Meet Your Facilitator:

Hi, I'm Dr. Vanessa Calderón.

I am a first-generation Latina, the daughter of a Mexican mother and a Salvadoran father, and like many children of immigrants, I grew up inside a story shaped by sacrifice, resilience, and survival.

My parents carried dreams across borders. They also carried fear, instability, and the constant pressure of having to make it in a world that was not built for them. Like so many families of the global majority, my lineage holds deep stories of financial trauma, uncertainty, and having to work twice as hard for half as much. I didn’t have language for it then, but I now understand: I inherited not just their strength, I also inherited their legacy wounds.

I graduated from UCLA and Harvard, and became a trauma physician working in the Emergency Department. I spent more than twenty years in leadership roles and business development. From the outside, my life looked like success. I had the credentials. The titles. The responsibility. The impact.

And yet, inside my own body, I was still living by many of the same invisible rules I see in so many of the women I now serve: work harder, carry more, don’t need too much, don’t take up too much space, don’t rest until everything is done.

I also come from a long line of ancestral healers. I've apprenticed in indigenous healing practices, sitting alongside Mexican and Maya healers and shamans. I practiced ways of remembering and reconnecting with the body and the earth, remembering the psyche and the spirit, in ways Western systems often forget.

It was through this weaving of science and spirit, medicine and ancestral wisdom, that I began to see something clearly:

The patterns I was struggling with around work, money, responsibility, and rest were not personal failures. They were inherited survival strategies.

My ancestral lineage, like so many, carries real financial and survival trauma. And those stories didn’t just live in my history, they lived in my nervous system, my ambition, my relationship with rest, and my relationship with receiving.

So I did the work. Not just in my mind, but in my body. In my nervous system. In my lineage.

I learned how to unwind the survival patterns. How to build capacity without burning myself out. How to be in right relationship with money and power. How to receive without guilt. How to let success be something that sustains me instead of something that costs me.

Along the way, I became a student of this work in the deepest sense, studying trauma, nervous system regulation, leadership psychology, and ancestral healing, and translating it into evidence-based programs and frameworks that I’ve taught, implemented, and published. This work has been shaped not only by my personal healing, but by years of clinical practice, leadership experience, and the hundreds of leaders I’ve supported through this same process.

Today, I help mission-driven leaders, healers, and entrepreneurs do the same.

I help them build lives, careers, and businesses that create real impact without self-abandonment.

I don’t teach this from theory. I teach it from a deeply lived and embodied knowing.

And I will walk this path with you the same way I’ve walked it myself: with compassion, depth, and reverence for the wisdom your body and your lineage already hold.