BIO:
Karita Aaltonen
Author, Speaker, Wellness Educator
Karita is a wellness educator, speaker, author, and yoga retreat leader from Tampere, Finland. Her mission in life is to give people hope, offer positive peer support to cancer patients, and share knowledge of holistic healing–with the aim of facilitating wide adoption of complementary practices along with western medicine in treatment of disease.
On Valentine's Day 2012, what was suspected to be a bad migraine was diagnosed as the worst and most feared type of brain cancer, Glioblastoma Multiforme Gradus IV. This brought Karita's busy life to a standstill. Her two boys Rene and Nooa were just 8 and 5 years at the time. "A mom of small children can't die!", she thought, and knew that she had to make a choice:
Will I live in fear, expecting to only live for a few months to a year, focused on the reasons I DON'T want to die... Or will I focus on the reasons I WANT to live for - and I chose the latter, easy. I wanted to live so much it almost burst my heart.
After a 6-hour surgery, a week in the hospital, and learning how to walk again, Karita soon returned to her normal life. But it was far from normal - not because of the epilepsy seizures because the doctors told her to expect them... But her intuition was telling her, strongly, that something's not right. She insisted on a scan right away to confirm: grade 4 brain cancer had renewed, after just two months.
This was the beginning of a "new life" for Karita. The idea of a Healing Circle was born–a system of holistic healing with seven areas of focus: the decision to heal; the people around you; your diet; the power of the mind, body and nature; hope... It was necessary to revamp all these aspects of life and gear them towards healing.
I decided that if no one has cured from this type of cancer before, then I simply have to be the first one to do it.
Instead of seeing the cancer as an enemy to fight within her body, Karita viewed it as a 2-inch friend who had come to teach her. "I believe cancer is a an urgent call from your body, mind, and soul to change."
Celebrating nine years healthy, Karita has dedicated her life to wellness education through public speaking, holistic health advocation, yoga and detox retreats, spearheading TV shows and wellness summits, launching an online course Build Your Healing Circle: The 7-Step System to Holistic Healing, and authoring two books in Finnish. Her first English book I Survived: A Nordic Woman's Guide to Healing from Cancer launched in September 2021 (by Nordic Wisdom).
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