Yaya McBride shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Hi Yaya, thank you for taking the time to reflect back on your journey with us. I think our readers are in for a real treat. There is so much we can all learn from each other and so thank you again for opening up with us. Let’s get into it: What battle are you avoiding?
The battle I’ve been avoiding is speaking directly to the hearts of my Latine community about our pain, not just personal pain, but the generational silence and “don’t rock the boat” conditioning that shaped so many of us.
For years I wondered, “Who am I to tell my gente that we don’t have to drown in media fear or political chaos?” Especially when we grew up in homes, schools, and workplaces where our voices were dismissed and our ancestral wisdom was pushed aside.
But the truth is… this is exactly the work I am meant to do.
I am a guide who walks between worlds, helping our people feel what we’ve been taught to numb, reconnect to the medicine in our bodies, and rise with the confidence we were never taught to claim.
Because our struggle isn’t only emotional, it’s historical.
Colonization has shaped us in three ways:
1. External Colonization
The oppression of Indigenous peoples across all the Americas, Brazil to Canada, every Caribbean island where our bloodlines sing.
2. Horizontal Colonization
Our own communities hurting each other through systems we didn’t build, systems that trained us into division, mistrust, and silence.
3. Internal Colonization
The most powerful one: the fear, shame, and survival responses stored in our nervous system, inherited across lifetimes and still shaping our confidence and voice today.
This third layer is where my work lives.
I help our people regulate, release, and remember, through somatic practice, ancestral wisdom, and the limpias that restore clarity and inner authority.
Because America, the true America, has always been all of us:
from the tip of Brazil to the tip of Canada, and every island in between.
This is our land.
This is our medicine.
And this is the voice I’m finally ready to use.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
My name is Yaya McBride, and I am the creator of The Curandera Americana™, a modern pathway of healing that blends neuroscience, nervous system regulation, somatic practice, and the ancestral medicine of the Americas. My intention is to demystify Curanderismo and American Ancestral Wisdom.
I guide Latine and multicultural communities who are carrying the weight of generational trauma, cultural expectations, and the pressure of living in many worlds. My work helps people come back into their bodies, release inherited fear, and remember the innate wisdom our ancestors lived by, the wisdom many of us were taught to silence to survive.
My brand, Mana Flow Lifestyle, is rooted in the belief that empowerment is not about bypassing pain, but about processing it, alchemizing it, and reclaiming sovereignty through the body. Through limpias, somatic practices, storytelling, and nervous system resets, I help my clients experience clarity, confidence, and a deeper sense of belonging to themselves.
Right now, I’m working on my second book, The Rise of the Curandera Americana, which explores how our communities can heal from internal, external, and horizontal colonization by reconnecting to intuition, land, spirit, and the body. My mission is to bring this work into colleges, organizations, and communities across the United States, supporting Latine leaders, families, and future generations to rise with certainty, dignity, and ancestral power.
I don’t just teach this work.
I live it.
And every day, I witness the miracles that happen when people stop shrinking for safety and start remembering who they really are.
Great, so let’s dive into your journey a bit more. What relationship most shaped how you see yourself?
The relationship that has most transformed how I see myself is the one I share with my husband, Casey McBride. He entered my life as my second husband and the father of my third child, younger than me, culturally different, built from discipline and structure that felt almost opposite to my world. But that contrast became the medicine.
Casey is a Tony Robbins Results Coach, and his work requires radical integrity. As he rose in his own healing, confronting his fears and embodying the principles he teaches, something profound happened in our relationship:
his commitment to his masculine power created a foundation where the feminine in me could finally breathe.
Because he owns his discipline, his leadership, his emotional responsibility, and his presence, I no longer feel the need to carry everything or shrink myself to feel safe. His grounded masculine energy gave my feminine energy permission to soften, to open, to express, and to feel without fear.
What I once interpreted as discomfort in our early relationship wasn’t about him, it was about the parts of me that still felt unworthy and disconnected from my own truth. His devotion to his own growth helped me return to myself.
It was within this container that I became fully Yaya McBride, the Curandera Americana, the identity that holds my power, lineage, intuition, and purpose.
My children are a close second.
They have mirrored my shadows, stretched my capacity, and taught me the medicine of rewriting stories for the generations that come after me.
These relationships did more than shape me.
They called me into the woman I was destined to become, a woman whose feminine wisdom is free because the masculine beside her stands strong in his own truth.
When did you stop hiding your pain and start using it as power?
I didn’t stop hiding my pain in a single moment, it has been a rising, a lifetime of small awakenings inside the hidden rooms of my unconscious. My pain has always been a teacher, and instead of running from it, I became curious enough to touch it, feel it, and understand the stories it carried.
I grew up in constant motion, born in New Jersey, raised in the hip-hop nation more than the Latine world, because my mother was always running, always hiding us so we wouldn’t be taken the way she once was. Hiding became survival.
And survival sharpened my intuition, my resilience, and my ability to find the gold in what looked broken.
But in the last few years, something shifted.
The drumbeat, the Latin pulse, the earth under my feet, they stopped being background noise and became medicine. I began to feel the elements inside me: the fire of the volcanoes, the water of the rivers, the breath of the wind, the solidity of the rock nations.
Even when I wasn’t “allowed” to light a fire outside my home, when a neighbor who worked in the fire department tried to silence that ritual, I realized my fire didn’t need permission to exist. It was already burning inside me, warming me, healing me, calling me forward.
That’s when I understood: hiding was never fear, it was incubation. A sacred pause while my medicine strengthened.
Now, I share my truth with unapologetic clarity, grounded in neuroscience, held by somatic wisdom, supported by ritual, and aligned with the earth that has carried me through dark and light. Moving 27 times before graduating high school, living in foster homes and shelters, taught me to see the world through a wider lens. It taught me that every shadow holds power, every wound holds a code, and every story can be rewritten.
Today, I no longer hide my pain.
I activate it.
I turn it into guidance, into lineage, into leadership, so others can remember that their suffering is not a flaw, but a doorway into their own strength and sovereignty.
Sure, so let’s go deeper into your values and how you think. What are the biggest lies your industry tells itself?
One of the biggest lies in the wellness, education, and personal-development industries is the belief that formal systems know more than the human body, the earth, and the ancestral wisdom carried in our lineage.
We’ve been taught that the “smartest” knowledge comes from:
weight-loss programs
standardized school systems
Western medicine
financial models
English-speaking experts
people with degrees, titles, and credentials
But this is a lie rooted in colonization, not truth.
I unschool my children, and what I’ve witnessed in them is proof:
innate wisdom is far more powerful than standardized knowledge.
My children, without formal constraints, understand concepts I spent years trying to teach in classrooms. They sense what isn’t said. They follow their curiosity. They create solutions from instinct. They learn because their bodies lead, not because a system forces them to perform.
Unschooling is not chaos, it is facilitated sovereignty. It is giving children enough time, space, and trust to follow the rhythm of their own genius.
And in many ways, that is Curanderismo. The practice of listening to the inner signals of the body, the intuition, the earth’s rhythm — not the external noise of systems created without us in mind.
The education industry tells itself the lie that it knows what every child must learn.
But the revolt we are feeling today, the burnout, the disengagement, the rising mental-health crises, is not because of defunding. It’s because the soul of our children is rejecting a system that no longer honors human truth.
Napoleon Hill spoke about this in Outwitting the Devil: how systems built on fear, control, and obedience disconnect people from their natural intelligence.
Neuroscience now confirms what our ancestors already knew:
intuition is a legitimate form of knowledge.
The body stores memory across generations.
The nervous system recognizes patterns before the mind catches up.
Quantum physics and experiments like Schrödinger’s cat remind us that multiple realities exist until consciousness chooses one.
So the lie is this: that the system knows better than the self.
My work, in Curanderismo, nervous system healing, and embodied leadership, helps people remember the opposite:
Your body holds the curriculum.
Your intuition is the teacher.
Your lineage is the library.
Your life is the classroom.
And that is a truth no system can standardize.
Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. Have you ever gotten what you wanted, and found it did not satisfy you?
Yes, I once got exactly what I thought I wanted and realized it wasn’t mine at all. Becoming a school administrator looked like “success,” but instead of more impact, I found more systems, more rules, and less humanity.
I entered education to empower people, not to enforce protocols. And the moment I saw the system prioritize procedures over human beings, even when I begged for support, I understood the truth:
Education, as it’s built, doesn’t create leaders; it standardizes them.
Leaving after 20 years wasn’t failure.
It was liberation.
Because outside the system, I finally returned to what actually transforms lives:
intuition, humanity, community, and the wisdom our ancestors trusted long before degrees existed.
That’s the work I do now, decolonized, embodied, human-first.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yayamcbride/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/YamileMcBride
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6onIYcAZgp0lQG8QOIEmaw
Image Credits
All of these I own
