Meet Maria Helena Anderson of Corpo e Alma Healing

Today we’d like to introduce you to Maria Helena Anderson.

Hi Maria Helena, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I grew up the youngest of six children in a tiny house in São Paulo, Brazil.
We didn’t have much, but my mother made sure we had something more important: she introduced us to Transcendental Meditation, Spiritism, and natural healing from the time we were small. I come from a family of healers going back generations, though I didn’t fully understand what that meant until much later.
When I was seven I was hit by a car on the way to school and broke my femur. I remember lying in the back seat whispering the mantra I had been given, trying to hold on to something steady. Looking back now I see that moment as my first real initiation into the world of healing.
I went on to earn a business degree, fell in love, got married, and in 1998 moved to the United States. I spent the next eleven years moving six times — New Jersey, Colorado, California — raising three children and slowly losing myself along the way. There was grief during those years that I couldn’t fully process. Two nephews died young. My marriage was slowly diminishing me.
Healing came gradually. I started with Dahn Yoga and energy work, then trained as a massage therapist, then found my way into sound healing, qigong and shamanic medicine. At some point I realized I wasn’t just learning techniques — I was following a thread that had been running through my life since childhood. Everything I had survived had been quietly preparing me for this work.
Today I have a healing studio in Westlake Village where I offer trauma-aware embodied healing — energy work, sound healing, massage, and shamanic medicine. I also recently finished writing a memoir about this whole journey, from that little girl in São Paulo to the healer I am today. It has been the most honest thing I have ever done.
I believe healing is not something that happens to us from the outside. It rises from inside the life we have already lived. That is what I try to offer every person who walks through my door.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Not even a little smooth. But I have come to believe that the roughness was the road — not an obstacle to the life I was meant to live, but the path itself.
The hardest years were the ones I spent disappearing. Far from everything familiar, raising three children largely on my own while my husband traveled for work — I kept everything running and somewhere in all of that I stopped being able to hear my own voice. I was walking on eggshells so quietly I had stopped hearing the sound.
Then grief arrived. My seventeen-year-old nephew Noah died of brain cancer. One year later my teenage nephew Mateus was killed in an accident in Brazil. I couldn’t travel to bury either of them. I prayed alone and woke before dawn and tried to hold everything together. My daughter came to me one day in tears and said: I want my mom back. That sentence broke something open in me that needed to break.
There was also the practical work of rebuilding myself professionally in a new country — learning the language, earning certifications, building a practice from nothing. None of it happened quickly.
But through all of it I never doubted that there was a reason. That faith came naturally to me, perhaps because of how I was raised. I always sensed that the difficult chapters were preparing me for something — I just had to be patient enough to find out what.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I offer trauma-aware embodied healing from my studio in Westlake Village, California. My work draws from multiple healing traditions — licensed massage therapy, energy healing, sound healing, Spring Forest QiGong and shamanic medicine — and I weave them together in a way that is tailored to each person who comes to me. No two sessions are identical because no two people carry their stories in the same way.
What I specialize in is helping people reconnect with themselves. Many of my clients arrive feeling disconnected — from their bodies, from their purpose, from the life they sense they were meant to be living. Some are processing grief or trauma. Some are navigating major transitions. Some simply feel that something is missing and cannot name it yet. My work meets them exactly where they are.
What sets me apart is that I am not just a practitioner — I am someone who has walked through her own deep healing. I have lived displacement, loss, a marriage that diminished me, years of walking on eggshells. I have buried grief I couldn’t travel to honor in person. Everything I offer my clients comes from a place of genuine understanding, not just training. When someone sits across from me and tells me they feel broken, I know what that means from the inside.
I am also deeply rooted in my Brazilian and Spiritist heritage, which brings a particular warmth, intuition, and ancestral wisdom to my work that clients often tell me they feel the moment they walk through the door.
What I am most proud of is the community that has grown around this work — the clients who return, who send their families, who tell me that something shifted in them that they had stopped believing could shift. That is everything to me.
Beyond the studio I share healing practices through YouTube and Patreon, and I have recently completed a memoir — Whispers of Healing: A Memoir of Becoming — which traces my journey from a childhood in São Paulo to the healing practice I have built here in California. It is my most honest offering yet.
If there is one thing I want readers to know it is this: healing is not something that happens to you from the outside. It rises from inside the life you have already lived. Whatever you have survived is not wasted. It is the material.

What was your favorite childhood memory?
I have two and I cannot choose between them.
The first is at my grandparents’ house in Tatuí, a small city outside São Paulo. My cousins and I would climb the mango trees and eat the fruit warm from the sun, peeling them with our teeth, the juice running down our chins, the fibers catching in our smiles. Then we would pick mulberries, make juice, and promptly stain our clothes and our faces with pure delight. Nobody cared. That kind of mess was the whole point.
The second is quieter. My father and I sitting at the kitchen table together. He would bring a big bowl of oranges and peel them very slowly, keeping the white pith on, cutting each one not in half but with one piece larger than the other — what he called lids. He would look at me and ask: big lid or small lid? And then hand me whichever I had chosen. We could sit there for what felt like hours.
Both memories involve fruit, which makes me smile now. But what they really have in common is this — they are memories of being completely present, completely safe, and completely myself. That is what childhood should feel like. And when I work with clients today, that quality of presence and safety is what I am always trying to offer. A space where something in you can finally exhale.

Pricing:

• Energy Healing 60mins – $155
• Energy Healing 90mins – $200
• 3 Shirodhara & Sound Immersion Sessions $600
• Energy Healing & Sound Heaven – $184
• Shamanic Healing- Illumination – $180

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.corpoealmahealing.com
• Instagram: corpo.e.alma.healing
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Corpo.e.Alma.Healing
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@corpo.e.alma.healing
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/corpo-e-alma-healing-westlake-village?osq=Corpo+E+Alma+Healing&override_cta=Request+an+appointment

Image Credits
Image credits: Gabriel Strafacce Costa