Rosie Beléndez: Homeopath, Healer, Teacher, Survivor
What does it mean to choose your own path when the road ahead is uncertain? To meet illness not with war metaphors, but with curiosity, courage, and careful attention? To heal—not only the body—but the beliefs that keep us small?
At age 69, Rosie Beléndez was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer—and chose to walk an unconventional healing path shaped by decades of experience in homeopathy, somatic therapy, and spiritual practice. In this intimate conversation, she shares how a series of inner promptings and serendipitous encounters—including a life-changing Zhineng Qigong retreat in China—helped her reclaim agency, transform her approach to illness, and ultimately witness her tumor disappear. With warmth, wit, and insight, Rosie speaks to the emotional, spiritual, and communal dimensions of healing—and invites each of us to meet life’s challenges not with fear, but with presence, curiosity, trust in the body’s wisdom, and a joyful return to love.
About the moderators:
Cynthia Li is an integrative medicine doctor and author, whose personal journey through a complex autoimmune condition was featured in Kelly Turner’s Radical Remission docu-series. Cynthia is also a certified teacher in Zhineng Qigong, and the editor of a book on collective field qigong, Mingjue Awakening. Her other books include a bestselling memoir, Brave New Medicine, and a forthcoming book, The Medicine of Flow: Harmonizing Your Inner State to Activate Peak Healing and Reclaim Vitality (May 2026).
Pavi Mehta is a writer, and co-author of Infinite Vision, a novice dancer, and co-anchor of the Well of Being. In 2024 she underwent chemotherapy, a double mastectomy and radiation treatment for breast cancer. Though from the outside, her path was very different from Rosie's, the essence and wisdom of Rosie's healing approach, and the practice of Zhineng Qigong introduced to her by Cynthia and Rosie, resonate deeply for her.
More About Rosie: There are people whose stories weave together medicine, mystery, and the quiet, unwavering courage it takes to stand at the edge of life and choose transformation. Rosie Beléndez is one of them. A doctor by training, a healer by calling, and a student of life by nature, Rosie’s journey has never followed the conventional path. Born in Mexico City in 1950, Rosie grew up curious, restless, and drawn to the edges of understanding. From a young age, she explored ancient Mexican traditions, social justice, yoga and many esoteric disciplines. But it wasn’t until she entered the School of Medicine and Homeopathy at Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute that these threads began to take root in a deeper, disciplined way.
Medicine became her foundation. Homeopathy, an intuitive medium through which she could serve. After a formative internship in Cuba and a year immersed in European homeopathic traditions, Rosie returned to Mexico and settled in Tepoztlán—a small town rich in history, tradition, and natural beauty. For over four decades, she has called it home, building not just a practice, but a life woven with community, ritual, and service. But perhaps the most defining chapter of Rosie’s story began seven years ago, when a small lump in her right breast turned out to be a triple-negative tumor—an aggressive, hard-to-treat form of cancer. Faced with limited conventional options and an inner certainty that her healing path would look different, Rosie made a decision many would find unthinkable: she said no to the treatment pathway that modern medicine prescribed. “It wasn’t that I wasn’t afraid,” she reflects. “It’s that I had to choose my fears. I was more afraid of chemotherapy than of dying. And I also chose to believe in the body’s ability to heal—if we create the right conditions.”
Those conditions, for Rosie, became a living laboratory of disciplined self-care, spiritual practice, and unwavering research. She explored every avenue that resonated, and the unique trajectory she created for herself included: deep inner excavation through Hakomi therapy, radical dietary shifts, plant-based medicines, Turkey Tail mushrooms, broccoli sprouts, energy work, and a profound exploration and practice of Zhineng Qi Gong. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t linear. But it worked. Rosie has been cancer free for over six years and lives each day with infectious joy, vibrant curiosity, and unstinting generosity.
Early on in her diagnosis, in response to a friend who asked, in some bewilderment, why someone like Rosie, who lived such a wholesome life, was struck with cancer, Rosie responded spontaneously, "To share with others." Today, Rosie shares not just her remarkable story of remission, but the wisdom gleaned from walking between worlds: the scientific and the intuitive, the medical and the mystical, the individual and the communal. Her work is rooted in both tradition and evolution. As a homeopathic physician for over 50 years, Rosie combines the rigor of quantum, holistic medicine with her lived experience as a cancer survivor. In the last several years Rosie's explorations have taken her deep into the study and practice of Andean shamanism. She guides others through practices that nourish body, mind, and spirit—from energy medicine and therapeutic movement to emotional healing and spiritual reconnection.
For Rosie, healing is never about fighting the body. It’s about remembering that “our body is a healing organism.” It knows how to restore, to regenerate—if we learn how to listen, how to nourish, how to align. She speaks with humor, honesty, and quiet conviction about the lessons illness brings—the call to face mortality not with fear, but with curiosity; the invitation to live with greater connection, to embrace service, to reclaim one’s true size.
“We can no longer hope to just be a light in people's lives,” Rosie says. “We have to be a torch.”
Her message resonates far beyond the world of cancer. It’s for anyone ready to meet life—not as a battle—but as a sacred, sometimes messy, always meaningful journey.
For more inspiration, check out Sacred Illness, Sacred Healing: A Holistic Approach to Cancer, an uplifting and informative talk by Rosie.