Everybody has a story
The forest where I grew up. Ohio is very green.
GROWING up in the midwest
For most of my childhood, I lived in a quiet, little, picturesque town in northeastern Ohio, named in honor of Revolutionary War heroes, and home to the academy where the 25th U.S. president, William McKinley, was schooled that would later become the high school I would attend. As a little girl, instead of playing with dolls and going to parades, I preferred to listen to my older brother’s record collection, build makeshift towns with my big sister in the neighbor’s yard, and swing on long, low-lying branches of willow trees. Today, the village is still dotted with the original colonial-era structures and newer buildings maintain the same quaint colonial look and feel.
A real live Cookie Monster!
cookies, a lot of cookies
In photographs of myself when I was a little, I was always eating a cookie. My mother took me to see a doctor because I would only eat cookies. Years later, I would identify this as the beginning of a lifelong food addiction. As a child, I’d figured out a way of numbing painful feelings—eating sugar, fat, and carbs—and would reflexively stuff down food in the same way addicts do in their respective ways. It was also at this time when I began to express myself musically, singing and playing church songs on a children’s organ and adding percussive, vocal embellishments to my father’s musical recordings (maybe to his dismay!).
Homecoming day. You can see my white long underwear peeking out from under my blouse. I might have been smiling, but I was sick.
ohio is very cloudy
For all the natural beauty in Ohio, only about a third of the year is sunny. Growing up, I had seasonal affective disorder. In the winter, I would get depressed and become apathetic and excessively sleepy. I’d put on weight. I was sensitive to low light indoors and dense gray, cloudy skies outdoors. Winters were downright cold, and I was always freezing, which was exacerbated by an underactive thyroid, common among people who live in the region. I was very active in school—a type-A overachiever—but to my detriment, health-wise. Like clockwork, every fall, a few days into the new school year, I would get rundown with a sinus infection and swollen glands that would linger until spring. Then my allergies would start up. It’s no wonder that I always wanted to live in a warm, dry, sunny climate!
The newspaper headline read, “It was hot!” Performing at the county fair in 90 degree temperatures.
i’ve always loved to dance
In high school, I was on the dance line. The girls and I would perform during halftime at football games come rain, snow, or shine, on frigid Friday nights and sloppy Saturday afternoons. That didn’t help my sinus infections. My doctor would prescribe antibiotics. This was before it was known that antibiotics kill the flora (good bacteria) in the gut and don’t kill viruses (from a sinus infection). After two years, my doctor stopped prescribing antibiotics because they stopped working; my body built up a tolerance, referred to as antibiotic resistance. He said that if I wanted to get better, I would have to rest. I thought he was a horrible doctor! But today, I appreciate his foresight—he was ahead of his time. However, the damage was already done, and I would suffer from systemic candida, leaky gut syndrome, and other intestinal problems for most of my life.
The visible signs of stress working 60–80 work weeks: weight gain, blemishes, pale skin, dark circles under my eyes, and bad hair days.
i never slowed down
It’s all too common in the United States—busyness. In college, I carried a double-major course load in mathematics and computer science while working two or three jobs and keeping up activities and my grade point average for a scholarship. (But I still had a good time!) My first jobs out of college as a software engineer entailed 60–80-hour work weeks. I loved to code, but the deadlines were aggressive and stressful, and I didn’t like to sit in front of a computer for long hours. I changed jobs frequently. By the time I was 30 years old, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, which is characterized by chronic pain, stiffness, and fatigue. I would binge eat. I saw a therapist and took antidepressants for a short time but stopped both because they didn’t seem to help. I switched careers, teaching at a university, and while I was there took creative writing classes, penned short stories, studied piano performance, and began to write music. I felt happy and alive whenever I was doing anything creative.
Laidback after getting henna while traveling in Morocco.
the move to nyc
A few years later, I left Ohio to accept a position at a tech startup in New York City. The technology industry was booming. It was a thrilling time in my career; never before had an industry ascended so rapidly and profitably. It was a thrilling time to live in New York City; the city was cleaned up and safer. My world exploded with excitement. Within two years, I was promoted several times and advanced to executive management. Ready for my next challenge, I joined a few colleagues at a ground-floor startup. My personal life was also flourishing, and I was enjoying all the city had to offer. I wasn’t making music but I had friends who played around town at great venues. It was one of the best times of my life. And yet something was wrong: I was always sad. Then 9/11 happened, and it became a symbol for a devastating time in my life. My world came crashing down.
In Central Park, New York City. After my second round of chemo, my face was puffy and my hair began to thin.
diagnosed with breast cancer
One day while I was showering, I found a lump the size of a tiny pebble in one of my breasts. It was a few months after I’d contracted Lyme disease from a tick bite … and a month after I’d decided that I didn’t want to live anymore. Suffice it to say, it wasn’t the first time I’d had suicidal thoughts. The difference was, this time I was resolved. I couldn’t do it myself, so I asked for it to happen. Be careful what you wish for. Though my tumor was tiny and stage 1, cancer cells had invaded my blood and lymphatic vessels and was thought to have spread. But then the unexpected happened. Once I was faced with death, I discovered that I wanted to live. There was a silver lining: Having just rebounded from hitting rock bottom prepared me for my next life challenge. I decided I would make it. Little did I know what the experience would lead to down the road.
At a vineyard in Sonoma, California. After a year, I was recovered and enjoying life again.
From New York to CAlifornia
In short, I began conventional treatment but stopped early in favor of taking a natural approach. I’d stumbled upon the accounts of survivors who were living proof that the body could heal itself, and I wanted to do the same. Thus began my odyssey of healing, consisting of research, trial and error, and triumph. A business trip to Los Angeles opened my eyes to Southern California as a healing mecca. With my body temperature just 95°F and my body badly damaged by the chemo, I transferred my job to Los Angeles. I wanted to lie on the beach and feel the warmth of the sun on my skin, healing me (from Vitamin D and negative ions). I settled in Venice Beach and got to work. You name it, I tried it—so many healing modalities. A year later I was recovered: The physical symptoms were gone; the damage from the chemo was gone; and the aging effects from my illness were gone. In short, I had never felt better. To this day I believe that I would have died if I hadn’t left New York City that winter.
Hiking in magical, majestic Big Sur became a yearly pilgrimage.
out of nowhere, a spiritual journey
With my health crisis behind me and elated with my new lease on life, something happened seemingly out of the blue. One moment, I was compelled to learn about physics and the cosmos, inhaling issues of Scientific American and Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe. And the next, I was enraptured with Zen Buddhism, Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, and metaphysics. Southern California is also a mecca for spiritual discovery. Over the next two years, I explored a number of spiritual, traditional, and nontraditional perspectives, and came away from the experience understanding the purpose for this period of my life, which was to formalize what I’d learned in a language for experiencing our world. I decided to share it with others. This culminated in the creation of Energy and Flow. But the project would have to wait. My healing wasn’t over. There was more to come.
Glasses as a symbol for this period in my life. A time to “clearly see” and understand the reasons for my longstanding sadness.
a time to look at things
I never stopped researching health topics once I recovered from cancer. In order to avoid another health crisis, I wanted to understand for myself, What must we do to be healthy? I was writing The Simple Seven and looking for a stress management tool to include in the book when again my world came crashing down. This time there was a message and it was clear: It’s time to look at things. The wheels of the universe assured this. My life came to a grinding halt and an outpouring of painful emotions began. I was laid up in bed, struggling, unable to make sense of what was happening. Slowly, I began to piece together a process that helped. This became the genesis for The Method, the tool that I’d been looking for. In subsequent years I would undergo an intensive healing period. The pain of trauma and abuse that was buried in my unconscious would surface in explosive bits and pieces on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. It was a grueling process that became a way of life. The pain was also physical—it could bring me to my knees. I wasn’t sure whether I would make it, or if I wanted to. I was having suicidal thoughts again. But in time, I would begin to see a light at the end of the tunnel and believed that someday I would come out the other side, free.
In addition to my healing practice, my interests in music, dance, writing, and art are coming together in rock music.
Time to rock ‘N’ roll
In retrospect, I’ve thought of my journey as a long and winding way of stripping away the “old me” and revealing the “true me.” It’s created an opening to built-in gifts— new ones, latent ones, and those that I blocked in childhood because I didn’t understand them. But the best gift of all was a cosmic wink that came one day in a flash of understanding, foretelling something unexpected. Something that would surprise and shock even myself: a newfound interest in rock music. I was shocked and surprised. But it isn’t incongruous with my journey. To me, the essence of rock ‘n’ roll is freedom, and my journey has been about liberation from stagnation, illness, and emotional suffering. I believe that everything serves a purpose, including, however unlikely, rock ‘n’ roll. I’m not sure what lies ahead. I’ll continue to go with the flow. And so the journey continues.
Marlene Veltre was born and raised in the Midwest. She has a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and computer science and has studied piano performance and art. Her varied career has included stints in education, medical devices, digital advertising, nonprofits, and executive management. Marlene’s journey as a cancer survivor provided the impetus for her research into health and wellness topics and spiritual development. The result are her books and programs, The Simple Seven, Master The Method With Guided Audio, Peak Vibrancy, and Energy And Flow. Marlene has a deep love for California where she enjoys cycling along the coast, taking meditative walks on beaches, and hiking trails in the majestic mountains. Marlene also spends time studying wisdom texts, creating abstract art, and writing and performing rock music.