By Gilbert Martina, Author of Healthy Minds, Healthy Nation
Most people think healing begins in a doctor’s office. For most of my life, I thought that too. My background is in healthcare leadership, where solutions are measured, clinical, and often biochemical. But several years ago — while navigating a period of intense stress back home in Curaçao — I came to understand something that changed the entire direction of my work.
Healing begins with memory; not just the memories we consciously recall, but the deeper, older ones — the memories held quietly in the nervous system, shaped by culture, family, and generations before us. These memories influence far more than emotion. They shape how we respond to pressure, how we connect with others, how safe we feel in our own bodies, and how resilient we become as life inevitably bends and shifts around us.
This idea is at the center of my book, Healthy Minds – Healthy Nation, and also the foundation of the work we’re building at The Blenchi Sanctuary in Curaçao. But it took me a long time to understand it fully — and it’s something I believe many people are just beginning to explore.
Because when you understand how memory works — not the memory of dates and facts, but the memory held in the body — you suddenly realize you have far more influence over your emotional health than you may have imagined.
The Body Remembers What the Mind Forgets
There’s a well-known phrase in ancestral healing traditions across the Caribbean: “The body keeps the truth long after the mind looks away.” For a long time, I dismissed this as poetic but unscientific. Then I began studying the neuroscience of stress and memory — and found that the old wisdom was right.
When something overwhelming happens, especially early in life or across generations, the nervous system adapts. It learns patterns:
- Stay alert.
- Stay small.
- Stay invisible.
- Stay in control.
- Stay ready for disappointment.
These become “memory loops” — patterns that were once protective but eventually become restrictive.
They affect everything:
How quickly your heart rate escalates under pressure.
How easily you trust.
How deeply you rest.
How you hold grief or anger.
How connected you feel to others — or to yourself.
What I’ve seen in my own life, and in so many people I’ve worked with, is that these memory loops can run for decades without ever being questioned. We assume they are part of our personality — until life situations reveal they’re actually part of our history. These “memory loops” affect the baseline of our fight or flight modus which records are kept in our mammalian brain.
The Key Shift is this:
Memory doesn’t just live in the brain. It lives in the body. The body’s memory can be reframed, reinterpreted, and eventually healed.
Why Memory Shapes the Nervous System
Modern neuroscience now supports what ancestral traditions have long taught: your nervous system responds to meaning, not just events.
Two people can experience the same moment but internalize completely different stories about what happened — and those stories shape emotional regulation for years.
When a memory carries a story of:
- “I’m unsupported,
- “I’m unsafe”
- “I don’t belong”
- “I have to do everything alone”
The body reacts automatically — even when nothing dangerous is happening.
The reverse is also true. When a memory is reframed with:
- “I survived,”
- “I’m stronger now,”
- “That wasn’t my fault,”
- “I’m allowed to take up space,”
- “I belong somewhere,”
the nervous system adapts again.
This is why memory-based healing works. It doesn’t erase the past, it rewrites its meaning, which changes the body’s response.
The Power of Reframing Key Memories
In the work I do now — whether with individuals, groups, or communities — we use memory reframing as a tool to calm the nervous system and create new emotional pathways.
Here are a few examples of what that looks like in practice:
1. Find the “origin memory.”
Most stressful patterns trace back to one or two formative moments (or inherited stories). Identifying them helps you understand why your nervous system reacts the way it does.
2. Rewrite the role you played.
Many people internalize themselves as the “cause” of their own pain, when in reality they were the child, the witness, or simply the person affected — not the person responsible.
Changing this interpretation changes your biology.
3. Reconnect with supportive memories.
Sometimes the most healing work comes from remembering a moment of closeness, care, or safety that you overlooked. The nervous system needs reminders of safety just as much as it needs reminders of survival.
4. Bring the body into the process.
You can’t heal memory through logic alone.
Breathwork, grounding, movement, and cultural rituals activate different parts of the brain and help create new emotional associations.
5. Anchor the new story through community.
Isolation reinforces old trauma loops. Belonging rewrites them.
This is why culturally rooted healing practices — like the ones found across the Caribbean — are so powerful. They don’t just change you individually; they change the context you’re healing within.
How My Caribbean Roots Shape My View of Memory
Growing up in Curaçao gave me a unique perspective on how community shapes emotional resilience. Our culture — like many island cultures — carries stories across generations through music, food, rituals, humor, and collective memory.
I didn’t understand the value of that until I was much older.
But the truth is: Collective memory creates individual stability.
When you grow up hearing the stories of your ancestors — what they survived, what they built, what they protected — it gives your nervous system a sense of continuity. You are not floating alone in the world; you are part of a lineage.
This ancestral memory protects mental health in ways we are only beginning to measure scientifically.
When that lineage is disrupted — through political instability, trauma, migration, or identity loss — the nervous system absorbs the fracture.
And when that lineage is reclaimed — through rituals, storytelling, and reconnection — the nervous system recovers.
This is one of the reasons I’ve devoted so much of my work to cultural healing. It isn’t abstract. It is biological.
Why Memory-Based Healing Works
Memory-based healing combines three elements that are essential for emotional well-being:
- Awareness: understanding the story your body is still carrying
- Reframing: giving the memory a new, truthful interpretation
- Repatterning: practicing new physical and emotional responses
When these three pieces align, people often experience:
- decreased anxiety
- improved sleep
- reduced emotional reactivity
- greater connection to purpose
- more ease in relationships
- a deeper sense of belonging
What’s interesting is that none of this requires forgetting the past. It only requires changing your relationship to it.
Tools You Can Try Right Now
Here are a few simple memory-based practices you can begin using today:
1. The “Name the Story” Technique
When you feel triggered, ask:
“What story is my body telling right now?”
Often you’ll find it’s not the current moment — it’s an old one.
2. Safety Rehearsal
Take a stressful memory and mentally place your present-day self inside it.
Not to relive it — but to witness it with new strength and maturity.
3. Ancestral Check-In
Think of an ancestor or mentor whose resilience you admire.
Ask yourself:
“What would they want me to remember about myself right now?”
4. Grounding Through Ritual
Even small rituals — morning sunlight, gratitude, breathwork, traditional music — tell your nervous system:
“You’re safe, you’re connected, you’re home.”
5. Rewrite the Line
Take one internal sentence you’ve carried for years (e.g., “I always have to be strong”), and rewrite it into a kinder, truer version.
Repeat it daily. This is not affirmations — it’s contextual neural rewiring.
The Future of Healing Is Rooted in the Past
As I continue developing The Blenchi Sanctuary and expanding the work behind Healthy Minds – Healthy Nation, my belief only grows stronger:
We don’t heal in isolation. We heal through connection — to ourselves, to others, to culture, and to memory.
The nervous system is not a machine. It is a storyteller, and when you change the story, you change the body that carries it.
Healing doesn’t begin with medicine. Healing begins with remembering who you are — and who you come from. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice. When we convert pain into trauma, we get stuck in the story. Healing means stepping out of that story. Ancestral healing means making peace with the past to free the present and the future to create our own story, our own future.
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BIO
Gilbert Martina is an ancestral health educator and former healthcare executive helping people reconnect with ancient wisdom to heal physically, emotionally, and culturally. After decades in leadership — including at Curaçao Medical Center and the Curaçao Football Federation—he was deeply affected by the ENNIA crisis, which sparked his search for deeper healing through shamanic practices, nervous system regulation, and ancestral teachings.
His new book, Healthy Minds – Healthy Nation, and his healing center, The Blenchi Sanctuary in Curaçao, are part of his mission to restore wellness and identity across Caribbean communities. This project is supported by a grant from the Dutch Foundation for Literature as part of its Regulation Literature Caribe initiative, recognizing work on transgenerational trauma and mental health in Caribbean societies. Learn more at Gilbert via his Social Media platforms hyperlinked below:
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