It doesn’t require quitting tomorrow, losing all your money, or blowing up your marriage. Shame convinces us it has to be dramatic to be real. It doesn’t. The real question is softer. How do we take our consciousness, our attention, our energy, and devote it to the destiny we’re creating instead of pouring it back into the inherited story that keeps us cycling?

She gave a number I love, because it makes this practical. Fifty one percent. If more than half of your energy is going toward the new creation, the soul story, you already have momentum. You’re already moving toward your destiny. It can be soft. It can be consistent. And with dedication, one year from now your life can look completely different. Not because you set it on fire. Because you kept voting for it.

What the Body Knew

Then we went to the ground I most wanted to reach. Her healing. After years of searching for answers, Celinne learned she had Lyme disease and two other infections attacking her nervous system. This time, instead of asking why is this happening to me, she made a radical choice. She decided to meet the disease as a teacher, not an identity. Not something to build a story around, but an entity that had come into her body to teach her something, viscerally.

It was not a soft journey. Antibiotics, sickness, exhaustion, acne, her whole nervous system lit up. She is explicit that this was her choice and not medical advice, and that she used science alongside her intuition, not instead of it. She chose a doctor who understood her, a former client, and asked her to hold up a clear mirror and not waver. And over and over, something astonishing happened. She would feel, in her body, that a medication was complete, or that a disease had cleared, and weeks later the blood test would confirm what she already knew. She felt her soul contract with Lyme complete before any lab could say so.

She cleared all three within eighteen months, something that usually takes years. Her doctor had never seen it happen that fast. What Celinne took from it wasn’t a healing formula. It was proof that she could trust her body’s wisdom. That everything arriving in a life can be treated as raw material, alchemist’s material, for who we’re becoming. She was careful and honest here. There is no magic wand for grief, and some conditions don’t simply vanish. But how we choose to relate to what challenges us completely changes our experience of it. That is available to every one of us, in any body, in any diagnosis.

The Fire Taught Me to Love

This is the truth I hope you carry out of this episode. Everything in your life is here to teach you. Every trial, every illness, every death, every abandonment, and every birth, every celebration, every launch and love and goal met. As souls, we can’t feel the way we can inside a body. The body is the gift of feeling. For too long we were taught to numb it, judge it, ignore it. Now is the time to feel it, to treat our emotions as teachers, as friends riding in the caravan with us.

When I asked Celinne to finish the sentence, the fire taught me what, she didn’t reach for anything clever. She said, to love. The fire taught her to love. After the burning, the healing, the seventy countries and the strangers and the illness that rewrote her blood, love is what was underneath all of it, waiting.

If You Feel the Tightening

If you’re reading this and you can feel a life you’ve outgrown tightening around you, let this be your mirror. You already know. You’ve always known. The next bar is there, even if you can’t see it yet. You don’t have to burn it all down. You just have to start voting, fifty one percent, for the woman you’re becoming.

That is the exact work I do inside the Divine Alignment Mentorship. Five months of building the bridge between who you were and who you’re here to be, so you can stop strategizing your way around what you’re actually here to heal. If that’s stirring something in you, the door is open.

Book a consultation with me at erinpatten.com. I’ll be on the other side of it.

Celinne Da Costa’s book The Burning Ground is available now, with over $200 in bonuses when you order through theburningground.com. You can find her work at celinnedacosta.com and her writing at her Substack, Living From Soul.