“Today I am someone brutally more aware of my own coherence. Someone much more consciously lives, more awake,” he says. Tini de Bucourt during his talk with NEWS.
Last year life tested her and shook her hard. First it was the rupture of the Achilles tendon and then ovarian cancer with a critical prognosis. She knew the dark side. However, her strength, her resilience, and the love of her loved ones helped her get through. Today she is another Tini.
“This moment in my life is a great challenge. I don’t want to forget everything I learned and the great opportunity I had. A Tini died and I gave her a very respectable and grateful mourning, and there is a new Tini with this new awareness of being alive. I am very attentive to what I want for my life and what I want to do, working with my authentic self. I select everything very well, friendships, projects, outings. I love silence. I feel like an outsider, someone who no longer fits in many places, but I don’t suffer from it. It’s realizing that it’s not that way and I pay a lot of attention to it,” she says.
Curious and multifaceted, she was a splendid mannequin in the seventies and eighties. She had her modeling school, she was a businesswoman and teacher. She studied psychopedagogy, family constellations, coaching, bioenergetics, yoga and dance. She lived seven years in India and wrote three books. She married at 18 and divorced at 21. She has two children – Cecilia de Bucourt and Juan Sieburger – and four grandchildren – Chiara, Christian, Sofía and Noah.
Currently, she gives conferences, has personal sessions with women, organizes trips and has projects that captivate her.
News: What issues are going through you today?
Tini de Bucourt: I am interested in being with people who join me, not necessarily because they have a very high intellectual level, but because of their love and warmth. And I really enjoy being with people from whom I learn, with souls that lead me to investigate and explore different topics. I am at a stage where I question everything, from psychology to family constellations, without making a value judgment. I try more to feel than to cranate. I like to be with myself, see the sky from my window and paint. I am very interested in art.
News: How much did it cost you to be this person?
De Bucourt: Very much. Everything that happened to me in life was for a reason. Everything was wonderful, I had a very good time. And what was not so nice or so easy and, above all, sometimes very lonely, were also enormous learnings. To become who I am is to stop pleasing, it is to stop saying yes when my soul says no. This being my most authentic self has to do with deeply respecting my spaces.
News: What are your strengths?
De Bucourt: One hundred percent resilience. I have an enormous capacity to reinvent myself. My strength is that I always do what I really want. In my life I had a boss, for example. I always did what I felt. My strength is also communication with people. For me today is time to give more than receive.
News: What is your life purpose?
De Bucourt: I am convinced that every human being has infinite inner wealth and that the majority, unfortunately, leave this world without even having questioned it. What a pity. My purpose is to wake people up. My mission is to communicate and contribute to humanity the best I can. Leaving a legacy, even through art. Going to the last day of my life knowing that I did what I could to be as authentic as possible.
News: What are your fears?
De Bucourt: What a good question. I don’t know, I am not afraid of death or illness. I have so much trust in the Universe that fear does not enter there. What has to happen will happen.
News: Last year was very hard for you. She ruptured her left Achilles tendon and was later diagnosed with grade four ovarian cancer and metastasis. How did you experience it and cope?
De Bucourt: The illness healed me. He is very crazy. When he appeared I knew it, I diagnosed myself alone in the sanatorium, when no one had announced it to me, and I did something very strange. I surrendered. I opened my arms, palms up, and said, “Universe, here I am.” I knew that my diagnosis was very critical, but I was never afraid. It was a very difficult stage, first the tendon operation, the heat wave, the boot. Afterwards I had six volumes of fluid due to the metastasis, six to seven liters that formed from Friday to Friday. Six times they admitted me to puncture me and remove that amount of fluid. I had no pain, but a lot of discomfort. When I had the correct diagnosis I started chemo. There I discovered the dark side of life. I was left very vulnerable, in a way, I connected with the emotions to this day. I’m talking to you and my eyes are filling with tears. The illness took a fog out of me and connected me with this awareness of being alive.
News: How are you doing today?
De Bucourt: I am in total remission, clinically cured. But I’m not discharged, because I have to take tests from time to time. So far I am very well, with very good energy, I had lost eleven kilos and I regained five or six. I can walk almost perfectly. I’m fine.
News: There is a Hindu phrase that says: “If it happens, it is good.” Do you agree?
De Bucourt: Completely. I thank the thousands of people when I expressed this on the networks from a very respectful and drama-free place. Many people thanked me for sharing it this way. My purpose was to demystify the word cancer as a death sentence. What happens is convenient. If you know how to take it as a learning experience and as an opportunity, I would almost dare to say that something happens chemically in your body that reverses it.
News: What did he learn?
De Bucourt: I learned to be more authentic. What I learned most is not to have expectations. I think the expectation is really painful. These are opportunities to ask yourself what you haven’t resolved yet. In my case it brought me everything that was great that I have and what was not yet so resolved. My blood family is scattered around the world and this brought an awareness of love that is much more present today. Ceci came from New York five times, she took care of me in a way that I will never have a way to thank her for a lifetime. My son Juan, my friends, not to mention, my blood relatives who live abroad, all there. It was like certifying that everyone is very attentive and very well. It was also a difficult year because when I was cured, three months later the father of my children died, with whom I got along very well and, furthermore, I am very close friends with his wife. That’s crazy. That’s why if you don’t surrender, you don’t understand anything.
News: What is your view on death?
De Bucourt: I had a lot of contact with death, especially in India. There I perceived it as something absolutely integrated into life, like a natural cycle. When this happened to me I had very deep talks with my children. But you don’t have to wait for something like this to happen to talk about what needs to be talked about. I fixed everything, nothing was left undone.
News: What makes you happy?
De Bucourt: My friends make me very happy, they are incredible. Nature, simplicity and having enormous confidence that everything will be as it should be makes me very happy. It means that what I propose is going to happen because I trust and do my best.
News: You have always been a beautiful woman. How do you see beauty at this stage?
De Bucourt: For me, beauty today is the capacity for freedom. Truly be who you are against all odds. It has nothing to do with stereotypes. There is something invisible that is perceived and that goes far beyond what the eye sees. Beauty has something enigmatic, very true, very honest, transparent.. It’s simplicity, it has to do with a balance. It’s an attitude, it’s dignity. It’s not horror. I want to become an old woman while maintaining my bearing and my bright look because I am honest with myself.
News: What do you plan for this year?
De Bucourt: I have signed a contract to write a book about my experience last year and about the mystery because this whole stage was a great mystery. The other project is to make my art show, I am very happy with painting. I also want to give lectures to convey everything I have learned in my life from a very honest and very simple place. On the other hand, I changed group workshops for personal meetings because people like to be heard. And I will continue with my travels. I have India for October and it will be the last group I take there. It is a trip that I put together with love and it will have transformative experiences. I am also going to continue traveling through Argentina, which has sublime places. They are not tourist trips, they are very small groups, trips with a lot of experience, personal contact and transformation. Conversations of such authenticity occur that we made an incredible family of traveling friends. We make teams, we do things together, we listen, we grow. It’s a plot.
News: How would you like to be remembered?
De Bucourt: As someone who dared to be authentic and who knew how to give humanity love and, above all, a realization, an awakening.