Brenda Ramos is a Spanglish-speaking, foul-mouthed, spirit-led, stardust-and-light-filled being: a complex system of atoms, neurons, and soul navigating a world shaped by racial empire, patriarchy, and extraction. She's a first-gen, queer AFAB woman of Borikua/Puerto Rican heritage, and was born and raised between the Borikén archipelago and its diaspora. Her bloodlines trace to the Jíbaro mountain people of Borikén, colonially known as Puerto Rico. She carries their sacred, sensual, and spiritual legacy into a life and body of work rooted in ancestral knowing, embodiment, and relationship.
Brenda is a mindfulness-based mentor and life coach, meditation teacher, and intuitive movement guide rooted in Decolonial and Indigenous praxis. Through Authentic Whole Self Living, she offers The Art of Radical Being, her Framewerk for cultivating a more trusting, embodied, relational way of living. Its five movements of coming home are Remember, Reconnect, Reclaim, Realign, and Return. They are rhythms we revisit, not steps to complete. They invite us to remember what is alive within us, reconnect with our bodies and relationships, reclaim what has been crowded out or suppressed, realign our choices with our values, and return with greater awareness and agency.
Brenda works with folks who feel they have lost parts of themselves to caregiving, aging, assimilation, or the demands of survival. She does not hand them a prescribed version of who to become. She creates conditions for them to recognize the wisdom they already carry, trust what they have been sensing, and come home to their bodies, inner knowing, roots, and relationships. Her work makes room for resonance, reciprocity, and interdependence: how we listen to what feels alive, tend what we are part of, and remember that none of us exists alone.
Living Balance is the orientation of this work. It is an embodied relationship with change, not permanent calm or perfect equilibrium. Brenda's Window of Living Balance gives language to the everyday rhythm of Leave, Pause, Notice, Return. Leaving is part of life; returning can mean resting, grieving, asking for support, setting a boundary, or simply becoming present enough to choose. Every return carries new experience.
Her formal mindfulness training includes a 300-hour Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training through MNDFL, the two-year Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program with Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield, and their 16-week Mindfulness Mentor Training. Her broader study and practice draw from Buddhist and dharma teachings, trauma-sensitive mindfulness, Nonviolent Communication, restorative and decolonial practices, JourneyDance, Reiki, and positive psychology coaching. She honors the lineages and teachers who have shaped her work, including Lama Rod Owens, Lodro Rinzler, Adriana DiFazio, David Treleaven, Roxy Manning, and Oren Jay Sofer among others.
For nearly two decades, Brenda taught hundreds of people around the world to access their sensual power through salsa dance. Today, movement remains a way to listen to the body, express what is alive, and reclaim joy and choice. Her practices also meet people in the ordinary fullness of life: caregiving, work, culture, grief, pleasure, conflict, and community. She writes The Practice of Tending, a newsletter exploring these relationships as an ongoing practice rather than a finished state.
Brenda lives and practices on the ancestral homelands of the Mohican and Munsee Lenape Peoples in Hoboken and Jersey City, New Jersey. She is a a program director in education advocacy, and a caregiver for her 96-year old mother, who is a cancer survivor living with dementia. She is also a mother, sister, titi, dark chocolate snob, proud goofball, and unapologetic night owl. She knows, bone-deep, that inner care and collective care shape one another. She's here to walk alongside people as they find their own ways of coming home.
Connect with Brenda:
Website: authenticwholeself.com
Instagram: @authenticwholeselfliving
Substack: substack.com/@authenticwholeselfliving
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