Luana DeAngelis
Founder & Chief Visionary Officer of You Can Thrive!
About our Founder
As a leader in the field of integrative healthcare systems and disease prevention, Luana DeAngelis began You Can Thrive! as a community initiative in 2005 to transform the way health care is approached; utilizing a cutting-edge multi-disciplinary system designed to create the best outcomes as a complete care paradigm shift.
At a young age, Luana's cancer diagnosis led her to create and implement a vision for inclusive care. She started by transforming the lives of those undergoing a diagnosis of cancer. Oprah's O Magazine spotlighted her expansive work in fostering integrative medicine, patient needs, and health care innovation.
Since Luana descends from a generational lineage of women in natural health, she has trained in hands-on methods for most of her life. Aside from the healing spaces facilitated in NYC, she began to adapt tele-health practices for guiding participants through integrative patient navigation before covid. Mentored by leading doctors like Mitchell Gaynor, MD, Sheldon Feldman, MD, and many others fostered the mission as the model grew in train thriver navigators who then give back and ‘ease the journey’ through cancer.
Facilitating Reiki in the operating room at Columbia Presbyterian and other hospitals she saw first hand how a heartfelt approach unites the physical medicine and the non-physical or metaphysical aspects to trigger long-term results. As a Master Integrative Therapist, she has been specializing in complimentary uses of sound, essential oils, restorative movement and imagery, compassionate presence and end-of-life bedside care.
Like Dr. Gaynor before her, Luana champions therapeutic sound along with other evidence based approaches such as; tapping to modulate epigenetic factors associated with preventative health.
Luana founded her non-profit model in 2005 by magnetizing our community behind preventative and palliative health care, advocating for better long-term outcomes by uplifting the importance of integrative methods that are historically marginalized. Her nearly two decades at You Can Thrive! has resulted in care for thousands of members and fostered hundreds of volunteers since it's inception. She is a renaissance woman who is a writer, and fine artist in her free time. She holds a technology patent seeking investors. She loves people and animals equally.
Luana's Story: Kissing the Dragon
I was 35 newly married, and I was about to be diagnosed with breast cancer. While visiting my mother out of state, I had a profound dream….
I was standing waist deep in murky water, a swamp. On my left was what can only be described as THE divine feminine, a dreamlike deity. She was shrouded in bright white light and serenity. On the shore was a dark woman veiled in mist; and in the water between the three of us was an alligator. I said to the dark woman on the shore, “Be careful, the alligator will bite you.” She began running around in fast motion, frightened and being chased by the beast. She yelled, “Look, you don’t have to let it get you. You can run from it.”
The alligator slipped back into the swamp and began heading towards the glowing woman and myself. I warned her, “Be careful, the alligator will bite you.” She smiled so calmly, and looked at me beaming love, and then did the same to the alligator perched with his nose floating above the water. She gently cupped the chin of the beast, lifting his face to her mouth and kissing him softly. As she released him, he chomped down into her right thigh. Opening her arms wide she put her head back, and looked skyward, all the while smiling peacefully through the pain and emanating a beam of light from her heart all the way to heaven. I understood as with other dreams that I'd had in my life, that this one was a vision and it was giving me something to be used at a later date.
The following week I was in church with my mother hearing a moving sermon on pain and spiritual growth. “When confronting pain, your first response is to curl up into a ball and tense against it,” the preacher stated “but this makes it so much more difficult. If at that time, you can remember to open your heart and let the pain wash over you, it makes it so much easier to bear. In other words, as an old parable goes -may you have the strength to kiss the dragon and let it bite you.” My mother and I looked at each other with shock, for she was with me when I woke from the dream.
Weeks later, I found a large lump in my left breast. After a long awaited sonar appointment, the doctor diagnosed me with invasive breast cancer. At that very moment; when I was in the dressing room about to be overcome by panic; the face of that goddess came to me; and a calm encased my spirit. I stretched my arms and heart wide open and chose acceptance, “I know that if my feet are on this path, they are there for a reason. I know you’ll send me the wisdom I need to get through this with grace.”
The Divine Mother came to me to share with me both a mission and a vision to alleviate suffering. I understand implicitly that it’s not what happens to you-- but how you respond to it. “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is entirely optional”.
Thinking back on that dream, I understand what the lesson was. Great spiritual leaders throughout time modeled just as SHE did. “Everyone loves a man who smiles on a sunny day, but the true worth of a man (or woman!) is one who can smile when nothing is going his way”. Facing the moment with calm and benevolence, even when facing ones own mortality and inevitable or existing pain is the true test of a human, man or woman. Breast cancer is a uniquely feminine experience of despair, and at this time in our evolution and consciousness it is imperative to heal the feminine. That is why the feminine divine appeared to guide me.
Although there are certainly times when the world feels sideways and blurry, cancer taught me acceptance and gratitude. To struggle against unfolding events is truly a worthless cause, being balanced in the face of adversity is its own reward. It’s a lesson that has truly freed me.
After getting through it, and feeling deeply the ongoing effects, some personal truths have emerged. This diagnosis guided me, ok it kicked me, to my true calling. I went into service. I did much personal work including service and 10 day retreats at Vipassana Meditation Centers You Can Thrive! was born. I'm so blessed to be in service and since 2005 our community offers a truly inclusive care paradigm shift. Free services for breast cancer and those marginalized, funded by a reciprocal giving that let's your gifts and fees generate thriving for others...
With proof of concept ours is the model that all people can utilize to prevent onset of disease. We hold our truth to be self evident in our results. We stand for a more compassionate, inclusive and patient model for health. A way of healing that prevents disease as well by addressing the cause. While our current more male aspect of healing addresses the symptom with a much more harsh and immediate methodology. Together they fit perfectly as equals; male and female completely healed. All aspects of our society can be healed by raising up the feminine to the level of the masculine in all things. We started in medicine. Healing the one; healing the ALL. You are that ONE inside the ALL.