It’s an ideal Wednesday, the temperature and the views seem to have Instagram filters. A silence of total peace, two individual armchairs facing each other, and a life to tell that is worth reading. I’m in a house hidden behind a nursery, surrounded by greenery, meeting a survivor, a Basque warrior called Virginia Nieto Sánchez (Bilbao, 1980) is an entrepreneur, a researcher, and also teaches neuroscience tools so that other people are able to take control of their lives. Pass me the mate, let’s start…
-How does your story begin?
-I was born in Bilbao, I studied Tourism at the University of Deusto because what I liked was to explore, to know, to travel… As a child I was very creative, I was always inventing things. When I finished I started working in a 5-star hotel and soon I realized that I was missing something. Then I went to London looking for a radical change, I changed profession and went into fashion, at the age of 25. I lived a very nice experience in very important companies like Prada, also in the multi-brand firm Matches, which at that time was a very important company in the sector and my task was as a personal shopper. At that time I worked with very important clients with whom I traveled to Paris, New York, etc.
-What exactly were you doing?
-First, talk to the client a lot to understand who he is. And I would ask very personal questions because I really wanted to know who I was going to dress. Then you buy outfits for the situations they are going to be in and they pass them to you in advance. Then you pack their bags and travel with them. There was a lot of therapy as well [risas].
But what a lottery that is, because you might get an ill-mannered nouveau riche or someone who, despite his fortune, is a nice and respectful person?
-They are super millionaires but in the end we all have the same problems. Since I’ve always been fascinated by human behavior, it was fun. And then there was the situation itself, for example, one client was the CEO of the world’s largest arms company and he had a meeting in an Arab country where certain colors are offensive. Part of my job was not just my client but where I was going so that I didn’t get him into a compromising situation for a simple matter of wearing clothes or colors that are offensive to other cultures.
The good thing is that I was given a lot of freedom, so I felt very comfortable and very me?
-Always based in London?
-Yes, and then I got an amazing job opportunity which was to run Dodi AL-Fayed’s daughter’s brand called Jasmine Di Milo, traveling around the world overseeing the stores… but… I fell in love.
-Nooooo! [risas]
Yes! I go, and I fall in love… [más risas], with an Argentinean, who didn’t want to live in London anymore. I had been building my career for 5 years, they had been looking for me to give me the job of my life, and in the end I said no. I had to leave.
-And they moved to…
-I told him that the only other option was the island. We left everything and came here to start from scratch.
-Age?
-2010, i.e. 30 years. There I gathered all my experience in fashion and together we created the whole concept of Emonk, which comes from Eclectic Monk, which was at the time what most represented our spiritual practice taken to work. Always exploring and traveling around the world to find new materials…
It is a brand of footwear and accessories, very bohemian and very Ibizan, with a very particular stamp or very own personality, with a very defined DNA, based on the principle of freedom, playfulness and fun, of a brand born under the sun.
I’ve always been very interested in personal development, I’m fascinated by human behavior as I said, so I looked for that deep connection and/or spiritual connection; I would put phrases in my shoes and things like that.
-Did you start in Las Dalias?
No, we opened a store in the port of Ibiza and it went terribly [risas], we didn’t make a good plan or calculation of what it was really like to open a store. And in the end we went to Las Dalias and we started to grow and grow and grow and grow, and very fast, and it exploded. Think that we started putting feathers in our hair, there were no rules, everything was more innocent, social networks were more real, it was a different time. Anything we could think of we did and people went crazy because it was a whole new concept. But then it took a very big dimension, all the Vogue style magazines were looking for us, influencers, TV, etc. and the problem is that you have to sustain success and suddenly, everything changes in my life because I had a stroke.
-Tell me exactly what happened.
-It was January, me normal and on my own preparing the production and collections, total madness, my partner in Buenos Aires visiting family and friends because we needed some air, him saying “I feel like I shouldn’t leave” and so on… one night, talking to him I tell him that my head hurts a lot. At 4 o’clock in the morning my dog jumps on my bed and starts sniffing my nose and I’m like “what a pain, it’s not time”….
I had a terrible headache, until 9 o’clock in the morning I got an appointment in Atzaró for a craniosacral massage that same morning and when I leave I sit in the Turkish bath and no, I was not well. I get in the car and suddenly in my mind the road unfolds. I go to the pharmacy in Santa Eulalia and ask for the strongest thing they had for headache and they give me something very powerful. Suddenly in the car I realize that my face is twisted and I could not speak. I feel like I’m getting a “don’t take it!” message. So I avoided it, I went home and by surprise my mother was there and when she sees me arrive, crying, in that state and having worked in a hospital many years she immediately took me to the emergency room knowing what was going on. I went in and never came out.
-What was the forecast?
-Well, stroke in the basal artery, which is basically the disconnection of life.
-What was the diagnosis?
-And, everyone expected me to die right there. For some reason I didn’t die.
-Did they drill into your head to drain the blood or what did they do?
-They went through my groin to my brain. But wait, there were no doctors in Ibiza capable of dealing with a case like this and they could not refer me because I could not move, any movement could cause my death and no one wanted to carry the dead, literally [risas]. And thanks to a close family friend who managed to talk to the owner of the Clinica del Rosario and got them to fly a doctor from Berlin who was an expert in this type of procedure. My family was told that they were practically certain that it was not going to end well, that the most likely outcome was death.
-And have you crossed to the other side?
-Yes.
-How long?
-A couple of minutes…
-Have you seen the tunnel, the light at the bottom, everything they say is happening?
-Yes, I saw it all.
-Well, please tell us in detail and from the beginning….
-I entered a tunnel of light that I now translate into a round tunnel of light.
[interrumpo] -But wasn’t then the dark tunnel with the light at the bottom, the whole tube let’s say was light?
-Yes, I suddenly arrived there. It is a place where there is awareness of the Whole, you know everything, an absolute ecstasy. It’s like you are suddenly released there and the feeling is of peace, it’s of love, it’s of balance and harmony, a whole that at the same time is nothing, a redefinition of the concept of “home”.
-Have you seen dead loved ones and pets, they say they greet you…?
-I didn’t. It was all light everywhere, and it enveloped you. The peace, the well-being, the wisdom I felt was infinite. I have never felt so good, so happy and complete in life.
And suddenly, boom – a flash – and it was back inside my body.
-And what did you feel?
-Well, I was in limbo, I felt like I was stuck in the middle of the two dimensions, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t even swallow water. I had no voluntary mobility. For two weeks nobody could even touch me. I thought I had gone crazy because I didn’t understand anything, and at the same time, I had a super consciousness of everything, I don’t know how to explain it but that part was horrible.
-What confusion! Like being in two planes at the same time, in the physical and the spiritual….
-Exactly, it’s what I call the quantum field, in the most absolute darkness which I call “the darkest night of my soul”, which lasted a lot of months.
But at that time I connected with something very crazy, because at that point I could connect with any kind of information. And I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t read, I was trapped in a non-functional body. But I was given a chance to access something that at that time I didn’t even know what it was, but now after much study I understand more what happened.
I understand that in that out-of-body moment you access a plane where doubt, lies, and nonsense do not exist, where there is knowledge or certainty, and truth in its purest state. But what I find very interesting is that you came back with that information.
-When they came to clean me and touched me, I felt information coming down from that nurse, like “her father has cancer and she’s worried”, just like that. Crazy, I was in a vegetable state but the head had an operability outside of reason or the standard knowledge of what we know as normal.
-How long have you been hospitalized and how long was the whole process, from the episode to being physically operational again?
-40 days in the hospital and a total of nine months from episode to return to talking, walking and driving, which according to doctors was record time.
-And when you were discharged and went home, did you have some mobility, or were you still inoperative?
-He was in a wheelchair and moved his arms somewhat.
-Have you had to relearn how to do everything?
– Everything. I couldn’t even hold a fork, nothing. But I challenged myself a lot, I started to see shadows, then to recognize objects, then to walk step by step….. Everything from scratch. Everything from scratch. A blessing to be Basque, very stubborn she was! [carcajadas]. And they would leave me out in the sun in the spring and I knew there were bees around so I would kind of talk telepathically with them, ask them what the best flowers were, etc… I started to develop those powers of connectivity with the environment. On the other hand, my analytical mind and my ego with tremendous anxiety about “when are you going to get well” was an issue. Plus I was crazy with insomnia, think for me sleep was “death” so once I woke up I didn’t want to go back to sleep for fear of not coming back. So it was a fight against my body while my mind was kind of re-doing itself at a higher level to my previous state of consciousness.
-Have you had any setbacks or has anything else happened since then on a physical or physiological level?
-No, fortunately, nothing. In fact nobody understands my results.
-Did he tell you why it happened to you?
-Yes, because of two things. The first is extreme stress. I was at a level of self-demanding and with no regard for myself or my body. Holding on to success, looking only to the outside, with no self-management tools to procure balance. And on the other hand, I was born with a 2.5 centimeter basal artery cavernoma, huge, that neither I nor my family knew about. The blood does not find its way out and in a moment of extreme stress or pressure, as the walls are very thin, it bursts.
-But of course, you come out of it but you still have the cavernoma, which is like a time bomb, right?
-Exactly. And the next one was going to finish me off because my body was already weak. But suddenly one day I gave up. I accepted it. I said to myself, “I surrender to universal wisdom, if I have to die, I am ready. And then an amazing thing happened: I started to receive the information that I could heal my own body.
All I had to do was listen, trust, and follow the guidelines. The real power is in the mind, that was the message I was getting. And then I started to visualize my life. Every day I visualized me driving my car. And I saw myself singing a song out loud, the same one every time, and every day, every day. In May and in a wheelchair, I would say in the vision “in August I’m driving”. And so it was.
-I understand it as a little bit in between, the power of the mind, the power of words, and autosuggestion….
-And there is no other, you have to see yourself healthy and strong as a goal, talking, seeing, with a more serene and mature look, and everything I projected happened. And it all started with losing the fear of death. Killing the attachment of the ego, of not wanting to let go of the body, but when you free yourself, you create yourself at will.
Then, in addition, the only doctor who could operate on such a basal cavernoma was in the USA. We were talking about a $300,000 operation. I was with this unusual access to information I said to myself, “how do surgeons know how to operate on this?” And I ended up “operating” on myself. I imagined every day, every day, that the cavernoma got smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller… One day I had to send control tests to the doctors and they answer us saying “that if those tests were from the same person called Virginia Nieto Sanchez we do not understand what happened but we do not see anything to operate”.
It was crazy for all the doctors who treated me and my case is being studied in Neurosurgery at the University of Girona. The doctors, with whom we had already forged a relationship, called me to hear me speak and to make sure I was alive [risas]. And I told them “the one who died is the other one” because it was the death of a paradigm for me, of a way of living, of a woman totally absorbed by a system, of beliefs of what success was, of the eternal carrot, and of a violence towards herself by not paying any attention to her own needs… and that woman died. And curious that 9 months later she was another one… 9 months later.
-But do you do all this by demonstration or have you studied the subject in more depth?
-No, I studied a lot. At first I thought I was crazy, but because I had so much time inside my head because the body did not work and the time inside does not run as outside, I tried things and experimented with thoughts. Then I recovered and as I needed to reconnect to the body I went, newly born in a 36 year old body, for three months to India to learn to meditate. There I learned a lot, I met the guru of love who had come from the University of Calcutta to give a master’s degree in meditation and we became friends. Every night we would sit on the banks of the Ganges and we wouldn’t stop talking. He was my mentor in a lot of concepts that I didn’t know and didn’t know how to put into words. Structure. I needed to connect the dots.
Fast forward to Ibiza and a friend told me that she recommended a documentary where Dr. Joe Dispensa appears. He talked about how he had had an accident and that all the doctors said he was going to end up in a wheelchair for life and how he had operated on himself. And I started crying my eyes out. It was an “aha” moment. That a neuroscientist had found the same formula that I had, it means that this is there, that I wasn’t crazy, and that this is a reality. Then another friend tells me that Dr John Dimartini, an expert in human behavior, is going to London to give a talk and that I had to go and see him. So I went. Already at that point I decided to specialize in the science of human behavior with him and then I also trained with Dr. Dispensa, with whom I have been able to really put my experience into words, it was a journey of studying a lot to specialize and understand what is the biology of meditation, epigenetics….
[interrumpo] -What is epigenetics?
-It studies at the level of genetics, how we can regulate some genes and others depending on the environment in which we live.
-Would it be like genetic management?
-For example, if you are in a war environment your genetics will be regulated in a way that makes you more resistant, but at the same time, you can be living in paradise and without danger but have a very violent mental environment, then genetically you will have the genes in defense mode. What I am getting at is that you can regulate your genes at will with your mind.
And so what I have done is to put together all that I have learned and lived these last years and create my own methodology. It is a formula that allows you to better understand your mind and change yourself at a biochemical level, regulating some genes and deregulating others.
We can change our life at any time. It takes work, it takes guidelines, it takes discipline, but once you understand the formula and incorporate it, you will have a tool for life that will put you in control of your life. The power to know who you are, your design, your emotional footprint and if what you are thinking all day is what you need to think. Thought determines everything, and emotion is a product of that thought. Thought creates the reality within you. The trick is to be aware of what you are thinking or thinking about what you are thinking about, known as metacognition. If you are in control of what you think about, you will change your emotions. You will change your biochemistry, because emotion is nothing more than a biochemical package in reality.
It is a daily self-check, in my program I do it this way, until I reprogram the mind to be at our service.
-People have no fucking idea of the power of the mind…. [perdón por el lenguaje pero quiero ser brutal en lo claro y enfático]
-No fucking idea!
-And the system educates us not to have it.
-It’s that if you understand it, you govern yourself, and in that context it’s very difficult for you to accept external governments. We are bombarded all day long with information about how life has to be – all the time – and all that noise doesn’t allow us to hear ourselves at all. It is very dangerous for systems to have people who know the power of the mind and its creative power. But individual thought requires a lot of exploration, it is not easy or fast. And beware, it’s not all flowers, when you find yourself without filters, it’s also fair to say, it’s very fucked up.
-It takes courage.
-Yes, and then there is the decision about what kind of relationship you want to have with yourself. And from there to take control of at least most of the 60 to 70 thousand thoughts that every human being has every day. On top of that, 80% of what we think today is the same as what we thought yesterday; new thoughts are very few. Moreover, the mind goes so fast that we don’t even really register many of them. So, how important it is that every day we take a few minutes to be aware of the life you are creating, through your thoughts, for yourself.
Starting the day without running to the cell phone, with one, breathing, thinking about how I’m going to present myself to the world that day… And if at a traffic circle someone does it wrong and I react badly it’s right, it’s survival, but how long am I going to allow that emotion to last?
-Do you provide any kind of advice or services?
-Here in Ibiza there is a lot of spiritual circus, and during my recovery I met many irresponsible people. Gurus who are fake, etc. I go with the science and inform myself all the time to stay up to date. And yes, I guide in everything I have told you but what I give you is this knowledge that will be a tool for your whole life and that will not depend on anyone but you to use it. I explain the method, you learn it and train it and when it becomes your second nature you have a tool for life. And it will not depend on anyone or anything else but you.
We all have everything to change our lives, it is simply a matter of knowing the neuroscience tools to be able to use the power we have naturally.
In addition to Emonk I have a consultancy called Maison Equantum, a space where several people work in multidisciplinary techniques where we offer various programs, for example, conscious breathing, meditation, nutrition and functional medicine. I am in charge of the personal development part because without having all the empires of your life in order you cannot, it is the beginning, and by empires I mean mental, physical and financial health, learning to manage them and keep them that way, all together with the other, it is an integral work. In the team there is an orthomolecular nutritionist, a psychologist, an endocrinologist, among others. What I do is to study the person until I have a diagnosis and help that person to define their needs, so that in the end, they can learn to lead a balanced life in all areas of their life. You don’t have to get to the moment of crisis to start working on yourself. Health is prevention. And emotional intelligence is fundamental for life. We also have an herbal and integrative medicine store called “Botanica”, which is in Santa Eulalia, where we sell products that complement everything I have told you.
-Last week the far right won the US elections. It’s hard for me at least to be optimistic. It seems that all this stuff we’ve been talking about is getting further and further out of people’s reach. And AI will make us dumber and less resourceful, and SSRs more artificial – I mean – personal knowledge and intellectual empowerment is not exactly what’s in vogue right now, How can we be optimistic about the future?
-I am and very much so, let me explain; we live in a dual world, there is no destruction without creation, it is designed that way. Surely we will have to be destructive to change the paradigm and go back to being constructive. But both are simultaneous in reality. Evolution works like this, it is a perfect spiral, a very very big global change is being cooked because the systems are already dysfunctional. And a new reality is already being created, with the same reality that is being destroyed is being built, and humanity will have no other choice because it is a natural law that what is not functional is eliminated, it is extinguished. Action and reaction.
There is a hidden but perfect order. If you look only at the detriment you will not be able to see the benefit, you are biasing yourself.
Good and evil is the disease of the mind, in the universe there is no good and evil. What exist are laws that are all the time putting everything in balance.
[sonriendo] At the end of all of this, wonderful things will come, you’ll see….
