I had the opportunity to travel to Mexico for the Holidays last minute. An amazing Christmas present from my husband, who chased the airfares until they changed so he could get me home.

You see, to me, Cancun is not the paradise everyone sees. Where you travel as a destination to see the beautiful turquoise blue waters of the Caribbean, stay in luxury all inclusive resorts to eat, drink and have a good time.

To me, Cancun has turned into one of the many places I call home. It is where my sister and my nephew live. Where I get to sit and enjoy nature, sometimes, days pass without me going out. Simply having good conversations, childhood and eating incredibly good food.

Being outdoors always makes me go inside, deep into my thoughts and my feelings. On a daily walk, I saw for the first time Achiote (annatto) in a tree, I had no idea what it was. But when I found out, I was in awe of it.

Achiote is an orange-red condiment and food coloring derived from the seeds of the achiote tree, native to tropical America. It is often used to impart a yellow or orange color to foods, but sometimes also for its flavor and aroma. But I have always bought achiote in the store, in a little cardboard box and mix it with bitter orange to prep it. Never in is raw, natural state.

The achiote comes in a small pokey pod that you have to open and then see little red seeds. It looks intriguing and kind of ugly. But the flavor it provides is glorious, if you have ever tried cochinita pibil, you have been favor by the grace of achiote cooking.

Looking at the achiote made me think about the raw emotions we all carry inside, how they can feel prickly and ugly sometimes. How those emotions take the best of us and we give up. We give up on ourselves because we are too ugly, too fat, to angry, too dumb. Becauseour emotions are too much to handle.

But what we forget, is that everything beautiful comes from the messiness of life. To harvest a rose, we get the thorns. To prepare a gorgeous meal, we need to mix all the raw ingredients together. When Miguel Angel painted the Sixteenth Chapel, it was probably a really messy process that was not beautiful until it was done.

We transform from the inside out. To flourish, we need to take the messy, ugly raw emotions and allow them to flow through us. Really feel them in order to release them, to eventually let go. Otherwise, we bottle up the anger, the sadness, the resentment and they don’t find a way out, just like a pressure cook. If there is no release valve, then it will eventually explode. And so do our emotions, we bottle up until we can’t handle it any more and we explode.

But when we really feel and release, instead of reacting; we learn to know us a little better, we learn when anger will take over. We equip ourselves with the needed knowledge to allow emotions instead of reacting to them. We take the ugly and transform it into beautiful humanness. All you need, is already inside, you are ready to shine, transformation, always comes from within.