From NASA to Nature: Mime Vega's Odyssey into Holistic Healing and Empowerment

0:01 Welcome to night Beat Media's Living the Dream podcast with your host Gregory Tucker, where we discussed the entrepreneur's journey of turning a dream into reality, showing you how to learn, overcome, and acquire strategic action steps. If you're ready to turn your dream into a reality, then get ready to take action. Here's your host, Gregory Tucker. Today we have a truly remarkable guests joining us. Her journey from a debilitating migraines to becoming a beacon of hoastic health and healing is nothing short of inspiring. My Vegas story is one of Resilien's determination and unwavering belief in the power of holistic healing. She's here to share her incredible journey and the transformative impact of holistic practices that have helped her not only conquer her health challenges, but also empower countless others to do the same.

1:18 So sit back, relax, get ready to be inspired as we dwell into the world of holistic health and living the Dream with our extraordinary guests, Mime Vega. Stay tuned for enlightening conversation that may just change your life mine. Thank you for joining us here. Hellonchlan, Gregory, thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here. Thank you. And what we always like to ask our guests is tell us about yourself. Well, just some like little facts. I am. I am a Jewish homeschool mom of nine. I've given birth to seven of my own and to kind of inherited slash adopted. And I'm a holistic healer. And I empower people to become the healers of their home, their family, and their community without the need for pharmaceutical drugs, or hospitals, or doctors or even dentists.

2:30 Today, this show is really about you name and about your journey. Now. Your journey from being a NASA computer scientist to a naturopathic herbalist and holistic practitioner is incredibly fascinating. Can you share the pivotal moment or the experience that inspired you to take the dermane had a shift in your career path? Yeah? Yeah, this wasn't like something that I ever thought I would be. Like you know when when they ask children like, oh, what do you want to be when you grew up? I never never wanted anything to do with the medical or health field. I was like, I want to be I wanted to be a computer scientist, and that's that's what I did become. For a while, I majored in computer science and I became a computer scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. And it's nine to eleven today. I was actually working at NASA when nine to eleven happened, and they sent us home early because of the tragedy, since you know, I was at a government facility. They I guess they probably let everyone home early that was working for the government, at least at NASA at that time. But anyways, and then I got married in two thousand

4:05 and three, and then nine months later, in November, I had my first child, and I was on maternity leave, and I was thinking about how I didn't want to go back to work and that I wanted to be with my baby and I wanted to raise him, and I didn't want to put him in you know, daycare while I was working. We had a really nice staycare center right next to NASA actually, and I could even like visit him during lunches and stuff like that and go back to work, but I didn't. I just really didn't want to do that, and so I told my husband that I wanted to stay home, and so what I decided to do is I decided to basically do start my own online business, working from home, doing digital marketing, you know, making websites for people, helping them get their business businesses online, which you know, it's part of It's not exactly what I did at computer science. I mean at at NASA as a computer scientist, but it was still computer related, right, so I could do it. I had the skill to do it. And so then as I was growing my business, and then I had my second child, first had a son, and then I had a daughter, and I was like, you know, I was already living the dream I felt, you know, I I was able to surpass my income at NASA, you know, and make way more than you know I made at that time, probably way more than they would probably ever pay me. You know, I'm not saying that. I mean, I just I just, you know, I broke those ceilings. Let's say, let's just say that faster than I

5:35 would ever have in a normal at a normal job, you know what I mean, even as a computer scientist, even as a programmer. But as I was trying to grow my business, I mean, I don't know, you must know, right, Like it can be very stressful, and you know, you don't have that steady paycheck every two weeks or you know whatever every four weeks, two weeks whatever. You you know, it's like it's like being a farmer where you have to like you have to sew and then you have to wait a long time, and sometimes the bugs come and eat up all your crops, or sometimes there's no rain, you know, or something you just don't know what's going to happen. And so farmers, you know, there's you know, throughout history, farmers have always relied on God right to bring the rain and always like pray, like like in the Jewish culture, like a lot of our prayers have to do with bringing the rain because we know how important that is for our food supply. Well. Being an entrepreneur, it's like it's very much like that, you know, where it's like you don't you have to I feel like you have to heavily rely on God and yourself. You have to rely on God because well, I mean, you can work as hard as you can, but misfortune will always happen, right, And you also have to rely on yourself because you've got to do that work. You've got to put in even though you don't have to work nine to five, you still have to put in those hours and work hard and serve people and you know, create value in the world in order to make money. But the uncertainty of everything was very stressful and sometimes working with, you know, people who were hard to work with, people

7:08 who didn't understand your culture maybe or the way you do things and didn't like it. And you know, just things are tough sometimes, right, And so it caused me a lot of stress. And I started getting terrible migraines, and you know, as you said, I thought I was going to die when I you know, they just started getting worse and worse and worse as time went on, and I thought, man, there's something wrong with me. Like the tile and all the etceterrin, all those things, I just they stopped working. And so this one day, my headaches were so bad that I just told my husband to bring me to the emergency room because I felt like I was going to die. I was just in so much pain. I had already given birth to two children, and the pain that I was feeling was way worse than even childbirth. So take me to the hospital, and they ran a whole bunch of tests and asked me a bunch of questions, and then they called me up finally after hours and they're like, you know, we can't can't figure out, we can't buying anything wrong with you, but the doctor wants to talk to you. So I'm like, okay. So I went to go talk to the doctor and she was basically like, well, we want to roll out the possibility of a tumor, so we'd like to give you a cap scan. But it was very expensive and we didn't even have insurance, so she wanted to clear the expense with me first, and she told me it was two thousand dollars, but it ended up being four thousand dollars. I'm sure today it'd be I don't know, maybe like twenty thousand dollars. You know, it'd probably be,

8:41 you know, a crazy amount that most people couldn't afford, you know. But so I'm like, well, I think I'm gonna die, So what's four thousand dollars. Let's go ahead and get that test. And so I got the test and she said, well, good news, there's nothing wrong with you. You just have a really bad headache. Here's some valuum. So I was like, what, like, what I just spent thousands of dollars and how much did you spend on your college education to become a doctor, And how much money did people spend to build this hospital and staff all these people and all this expensive equipment. And you're telling me there's nothing wrong with me. There's obviously something wrong with me if I'm an excruciating pain and I think I'm gonna die, like, there's something wrong here. And that wasn't the first time that I had a major disappointment with the modern medical system, but that was the final straw with me. I was like, this is ridiculous. These people don't know what I'm doing, what they're doing.

9:39 I need to take charge of my own health and healing. And so that's when I started doing my own studies and I found I found my cure. And you know, there were things that I was able to do very quickly. For example, I was able to take certain supplements, you know, vitamins for like short term relief. But then I found out that the root cause was number one, my diet. I was on a vegetarian almost vegan diet, and that depleted my body of B twelve mostly and this depletion of B twelve was also due to all the stress that was caused by by my entrepreneurship journey. And so the cure for me in that situation was number one, take B twelve, you know. And there's some other herbs that helped to support me as well, but that was one of the main things.

10:31 Is just take B twelve and it was like it worked better than tile and all work better than the valume that the doctor gave me. And you know, get more sleep, you know, no more like you know, quit burning the midnight lamp because your health is more important than your business. And number three, stop trying to be vegetarian. You know, they talk about how healthy being vegetarian or vegan is, but it's not for everyone, and it's not for every and it might be good for some people at a certain point in their life, which it was for me. It helped me with certain issues and a certain point in my life. But as I you know, as I needed different things in that stage of my life, I needed to eat meat. And I learned that my B twelve deficiency was caused by my vegetarian diet and near almost vegan diet, and so I had to stop that. I had to start start eating more dairy and eggs and fish.

11:30 I still wasn't eating like red meat or chicken very much, but I ate a lot of animal products still, and that helped me as well. And I was like, this is awesome, Like I can do this and I don't need a doctor. I need to. I need to I need to really tap into this, you know, like I could have saved myself four thousand dollars had I known all these things prior. And so I was like, I'm going to invest I'm going to invest in myself and I'm going to learn the art of holistic health and healing. So I studied nutrition, I studied herbalism, I studied orthomolecular nutrition, I studied life coaching. I studied all these different healing modalities. You know. Now it's how many years, twenty years later, I can happily say that I have raised my children.

12:16 And back then I only had two when I started this journey. Now you know, I have nine, and we don't. I don't take them to see doctors or we don't. You know, they don't They've never taken over the counter antibiotics, They've never been injected with anything. Everything that has any problem that has ever come our way, we have been able to deal with it with herbs, nutrition, you know, supplements, rest, you know, sunshine, getting rid of negative thoughts, you know, all sorts of holistic things. And I'm teaching people. I'm coaching people, and I have students who are already in the medical field, like you know, doctors and nurses, And even had a dentist contact me and she's like, how do you how do you avoid dentists? You know, like I'm a dentist.

13:09 I want to know how you do it. So it's awesome, it's it's and it's so empowering, you know, it's so empowering to be like to understand what our bodies need and to have that kind of knowledge. It's part intuition, like I believe that everyone has an inner healer inside of them, right, and then it's also part knowledge. You have to you have to you know, you intuitively know certain things, but then you have to back that up also with understand understanding what's available in the world in terms of you know, what's out there in creation, what's out what kind of herbs are there what kind of food does what to your body? And what kind of vitamins and supplements you know, do this and that to your body. And you know, vitamins and supplements they might not be super natural like herbs and food are are, but they're natural in terms of your body knows what to do with them, and they don't have crazy side effects like pharmaceutical drugs too.

14:09 So for example, if I had a friend over and they took some kind of drug for their blood pressure, for example, and they lost one of their pills in my house, I'd be like, you need to find that pill, because if one of my babies found that on the you know, on the floor and accidentally consumed it, I would have to rush them to the hospital. You know that that could be severe poisoning. But if I drop, you know, if I drop some herbs on the floor, even if they accidentally you know, eat it, first of all, it'd be pretty nasty if they stuck some you know, dry herbs in their mouth they just spit it out. Anyways, Well, let's say they you know, they they you know, stuck a vitamin C pill in their mouth.

14:52 Oh well, the worst that can happen, they'll get diarrhea, that's no big deal. I know how to deal with that. You know. The the best thing that can happen is that they'll boost their immune system because they've just taken some vitamin C, you know. So it's so safe, it's so natural to our bodies, and it's so amazing, and we are kept so much in the dark in regards to these very simple, holistic natural remedies. It's it's amazing. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I'm a conspiracy realist. They want us, they want us to have jobs. They don't want us to be independent. They don't want us to be financially free. They don't want us to be free of the need for the medical system. They want us to be dependent on every every single system they've concocted, you know what I mean. And I just love freedom. That's why I love entrepreneurship.

15:50 That's why I love holistic health. That's why a homeschool, you know, because I want my I want to teach my children what I think is important. You know, Like how long do they study history and they don't even study correct history sometimes, or the kind of history that matters to me sometimes, you know, Or how much How much do they How much do our children study science in public school? Yet they don't know the science of their own bodies and how to heal themselves. Like why why should we spend twelve years of their time studying science that will not be personally intimately beneficial to them their own health and healing. So that's what my you know, my my own student, My own children are also students in my in my certification program, not just you know other people. So with that and said, when family members or when some of your ex colleague found that you left NASA's computer science program and started pursuing a career in health, were there any pushback?

17:03 Do you get anything from you or a colleague or as pushback? It doesn't matter whether they thought so it was appropriate for you because you did something that you felt you needed to do. But I just wanted to give you a chance to say something to that effect because someone else out there maybe experiencing the same thing and that is getting ready to make that transition and they may fall to pressure. So what would you First of all, I didn't, So this isn't network marketing, you know, Like I'm not trying to push anything on anyone but primarily, you know, I tried to live my life as an example to other people as to what is healthy. And of course I'm i'm you know, because i'm a because I'm a business woman, because i'm a business owner, I'm a I'm all always promoting the things that I believe in. So whether it's you know, an herbal formula or you know, vitamin or supplement. And at first people are just kind of you know, I'm not pushy, but you know, I'm out there, I'm emailing people, I'm on social media saying this and that and whatever. And probably in the beginning people were like, hmm, you know, they're just kind of curious, but you know, no one was disrespectful. And if they're.

18:26 If I ever do have people in my circle that are disrespectful, I just cut them out. I mean, like, seriously, life is too short to worry about your haters. I mean, there are plenty of people that love me. I don't need to worry about people who who hate me or who hate what I do. I really don't. I really don't. And as far as family members go, I've even blocked family members. I'm like, you're gonna you're gonna hate on the things that I'm talking about. Block on Facebook, like you're still my family. You know, when I go see you for a holiday, I will love you, i will greet you, i will serve you some you know, delicious home cooked food.

19:06 But I'm not going to let you hate on me in public or on social media. We choose our friends, we choose our circle. And that's you know, any entrepreneur because most most entrepreneurs, they start out as solopreneurs. Right. You don't start out with a big team and an advisory board and you know all that, you're just yourself. So you really it's really really important to dig into a support system where that is going to support you in your business and in your goals. One of them would be podcasts like yours, right, podcasts like yours that are helping people, encouraging people, and where people can get to, you know, hear different people's stories who are making it, you know, and who are succeeding in their in their goals and in their dreams. That's so important. Your service is so important.

19:56 And it's free. That's amazing, you know, like it's apps free, you can just log onto your podcast. That's huge. The value that that podcasters give I mean like and then of course, then there's you know, then there's the higher levels of support, like joining a coaching program or having a one on one coach. Of course, having good friends that are also entrepreneurs and understand that's also extremely valuable. And I do have some friends like that, but I think it's very hard to find people like that, like just around your neighborhood, you know, like those kinds of in person friends that understand your entrepreneurial journey. They're very hard to find unless you join like a group. There's some like business groups where it's like a business referral group.

20:42 Those kinds of groups can be supportive. But you know, with me, because of my children and the fact that I homeschool, I'm not really able to leave home a lot unless it's with my children. So so I rely on things like podcasts, and I also have you know, I also have a coach. I have. I have a life coach. I've had several life coaches, you know, throughout my throughout my journey, but one on one life coaching is also extremely valuable. I believe that's one of the reason why I became a life coach. I think having a life coach is valuable for for for an entrepreneur because you know it can help them. A life coach can help them with their goals, with their mindset, it can help them with healing, it can help them with the relationships, you know, all sorts of things. A life coach is just help. A life coach will help you tap into the knowledge that is within you. And the reason I brought that up regarding the input from people who are within our circle or our sphere of influence, and sometimes they may not intentionally mean it, but it may be something that they may say that could derail or send you into a negative frame of mind or thought process right there, because the journey,

22:12 it's not one of those fairy tales or a story book stories that a lot of times we will come into those storms and we have to solve those problems. So, as you had mentioned, having a coach, someone that can help you or well, they're not going to do the work for you, but they can help or guide you through those storms, and they also help you come to find solutions to a lot of the problems that you may be facing right there, because they're continuously changing and you're never too old to learn something that could improve your life right there now. Yeah, and also like that whole iron sharpens iron, like you know, learning from other people and their experiences. Oh yes, some of the things that you were doing prior to becoming a coach, they were transferable far as to your business.

23:27 Right now, what are some of the skill sets that you found to be really invaluable first in your business? As a computer scientist, I was very experimental. So I was a scientist, right So even though you know my sciences with computers, there's still many experiments that can be done with computers, and so, you know, and I wanted to accomplish a certain task, I would think about, you know, how do I do this? And then I test it, and then I see if it works, and if it doesn't work, I go back. I went back, you know, step by step, and I said, hmm, it failed. Let me let me change this, And very methodically, I would trace back my steps and adjust things one at a time until I built a until I built a piece of software or an application or a function that did what I wanted it to do. And I didn't rely on anyone else. I did it right.

24:29 And that's how I approach my health as well. That's how I approach health and healing, and that's how I teach my students to do. I say, look it. If you want to be healthy, you need to look at all these things. One, two, three, four, fivesent you know, these are the things. Lay them out. Are you doing this? Are you doing this? Are you doing this? Is it working yet? Is it working yet? It's not working? Well? What aren't you doing? You know? And we and we look at it. So, for example, my daughter was a great example. She was getting really bad migraines, right, and so we're like, okay, great, so easy fix coffee. Coffee, Okay, coffee, let's drink coffee. It fixed it for a while. Okay, it's still coming. They're still coming. The coffee isn't working anymore. Okay, what do we do. Let's try juicing. Okay, let's try juicing, vegetable juicing. So she started juicing juicing like every few days. She's like, yeah, that that helps.

25:22 That helps. And then but they still kept coming back, right, They helped, but they didn't make them go away completely. And then for my other daughter, she was started having tummy problems, right, so I was like, hmm, let's try, let's experiment. I said, let's try cutting out gluten, and she was you know, she's young, so it's really hard for a child to have self control. So I had to just stop buying gluten, no more gluten in the house so that she could be gluten free, even though the rest of us were fine, and she her tummy improved with going gluten free. And my other daughter, who had migraines, also stopped having migraines because she stopped eating gluten. That wasn't even that wasn't even one of the things we had considered trying. We were trying other things, you know, different supplements and herbs and stuff like that.

26:07 But once she finally cut out gluten, she also was healed of her migraines. So my older daughter was healed of her migraines, my younger daughter was healed of her tummy aches, all by going gluten free. So we're very experimental like that. But how would I even know, How would I even know to experiment with vegetable juicing, How would I even know to experiment with going gluten free. It's because I studied and same thing when I was at NASA, when I was a computer programmer. I would devote about one hour out of the eight hour workday every day learning reading, learning more about the programming languages and different tools and methods that computer scientists and computer programmers used.

26:52 So there always has to be this ever cycle of learning and learning and learning because there's always new things coming out. No matter what your business is, you have to keep developing yourself personally with the education. Knowledge is power, So knowledge, you know, keep keep increasing your knowledge number one and number two, don't be afraid to experiment with things. And did you have a mentor along your journey in the beginning, No, not really, I had some, I mean for computer when I became when I was becoming a computer science a computer scientist, I had some really brilliant teachers I had. I had a teacher who he kind of mumbled and like his hair was like never combed, and his shoes talked and he just like wore like a T shirt and jeans, and he was the head of the computer science like department, and it's like, wow, he just he looks like a bum. But when so and you could, like most people like fell asleep in class, and I was like, I'm gonna I can't hear him. So I'm gonna I'm gonna sit in the front of the of the room. I'm gonna listen him very carefully. And you know what, he was brilliant. He was brilliant. I got more from his lectures than I did studying on my own.

28:07 You know, he just knew everything deeper than than textbooks would would would would teach us. And so that was extremely valuable. So I didn't have like you know I had. I had a really great teacher, and I think that you know, I do have like you know I do. Uh use life coaches right now, who you know function also as a business coach for me. You know, they're trained in business coaching, life coaching, you know, different kinds of coaches. But you know, for someone that doesn't have the budget for that yet, there are a lot of like I said, free information or courses and programs that can help you achieve like anything and everything. Really, there's also a lot of books on audible dot Com that you know, a book is like condensed, you know, wisdom, years of wisdom condensed into you know, just a few pages. Books are so awesome and you know, with an audible dot Com book, you can just listen to it while you're in the car, while you're cooking and cleaning.

29:07 I mean, it's just great, all the amazing knowledge that's available to us these days. And that is so true. We live in an amazing time right now that we have an abundance of information. I think it's sometimes it can be referred to as information overload, So it's how do you manage all that information? Yeah, those are such good questions, you know what. And you know, I'm a religious I'm a religious person. I'm I'm a religious Jew, and so I really I have to just go back to my faith in God. I believe, I have faith that God leads me to the right sources, and you're right, Like, for example, I had I hadn't. I had an another health crisis with hypothyroidism, and when I started researching the the condition, there were all sorts of opposing opinions and one the one of the main supplements that I used was iodine. Iodine and readox okay, and both of them, but especially iodine. There's so much negative propaganda about iodine, saying that it's very bad for your thyroid and it can make your condition worse and et cetera. Et cetera. And I was like, wow, I could have been I could have been stuck in paralysis had I not already had years of experience and study under very knowledgeable and effective

30:42 holistic healers. So I knew what my the people that I had already you know, learned to trust for years what they said over the other voices in the world. And I can't really attribute it to anything, but you know, having taken the time to study all those years and to find out what worked and what didn't work. So if if there is someone that I'm learning from, whether it be in business or health and healing or you know, anything and any any any avenue of life, and you know, I know that if I am listening to them, that I am seeing success, that I am achieving my goals. You know, I'm getting the results that I want. Then I then I tend to continue to trust in the knowledge that they give me. And you know, you'll have to balance that with your own knowledge because sometimes even the different healers, the different herbalists and holistic doctors that I that I do trust, sometimes they'll have conflicting information and you know that just comes with experience. And again, like I said, having the willingness to experiment for yourself. This guy says this. This guy says that, let's test it out. Let's test out doing this. Does it help me? Do I feel good? Yes? So this is garbage. Just find out. You just have to be a scientist, you know, and run your experiments. And that is actually really do your research. The bottom

32:15 line right there is do your research. Now. The next thing we want to talk about, and that is your business. Your the name of your business is a Ruka. Yeah, so that the website is Ruka dot com a r u kh dot com and like the full name is the Ruka Holistic Life Academy. When someone comes to your website, you want to give us a little insight on what they can expect. Yes, so if someone comes to my website, this this page is basically designed to introduce them to the Holisticular Certification Program and by way of this free course eight Secrets to become a Holistic Healer. And in that free course, basically you learn about the different things that that that I teach in the program, the different things that you'll learn that have helped me to basically, you know, avoid doctors and be able to heal myself and keep my family healthy naturally and uh so, yeah, so that's what this page is all about. At the bottom is a bunch of blog articles on different health and healing topics. You get to scroll a lot. It's just a lot of information. But so if you click any of those buttons that you have just scrolled past, it'll bring you to a form where you just enter your information and then you get access to the

33:45 free eight Secrets to Become a Holistic Healer series that I created. A person goes on their journey that they want to find out more information, how do they get in contact? Yes, so my website is a great place, and my email also my Mataruka dot com, m M A y I am at Uruka dot coma r ukh dot com and you can, you know, you can just email me if you have any specific questions as well and fly. And that is for those who are just beginning your journey into holistic living healing. What advice or first steps would you recommend for them? Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid. There's a lot of fear. There's a lot of propaganda that that they put out, that people put out to make us afraid. Of holistic remedies. And the truth is, as I said before, the pharmaceutical drugs are deadlier than the holistic remedies. It's actually safer to not do anything at all oftentimes then to take the pharmaceutical drugs. If you just slept more and exercise more and drink more water, oftentimes you will be better off. That's not a blanket statement. And I'm not trying to you know, take the place of your doctor and or anything like that. But don't live in fear. Empower yourself with knowledge. Oh those are some powerful right there, and I think that definitely is something profound. Don't live well.

35:25 Thank you, ma'am for sharing your journey with us, and we hope to have you back and continue success and on your journey and living your dreams. Thank you so much, and thank you for allowing me to be here as an honor again. Thank you. Thanks for listening to night Beat Media's Living the Dream. If you enjoyed this podcast, please live a comment or hit follow and subscribe on our link so you can stay up to date on new episodes until next time. When writing the story of your life, be sure you're holding the pen