I was 15 years old when I discovered my first vocation, DANCE. I was a professional dancer, choreographer and contemporary dance teacher for ten years. At the age of 23 I found myself in an existential crisis that led me to psychotherapy and three years later, I discovered my other vocation, I decided that I wanted to be a psychoanalyst, but to achieve it I had to give up dance.
Leaving dance was heartbreaking and the recovery was gradual. I went from the expression of the body to the word. Thanks to the fact that my dance training had forged an iron discipline in me, it was not difficult for me to submit to the academic demands. I was trained in institutions governed by the most rigorous orthodoxy of psychoanalysis. My formal studies began in 1995 and concluded in 2010. In Psychoanalysis I found my new passion, aspiring to understand the labyrinths of the mind through psychoanalytic theories, methods and clinical practice.
Ramona Isabel Cantú Westendarp
Director and Founder
PSYCHOTHERAPIST SINCE 1999
Face-to-face care in La Paz,
Baja California Sur
At the end of my training as a psychoanalyst, I stayed for 10 years in the Monterrey Association of Psychoanalysis, actively participating in clinical areas, teaching, in academic, political and administrative committees. I had the honor of working as a didactic psychoanalyst and thus contributing to the training of new colleagues. I was very interested in challenging the inbred attitude of psychoanalysis, and for this reason I organized multidisciplinary work groups for the annual congresses; Especially, I have always been passionate about the relationship between psychoanalysis and art.
As the years passed, the awareness that something was missing resurfaced in me, immersion in the psychoanalytic world was no longer enough. I formed a study group and we began to read Philosophy for two years. Later in 2013 I decided to study a PhD in Arts and Humanities with the expectation of nourishing myself again with art. But my intuition told me that I had to return to the body, I lacked dance, so I began to have free dance sessions that my husband later joined.
Around 2017 my biggest existential crisis began, like a free fall from the Olympus of Cartesian rationality. At the same time, my situation became complicated due to certain health problems that worsened. The treatments that official medicine offered me had run out, I went back for psychoanalysis, but I was still sick.
In the last 15 years of my life I have had to overcome the pain of a wide variety of physical symptoms. Now I recognize that my body has been my great teacher. The loss of my physical health was the gateway to see life from another perspective, literally while lying down, because I couldn’t stand the pain in my coccyx, the first sign of what is called the energetic body came to me: I began to feel my chakras.
Since my adolescence, I questioned social conventions and religions, however, it was during my psychoanalytic training that the then timid atheism was consolidated. I had the firm conviction that the only valid knowledge was scientific and philosophical. The “high culture” in which I developed taught me to consider ancestral, popular and esoteric knowledge as the product of a childish, ignorant, manipulative or, at best, metaphorical mentality.
What was happening to me? I had no conceptual framework to understand that energy that ran through my body. What followed was a fortunate series of synchronous events that brought me closer to people that I would never have imagined going to consult before: alternative doctors, spiritual teachers, psycho-body therapists, shamans and their ancestral medicines, clairvoyants, astrologers and numerologists, among others, so many that have helped me understand dimensions of the human being that science does not yet recognize.
Another of the consequences of my transformation led me to make the decision in 2023 to leave my hometown Monterrey, where I had always lived to go with my husband to La Paz Baja California Sur, a beautiful, energetically vibrant place. With this I fulfilled my enormous need to live more in contact with nature, and to get away from the terrible air quality of Monterrey, which affects my health so much.
It is clear that the blind faith that I had in the scaffolding of evidence-based medicine has cracked. The evidence was manifested in my own body, my illness and my healing process have been the turn of the screw for my personal and professional life. I had to dismantle my worldview. The biopsychosocial model with which I was indoctrinated began to seem limited to me. Now I see that, in order to heal physically and psychologically, we must also heal SPIRITUALLY and ENERGETICALLY. Also, now I feel certain of the existence of a SUPERIOR BEING.
Dropping my epistemic anchor has been part of the so-called dark night of the soul. I still find a lot of value in the psychoanalytic method, only now I have a renewed understanding of human consciousness.
The reunion with MY DANCE and with my energetic body have opened unconscious doors unimaginable before. I found access to another VIA REGIA TO THE UNCONSCIOUS. The happy union of my two great passions: psychotherapy and dance has inspired me to a integrative psychotherapy proposal.
I don’t know where my HIGHER SELF will take me in the years to come. At the moment I continue my healing process, my path of spiritual evolution, my clinical work serving patients in individual and couples psychotherapy online and in person in La Paz BCS. I teach workshops and retreats at the Center for Transdisciplinary Psychotherapy in co-creation with colleagues from various fields of healing the body and soul.
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Jessica Liseth Ávila Franco
Since I was a child, I remember having the desire that when I grew up I wanted to dedicate myself to providing service and accompaniment to children. My greatest inspirations, and whom I remember with great affection, were my teachers, both preschool and early elementary school. In those years, being in a classroom full of colorful decorations, stories, paints and crayons was a refuge. Although in those first years I interpreted that fulfilling that desire meant becoming a preschool teacher, when I discovered psychology and the possibilities within psychotherapy, I could not think of any other professional career other than entering the world of psychology.
Even though I remember my childhood as a happy period and from which I treasure beautiful memories, during it and as I grew up, I began to recognize that many events and situations that I experienced were complex to deal with. Furthermore, I recognized the importance of the tools and emotional resources that adults close to children must have, or learn, to accompany and promote comprehensive, more loving and conscious development.
Thus, in 2007 I began my studies in Psychology. In search of answers, I found a sea of questions and questions that I continue to ask, answer and question to this day. I graduated as a psychologist in 2011 and since then, I have worked in different areas of psychology, finding and reaffirming my preference for the clinical area with children and adolescents, which is why I completed a master’s degree in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy. In search of strengthening my training, I have been in constant training with certified courses and workshops around evaluation methodologies and strategies, cognitive-behavioral clinic, psychodiagnosis, parenting support, neuropsychology, as well as specific approaches and treatments for psychopathologies.
My professional career has focused on providing psychological support and psychotherapy to children, adolescents and adults, as well as training, advice and support on issues related to child development and parenting for caregivers and families.
Throughout my years of professional experience, I have had the opportunity to work both in private practice and in non-profit institutions, which has allowed me to acquire a more comprehensive vision of the discipline and continue to know and explore the complexities of being.
Likewise, I have collaborated in the training of graduates in Psychology from university teaching.
I am passionate about stories and tales. Within clinical practice I enjoy storytelling and personal creation of stories that promote the emotional processes of boys and girls.
Today, I continue in the active search and constant training to develop resources that allow me to accompany childhood from different perspectives and angles. In recent years, my interest in practices such as dance therapy, meditation, yoga, mindfulness, art therapy, among other tools to promote and accompany the development of the youngest members of the home, sow self-awareness, and promote their socio-emotional development has strengthened and assume it from love and enjoy the wonders of life.
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