Katrina is a Bestselling Author, Founder of #WORLDCLASS Magazines, and a serial entrepreneur. After being undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, and finally diagnosed with Lyme disease, Katrina realized that Western Medicine had failed her and medical doctors had no clue how to treat Lyme and other degenerative diseases. She rejected the tag of “incurable” that was put on her, and healed herself with radical lifestyle changes and holistic treatments. Katrina helps people to reverse chronic illnesses by offering guidance with drug-free treatments in her bestselling book "Katrina's Recovery from Mysterious Disease".
Today Katrina helps women from all walks of life to create the lives from their dream boards and beyond. Katrina is known as an ambitious woman building businesses and mentoring all while saving the environment on 6-inch stilettos.
Katrina is an author of several books, including “Katrina’s Recovery”, “Healing Journal” and “Raw.Real.Revealed.” She has been featured on major websites, magazines and TV stations.
She woke up one morning with a mysterious disease neither she nor her doctors could figure out. Her symptoms were “too broad”, they said, and with over 60 different symptoms, she almost accepted her fate and let herself succumb to the ferocious and mysterious disease.
She examined her lifestyle to see if she could find some answers in the way she was living. At the time, she was a fitness & yoga instructor, a nutritionist, and was going after her Masters in Oriental Medicine. Her healthy lifestyle provided undeniable proof that something was seriously wrong despite what doctors were telling her.
After months of debilitating pain, partial paralysis, chronic fatigue, and misdiagnosis from multiple doctors, tests finally confirmed she had Lyme disease; a disease, that at the time of her diagnosis, had no known cure.
“What do you do when your doctor looks you square in the eyes and tells you, ‘this is something you’ll have to live with for the rest of your life’?”
I imagine you scramble. You look for answers. You do everything in your power to carve out some sort of normalcy in your life. You don’t give in or give up on yourself.
And that’s exactly what she did.
This week’s #WCW is Katrina Starzyhnskaya, a luminary in her own right. After struggling to heal her body through conventional methods, she turned to a holistic approach that catapulted her toward a full recovery.
This is her inspiring story:
What was life like for you before you got sick?
“I had just come to NYC from Belarus because I wanted to travel and create the life of my dreams, which was not possible back home. I had $500 to my name and I used $300 of that money to become a certified fitness instructor. I had a passion for health and wellness and so I followed that path and became a fitness instructor, then that evolved to being a yoga instructor, then I went into nutrition and eventually decided to get my Masters in Oriental Medicine. My life was great, but I was constantly under a lot of stress and was unhappy a lot of the time. Then one day I woke up with half my face paralyzed, was in a lot of pain, started losing my short term memory, and didn’t know why it was happening.”
When you got diagnosed with Lyme disease, how did you initially react?
“At first, I was discouraged and got depressed. How do you handle that kind of news and go on living with that kind of unbearable pain? I was healthy, I was fit, and with my background, I also believed that our bodies can heal itself. So I did a lot of research online and found communities of people who had cured themselves of ‘incurable illnesses’. I found four people who cured themselves of Lyme. That encouraged and inspired me to go on my own healing journey.”
Can you tell us about that journey?
“During my research, I found that everyone who cured themselves had the same pattern. They all had a complete lifestyle change. They changed their diet, they did detoxes and cleanses, and a huge part of their recovery was that they changed their mindset, and focused on their emotional health. At the time of my official diagnosis, I was very depressed and in a lot of pain, so my mind was constantly in negative thoughts about my situation. I had to become more positive even though I was depressed. I had to change the way I was thinking. I kept asking myself ‘Why me? Why did I get sick?’, and then I realized that I manifested this because something in me was negative. I was constantly under a lot of stress and was unhappy and I was not appreciating anything in life. That realization changed the way I approached my life, so I changed my thinking and began my healing process. I moved to San Diego to heal myself and it took 3 years to completely heal my body. I kept a daily journal and ranked my pain on a scale of 1-10 and jotted down other symptoms. In addition to changing my mindset, I focused on my emotional health as well as my diet and physical health.”
After you healed yourself, you wrote a book about it called Katrina’s Recovery From Mysterious Disease. Tell us how you parlayed that book into getting to interview some of the most successful people on the planet.
“After I launched my first book I was really interested in the mindset of successful people, so I decided I wanted to interview these people and pick their brains a little bit. I thought I would turn those interviews into a book or do a documentary. I came up with a script and would tailor the script to the person I was interviewing. I reached out to people and was surprised by how many actually said yes. I ended up with about three hundred interviews with people like Sir Richard Branson, Michael Hansen, and Phil Mickelson; all kinds of luminaries and successful individuals. That’s when I decided that instead of writing a book, I wanted to give what I learned away, so I launched World Class Magazines to share everything I learned.”
After interviewing all of these uber successful people, I’m sure that you’ve come to define success in a specific way for yourself. What does success mean to you?
“To me success means, in a very holistic way, to feel fulfilled in all areas of my life – emotional, mental, physical, financial, spiritual and in relationships. Success is a very holistic approach to me, it’s not just financial success that I’m after.”
What are your top three pieces of advice for women who are reaching for success in their lives?
- "Connect to your heart. I think we need to balance our mental focus with heart-centered focus as well. When we can connect to our hearts, it helps to activate our ‘good feeling’ emotions and that will move us toward our goals and dreams.”
- “Take action despite the fear. Don’t let fear stop you from going after what you want. Question everything, even your own fear.”
- “Get to the root cause of your problems. More often then not, our problems stem from an underlying issue. For many women, their issue is low self-worth that comes from something that happened in their childhood. If you can get to the root of this issue and heal it, you can go after and achieve anything you want in life.”
Despite a debilitating disease, this woman bounced back and found success, on her own terms, in her own way. Her life is a testament to what you can achieve if you just put your mind to it.
To learn more about Katrina, please find and follow her on Facebook and Twitter or visit her website http://www.worldclassmagazines.com.
If you’re a woman who’s up to BIG things and transforming lives with your business, and would like to be a #WCW featured woman, please go to www.lindapharathikoune.com, and get in touch with us!
Linda Pharathikoune is a freelance writer, author, and Founder/CEO of The Writing Room, LLC. She lives in a cabin in the mountains and is secretly obsessed with baby goats. Actually, it’s no secret at all.