In my late twenties, I realised how much disappointment I felt about the relationship I had with my dad.

The narrative in my family had always been one of closeness. We are really close, we’d all say. We share everything with each other, we have regular calls, we go on holidays together. Heck, my mum and dad even live in the house of my sister and her husband, looking after their daughter.

The further I explored my inner world through therapy and coaching, the more solid my own narrative developed. I realise that while our family is close, I had a lot of conflicting feelings because the most lasting impression I have of my dad over the years is his anger. Uncontrolled, explosive rage.

As someone who is always challenging people, poking holes in logic and asking a lot of questions, this anger became the constraint of my curiosity. I had to be careful that if poking the bear was the only way I could scratch my itch, then I better not poke the bear too hard.

Parented into silence

My parents were raised with the belief that children respect parents. This means staying quiet when your parents say something, even if it doesn’t make sense. It means not ‘speaking back’ or responding especially when the discussion gets heated. And their parenting style was grounded on this belief.

For me, asking questions, especially if things did not make sense, was how I understood my place in the world. It wasn’t about challenging someone’s pride, making someone lose face, or disrespecting an elder. It was just how I learnt to relate to the world and those around me even if the act of seeking that understanding ruffled feathers.

So you can imagine, I grew up asking why. I grew up letting my parents know when their choices, words or decisions did not make sense to me. And with that, I was often met with rage. I was often yelled at. I was often told that I had made my dad angry again.

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Feeling shame and guilt

Experiencing rage and yelling when I merely wanted to understand was so confusing for me. And because there was no one else to tell me that my desire to understand was not wrong, I ended up internalising a deep sense of shame. I ended up believing there must be something seriously wrong with me if I am always causing so much trouble.

Why do I always make my dad angry? And how can I be a better child?

I learnt to be quieter and to bite my tongue. During my teenage years, I can remember a strong desire to make it through a family holiday without getting dad angry. I used that as a yardstick to mark the progress of my sinful behaviours. It was an easy way of checking whether I was making good progress.

I remember the feeling of despair coupled with guilt, shame and failure during a family holiday. We’d made it quite far into the holiday without him getting angry but close to the end he exploded. I felt like such a failure. I’d come so close to succeeding at not making him angry. The mood was dampened and it was my fault again.

My teenage years were marked with a lot of this type of internal dialogue and feelings of shame and guilt.

Understanding that his anger was never my fault

When I began working with a therapist in London, I grew to understand that his anger was never my fault. I might have been a trigger for his reactions but I learnt that people cannot blame you for how they feel. Of course, certain actions cause a more universally agreed upon reaction but how anyone reacts is their responsibility and not ours.

As I grew older, I let go of internalising the blame or feeling guilty when my dad got angry. I still felt upset that the conversations could not be more peacefully navigated with dialogue. And over time, he learnt to accept and understand that he did have work to do with his anger.

This desire of mine to converse with him about topics whether they are hard or easy has always served as a point of pain. If we can’t have a conversation without him getting angry or me walking away, then how do we build a closer relationship?

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My life practices expands the capacity of my heart

One of the biggest fears I have is for my parents to die before I get the chance to repair the relationships I have with them. Despite having this fear, it kept butting heads with how disappointed I felt with how his anger was always directed at me.

For years, I couldn’t break through the feeling of my hurt. It felt like an unmovable rock in my heart, in my speech with him and in how I show up in our interactions whether that was in person or online. Months would go by without reaching out to him or with me avoiding chatting to him. That felt the safest for me.

Over the last couple of months, there have been tectonic shifts. My work in energy healing brings a lot of clients with their own versions of parental trauma to me. Working with them invites deep empathy for them and their parents, which in turn, expands my heart’s capacity to see the world from my parents’ perspective.

I have also been part of a beautiful practice called dyadic unfolding run through the ARC network founded by . It invites a simple yet profound practice of seeing, feeling, valuing and loving what is true between pairs. In the practice of valuing and loving strangers over Zoom, I am reminded of how much I value my own parents despite not always agreeing with them.

And my daily mediation sitting for an hour of silence, singing devotional mantras with the harmonium and activating my voice with a coach has also added to the effect of an expanded heart.

If we can’t talk, maybe we can email?

An idea popped into my head over the summer to ask my dad if he would be willing to email with me as a way of communicating.

I felt like if we wrote emails without requiring the other person to be live in front of us over FaceTime, it could diffuse some of the pent up tension, it could give us the space we need to feel the feelings and calm down before reacting.

On Sunday I finally found the courage to send this message to my dad:

I had wanted to make this suggestion for a while but it took months for my body to feel safe doing it. It had been on my mind and everything the idea occurred in my mind, I’d dismiss it as I wasn’t ready.

Finally when I did write the message, it was a relief how anti-climatic it was. He replied immediately that he was up for this.

I liked that he warned that expressing in English may fail what he fully desired to express.
Since he also speaks Mandarin, I suggested that we could mix the languages to get to the nuance of expression that maybe one language couldn’t arrive at.

He had done all of primary and high school in Chinese and the last few years of high school in Canada and university in the states.

He even suggested I initiate the first email to kick us off.

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My body feels wonder and enters a state of expansion

After I messaged, I could feel my body release an exhale and feel expanded. It almost did not matter what his reply was at that point because I had done all that I could to build the bridge from my side. It was a big bonus that he agreed. And an even bigger one that he wanted me to start first.

I know this turning point in my relationship with him is just the beginning of a new era of relating but I feel so hopeful. I am excited that this will allow us to communicate without shutting down. And I am hoping it will give us the space to get to know each other in a way we have never had the chance to before.

My hope is that this slower form of written communication will give us room to explore, and space to take breaks if we need.

I want to get to know my dad as a person. I have so many questions for him!

• What was he like as a child?

• What are his fondest memories?

• What was he scared of?

• Was he close to his parents? Did he feel closer to his mum or dad? Could he go to them in times of need?

• What was it like when he was sent abroad for school?

• What are the saddest memories of his childhood? What are the happiest ones?

• Was he close to his siblings? Did he ever fight with them?

• Does he have any regrets?

What else would you want to ask your dad? I’d love ideas!

I will keep you posted on how it goes. And I hope that this serves as an encouragement for you to go after what your heart desires. If there is a relationship you’ve always wanted to repair, is there a way to take a step? If even that step feels too big, what is a smaller step that feels manageable?

It is never too late until it is too late.

Love and light,

Wan Sin

It turns out I wasn’t just chasing the boys, I was chasing the girls too.

I pursued a friendship with a cool girl at my yoga studio. Let’s call her Kate. A couple of months in I asked her to help me with something very simple and she didn’t show up the way I expected a friend would.

I’d come back to my yoga studio in London after a year of travelling. I was open to more female friendships, especially ones who could understand what it meant to be a person of colour. This led me to a conversation with Kate in the changing rooms. We exchanged contacts and I offered to join a class she planned to attend the following week.

Making and keeping friends as adults in London is tough. There is so much heavy lifting involved in aligning schedules and this usually has to be done weeks in advance. Our commitment to the same studio and teachers made me excited by the possibility of an easeful friendship with regular face time.

The week after we met, we went to a class together and had lunch afterwards. We gagged at things girls gag about (boys) and there was endless laughter. I was in love and I wanted to have her in my life.

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Ignoring the nice girl

While I was chasing Kate, there was a perfectly good friendship waiting for me with girl I had partnered with in a handstand class. Let’s call her Lisa. I didn’t think too much of her until we bumped into each other a couple of weeks later outside a salad shop. I knew instantly that this ‘coincidence’ was a sign that Lisa was meant to be in my life in some way.

We had a chat, swapped numbers, realised we were practically neighbours and agreed we’d catch up. Even though it could have been possible to see her earlier, it took more than a month and one cancelled plan for it to happen.

In contrast, I was making a concerted effort to have Kate in my life. I noted however, that every time I asked if she wanted to have lunch after yoga or hang out in some capacity, it was always met with ‘no’. ‘I already have lunch plans’. ‘I am already hanging out with another yoga friend’.

The few hang outs we did have turned out to be possible because her other plans fell through or ended early. I was the leftover choice. In retrospect, I can see how she wasn’t valuing me but I was so caught up in the chase I was willing to overlook the obvious.

When I realised I was chasing

I was invited to teach a module during a week-long teacher training run by the teacher that Kate and I loved. Right before my session kicked off I asked Kate if she would be willing to take pictures and some videos of me. I thought it was a no-brainer to ask her since we’d been messaging, we were friendly and we’d even hung out a few times. I didn’t know anyone else in the group of forty.

She said she would rather receive than help me take photos and videos. Her saying no took me aback but that wasn’t what hurt. I had seen her share pictures of teachers' modules on Instagram from that week and had naturally thought she’d be happy to take some for me too.

Maybe my understanding of our friendship was different. I thought that after a few hang outs we meant something to each other. In that moment I understood that maybe we didn’t see the relationship in the same way.

Recognising my pattern stunned me. Why was it that working for affection felt so compelling to me? And why did I feel the need to work hard to win someone over when there were plenty of good friendships with arms wide open towards me?

I decided I did not need to pursue this friendship any further. It wasn’t that she was a bad person or wouldn’t change her mind, I could just accept that it wasn’t the type of connection I’d hoped for and focus on my energy on other people.

Setting that boundary was an energetic shift. I did not need to focus on someone who didn’t want to meet me halfway. I could put my energy towards those that did. I was beginning to allow a different pattern to emerge. I no longer felt that I needed to earn my place in someone’s life, instead I started seeing where there was already room for me.

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The nice girl is actually the cool girl

I’ve often found myself attracted to emotional unavailable men. Or men who seem to be struggling or I’ve decided needed saving. I’d want to help them and when they didn’t respond in the way I’d hoped, I’d become frustrated and want to change them. I have spent a lot of energy on these types of relationships.

I’d assumed that after leaving a two-year relationship in which I’d recognised these dynamics, I’d be better at spotting them. And in some ways, I was catching these pattern in the relationships that followed and stepping away sooner. But I hadn’t stopped recreating them. I was still drawn to this sense of familiarity, even when the endings felt like rewinded replays.

What surprised me was discovering that I was doing the same thing in friendship.

After a few missed hang outs and cancellations, Lisa and I finally had dinner together. Over dinner I shared what I’d been noticing about my own patterns with men and women, including what had happened with Kate. As I explained it, Lisa reflected something back to me: she was the nice boy.

Even though we laughed about it, the words rang true. I’d spent so long trying to win over people who weren’t making space for me that I’d overlooked the people who already were.

Time to choose the nice boy

Recently I looked through my WhatsApp chat history and mentally categorised the female friendships. It shocked me to realise how many of them were just me playing into the chase. I scrolled past the nice boys and girls I’d lost over time for acting in similar ways to how Kate acted with me with some sadness. But I was also happy to see the number of nice people entering my life.

I know I deserve beautiful sisterhood, filled with love, celebration of each other’s achievements and joy. It sounds so simple to say, yet for much of my life, I haven’t always known how to recognise or receive it. I was so hard wired to pursuing certain kinds of connections because they felt familiar that it was hard to break the circuit.

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Even though I understood what I was doing intellectually, the trait still played out. I was longing for something I knew I could have yet my body was did not feel safe and did not know how to go there.

It is too early to say what will become of this buddying friendship with Lisa. But something has shifted in how I’m approaching relationships. I am noticing myself pay attention not just to people I have a natural draw towards but also to how the relationship dynamics play out. Am I the one who always chases or is there a balance?Are they making room for me? And for those who are, can I crack my heart open to make room for them too?

Expanding in the face of contraction

I am also noticing the habitual pattern of my body contracting against a relationship in a space where it ought to expand. I saw myself suspicious of the behaviour of a girlfriend, thinking of her action as a potential threat. But when we chatted about it, I saw how much of a defensive worldview I was imposing on her actions. And how she was coming from a totally different place to the one I had interpreted her to come from. So I am learning that before making any premature conclusions about whether something is a threat, to take time to sit with what arises, to drop into my heart space, to ask them for clarity if that is available and to challenge my patterns.

I am sitting with the discomfort that comes from expanding my window of tolerance to seeing the world differently. Slowly easing myself into a practice of choosing those who choose me back. And showing up for people who show up for me.

This work is scary and yet in the little glimpses I’ve had of it, feels deeply meaningful. So I am unclenching in the direction of more ease and less chasing. And I am inviting the kind of relationships in which we celebrate one another without having to earn our place in the other’s life.

Love and light,

Caryn/Wan Sin

Yoga teacher training as another certification grab

Embarking on a yoga teacher training in 2018 was probably the beginning of this journey. Even back then, if you’d asked me to be honest about why I was doing the training, I probably would have discovered that I just wanted another certificate, another reason to be proven worthy. Alas, this journey closer and closer towards my truth did all begin with a simple yearning to prove myself. I think this is a good reminder that people can change and even the people we might admire now may have once started where we started. The superficial can often be the gateway to something deeper.

Each of my yoga teacher training classmates taught me something. There was a woman who point blank stated that everyone needed a therapist and just like that I decided to go get myself one without having a reason apart from it being avant garde and also why not? That was a game changer. I cried so hard at the end of my first therapy session.

There was a guy who’d done the Wim Hof (Ice Man) training before deciding to train as a yoga teacher. He taught our whole class how to still the mind in cold water. That was another game changer. I got so addicted to cold water swimming that every break we had during our retreat at a Scottish Tibetan Buddhist monastery, I’d run to the stream where he first taught us, so I could dip again. I must have gone every break we had, at least two or three times a day.

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Learning to cry

I turned twenty-five halfway into the training. I had reached that age pretty much tearless. Learning to cry wasn’t directly related to what has unfolded but is an important milestone on my journey. Crying is the expression of sadness and I was suppressing a big part of myself for over two decades.

I distinctively remember finding my classmates dramatic when they cried during the training. It was in the final practice at graduation during a standing forward folded twist where my tears finally streamed down my face. What a release! What a relief!

I cry all the time now and what a blessing to be able to express myself in this way. With my bhakti practice of chanting Indian mantras while playing the harmonium, I find myself connecting very deeply to God and the oneness. In those moments, I am often moved to deep tears.

Crying allowed me to connect with the full spectrum of emotions from joy to sadness and grief. And it allowed those energies to move out of my body, so that it doesn’t remain stuck. Understanding this, and being able to practice it has allowed me to be present with what is alive in me and therefore present with my clients. This has become a core part of my energy healing work.

The power of intentional touch

The thing that probably blew my mind the most was the hands-on adjustments during the teacher training. I didn’t know that touch — the quality, method and intention of it could have such a powerful effect on another person. I felt the difference in touch from one person to another, and I realised I had a lot to learn about how to touch another person. I was told at the start that the way I assisted would come on too abruptly and out of nowhere.

Over those six months, I learnt to become more intentional with the physical touch but also with my energy. And four years later, I would get good ratings from massage clients.

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But first, the brain

Before I made my way over to working on the body, I took a turn towards exploring talk-based modalities — closer cousins of rationality. As it allowed my intellect to do the work, it felt safer and more revered. Even though working with the body seemed to be where my curiosity lay, I had internalised a belief that massage was the type of work that was beneath me.

I’d been introduced to a book called Non-violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg and I loved the promise of being able to share needs and wants without the accompaniment I’d been used to which was a lot of yelling and explosive anger.

Piqued by the promise of compassionate conversations, I signed up for a year-long training on the topic with five residential modules. I learnt about being in groups, regulating intensity, working through conflict, deepening empathy, transforming emotions like anger, guilt and shame, creating restorative circles and mediating conflict.

The next year I did an introduction to counselling training. It was a good dip of my toe because I quickly realised that I wasn’t interested in holding that type of space. It felt energetically draining and so I didn’t pursue that path further.

Through a conversation with the teacher, I decided to pursue an ICF coaching training as a next step. Training as a coach felt meaningful. A good coach is someone who not only has the tools, but also the ability to listen deeply, facilitate someone else’s expansion and to know which fork in the road to take so they can bring the client towards the ‘aha’ moment.

I enjoyed the training so I decided to give it a go in the real world. I found a few people to give three free sessions to and a couple of those converted into paying clients. But quickly, I saw my motivation for that work waning and I grew bored. I felt I was getting closer to the work I wanted to do but not quite there yet.

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Courage towards the first creative act

Fresh off the shackles of a corporate job, I collaborated on a freelance gig with a guy called Ivan. He ended up recommending a writing community to me when I mentioned my interest to explore writing further. It was pure curiosity that led me to want to write but I ended up with interesting and well-paid freelance gigs from members of the community. Eventually running that writing community became my job too.

The writing had some celebratory milestones too like publishing a personal essay in an anthology, and picking up some writing work. This first leap into a creative act gave me the courage to take another leap into drawing and painting, something else I’d wanted to spend time on. And that leap led to another courageous leap at the end of 2022 to finally do massage training.

Finally training in deep tissue massage

In my massage class there were skilled therapists from abroad looking to convert their qualification, some were adding another style of massage to their toolkit and others were changing careers. I shared that I’d been on a journey to explore human connection at a more philosophical level.

I’d lived in multiple different countries, studied two languages to understand different cultures and even explored the depths of AI from an ethical standpoint. Ultimately my inquiry into humanity ended up leading me back to working with the human body. I finished the training with an interest to explore it further.

Plant medicine and the spirit world

I had become curious by psychedelic mushrooms during my yoga teacher training but I didn’t have my first experience of it until a few years later. Psychedelics came hard and fast after the first time when I had a heroic dose. I sat with it a few times then experienced other variants at Burning Man events and then found myself at an ayahuasca retreat in Peru. That year I was on the cusp of leaving a full-time job again, it didn’t take the same amount of time it did the first round to realise the corporate route wasn’t quite for me. I’d decided to take time off to go travelling. My boyfriend of the time had been interested in reiki and my encounters with the spirit world were becoming so frequent that I no longer felt ashamed to be interested in woo-woo things so I organised a reiki training for both of us. It no longer felt embarrassing or weird. Exploring reiki just felt like another curiosity being scratched. Then we went travelling.

My friend turned green in front of me

I didn’t think too much of that training on our travels, except that I’d probably want to do reiki and massage more seriously. Towards the end of that trip it became more and more pronounced. A month by myself in an old Japanese house in a small mountain town was where I began a daily practice of yoga and meditation. Bringing me back to the two practices that my teacher training introduced into my life. The sheer clarity of thought I had was like nothing I’d ever experienced elsewhere. I started getting very clear downloads of things I’d do including the knowledge that I’d be back in London for the summer, start playing the harmonium and get serious with bodywork.

After a month alone, I was joined by a European anthropologist, let’s call her A. We spent all our days together and became close. Another friend was visiting from the US and when I introduced them to each other, A turned green in front of me. I knew instantly that she was feeling insecure about our dynamic with this new person. Later I asked her and she confirmed all the things my body saw and understood. Things like this started happening more and more. I realised I no longer needed to doubt my intuition about energy readings. My training had given me the foundation, and the daily meditation had heightened my potency. I was ready to start doing the work.

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Fractured foot propelled me towards my truth

The first two months back in London was primarily picking up the jobs that two online platforms were sending me — predominantly in massage. I was able to offer those clients energy work, some even paid me extra for it and others asked me back to do energy healing only. These people became my first clients. Most of my earnings still came from doing massage jobs.

While leaving a dinner party after a day of clients, carrying a massage bed of fifteen kilos on my back and the harmonium of eleven kilos in my left hand, I stepped down from a curb to the road in a hurry. I was rushing for a bus when my foot landed weirdly, made a loud sound and caused instant pain.

The universe wanted me to stop in my tracks. I’d been running around, entertaining massage jobs when my truth was to get courageous and build a business in energy healing. Making money through massage was already proven so I kept at it instead of taking a step away and asking myself how can I grow the energy healing business — the thing I wanted to focus on doing?

Since the injury I have not done any massages. I have taken the time to build my website, think through my position and work on sharing my work in energy healing with the world. I have also had a number of clients. In this time, I have been offering my fortnight kirtans and energy healing, including sharing a kirtan at the online Ram Dass satsang and one at the in-person satsang.

At this point, while I am fully invested in this calling, it is too early to say what the future holds. I want to believe I am not delusional about this being my calling because if it is truly my calling then the universe will find a way for it to work. Everyday I show up in the way I know how, I share my fortnight kirtans with relevant group chats inviting people to join, I am learning about what it means to bring people into my world and share my philosophy around energy healing, and I hope that as I put one foot in front of another, I am slowly chipping away at eventually making this calling something that can sustain me financially.

Follow me here or in Instagram to find out @lightofwansin

Who cares about seasons?

I never used to care about seasonal changes. Perhaps because I didn’t have to, being born into a climate of equatorial heat and heavy rain. Seasons became a matter of survival only when aged nine, my family moved from Malaysia to Australia. Even so, I related to them the way I related to brushing my teeth. I knew it was important to participate in it, but I didn’t care too much for it.

My observation of the seasons started with my fascination for sunrises and sunsets. At a writing retreat, there was explicit scheduling for us to gather on the beach and watch the sun set over the water. It didn’t matter if we were chilling, out having ice-cream, surfing or doing something else, we’d all make our way to the beach and gather at the same spot every day that week.

This ritual left an impression on me and back in London, I had the opportunity to spend a week watching the sunrise over the Thames. By June of last year, I was a prime candidate for wanting to celebrate the summer solstice at the Stonehenge.

The summer solstice is a marker of the longest day and shortest night of the year. And in a city like London, sixteen plus hours of daylight is something to celebrate. As I learnt that two to three minutes are added to the day from winter to summer, and the same as the days get shorter, I realise it is all just a cycle. From dark to light and light back to dark — the infamous yin and yang that governs everything.

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Wisdom of cycles in Traditional Chinese Medicine

I just started training in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) a few weeks ago, which is a system based on many types of cycles. It turns out working with seasons and cycles is age old wisdom. TCM dates back nearly five thousand years after all.

In TCM, the four seasons which we think of as across a year also operate daily:

• 3 am - 9 am: spring when yang energy rises and we blossom to begin the da

• 9 am - 3 pm: summer when our yang energy is the strongest, and we are most energetic making it the most suitable slot in the day to do work

• 3pm - 9 pm: autumn when yin energy rises and yang energy starts declining, this is a time for relaxation and winding down

• 9 pm - 3 am: winter when yin energy is the strongest and a time for us to hibernate and recharge

There is also a daily qi cycle. Qi being the life-force energy that flows through us and provides for our well-being when free flowing and causes illnesses when blocked or disrupted. In TCM, energy peaks in different organs for two hour intervals throughout the day. I will share more on this in a future post.

Working with these cycles can bring benefits and ease to our lives by replacing relentless year-round productivity with sustained rhythm of action and rest. If the cycle that operates across a day makes sense, then surely the cycle that operates a woman’s menstruation as well as the seasons in a year makes sense too.

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Yang: the energy of a busy summer

Four hours and twenty-nine minutes of darkness have been added to the night between the summer solstice at the end of June and the autumn equinox last week. And it has been an active summer for me. I was so privileged to be in a position financially and geographically to attend a Krishna Das retreat in Tuscany. I got to commune with a group of bhakti devotees and deepen my practice. Then I was in Copenhagen and Stockholm with my family.

Back in London, I attended two more Krishna Das concerts, scored my first teaching gig on chakra and the subtle energy system for a top tier yoga studio in London, attended two beautiful festivals in areas I love and topics I want to keep deepening into: Medicine festival and All Things Fungi festival. And the biggest win was starting to lead my own kirtan events. I have been hosting them every two Sundays and since the first one, I have led five kirtans with eighteen attendees and also have been growing my one-to-one energy healing client base.

In the heat of the summer, I also cycled madly across London doing massage jobs that appeared ad hoc. I took every job that came my way and was in and out of my flat non-stop. I was also running three times a week and going to yoga too. If summer was about the height of yang energy then I maxed out on all my yang.

A forced transition into yin

There were days I’d do an eighteen or nineteen kilometre run as I was training for a half-marathon and then be on my bike for hours cycling to and fro massage jobs. Something had to give and it came as a foot injury on a Friday night of a very long week at the beginning of August.

I’d just done energy healing at a client’s, finished at a beautiful and delicious dinner party and was scuttling towards the bus having decided I wasn’t worth a £21 Uber ride at near-midnight (scarcity choice and wrong one at that). On my back was my fifteen kilogram massage bed, packed away like a standup paddleboard, in my right hand, an eleven kilogram harmonium and on my feet mere sandals. As I put one foot down from the curb to the road, I heard an unpleasant thwack and in slow-mo I collapsed to the ground. Except that I controlled myself because I didn’t want to drop and smash the harmonium that had been on a long-term loan to me.

A very kind couple came to help me and while I wailed on the floor, from a fear of not being able to do the half-marathon I was on track to do it in under two hours rather than the pain or severity of the injury. They waited for me to order an Uber and helped me hobble into it.

August and September were my months to slow down and take stock. I knew that my lifestyle of taking all the massage jobs was untenable but I didn’t want to face the truth. I felt like I had come so far in leaving the corporate behind and making it work in this bodywork world. I was also starting to get paid energy healing clients at the full rate I was charging. Things were getting real!

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Debunking money trauma and beliefs on productivity

In all that, I saw a fear of not having enough money. A belief that if I could break even by breaking myself over all the massage jobs then I was doing something right. And this injury forced brakes on me. I was unable to walk, let alone stand on my feet and massage for hours. While my body sighed a big relief as I had come to the realisation that it was energy healing I wanted to focus on, it was the massage that was getting me the easy money. Where was money going to come from now that I was injured and unable to take massage jobs? How was I going to break even on my monthly expenses?

Perspective is always interesting because I was not cash-strapped. I’d just spent the previous year not working, and travelling full-time. I was okay with spending money to make that happen and so I was faced with the question of why I wasn’t willing to give myself the same investment in building up my energy healing business.

I have been out of sustained work since the eighth of August when I injured my foot. I saw my physio the very moment he was available and he comforted me that it was just a soft-tissue injury that would recover easily and speedily. It seemed that I would be on track for the half-marathon. The swelling did not reduce and after three weeks I decided to get an xray. The xray was concluded with soft tissue again so I continued walking on it. Three weeks after the xray, at seven weeks post injury, I got a call from the hospital that a review process had picked up that actually it was a fracture! And I would have to be in a boot for six more weeks.

I truly believe that the universe conspires for things to happen when they do. Whether it is someone you meet, a blessing given to you, an accident or something else. The time and place of things aren’t to be overlooked. (Of course, don’t overthink them either!) I understood it was God/the universe’s way of telling me I needed to slow down and relish in the moment. This gave me a fantastic Medicine festival where I met and got to experience it in a more savoured, more quality way rather than a fast and consumeristic frenzy that I am patterned to.

Clarity appears out of force

My truth, as the layers kept peeling back was to go full-fledged into the energy healing work I knew I was here to do. It was so clear, and it comes up in almost every meditation session I have when I seek clarity in direction.

And this injury gave me space to develop my business by getting my Google reviews up to date, building a website that spoke of what I offered and developing a course for a teacher training that led to followers on Instagram and instant clients that week of the training.

This timeout from work also allowed me to truly face my fears with money. As the dust settled, I realised not earning money right now wasn’t that scary, and it was all an illusion. The illusion grounded on a belief that if I broke even then at least no one could point their fingers at me wanting to do energy healing when I had a promising career spanning, at this point ,over a decade already in the very-hot-space of AI. It was also pinned to the belief that if I wasn’t working then I must not be productive and what a waste of space of a human I must be to sit on the couch all day. I faced these beliefs and in the seven weeks of immobility, I debunked them. They lost their power on me.

Moving into autumn

The beautiful thing is that autumn is a period to start slowing down and to start taking stock of the harvest. It is a period of transition, preparation and preservation. It is a period that asks what am I ready to let go of so that I can prepare and preserve for what is and should come?

My daily meditation practice has become robust, and it now has company in a daily singing practice and bhakti devotion. I am back at the harmonium, practicing and learning new songs. I am more clear than ever that my energy healing practice is where I want to focus and the offering I want to give this world and therefore the engine by which I should make money and sustain a livelihood.

I am focused on developing my following and client base in energy healing. I am invested in my learning of TCM because there is a lot of wisdom around qi and life force energy I know it has already given me and will continue to. I am tapping into my business school knowledge to think about customer personas. Who do I want to serve? What do I actually offer? Why should they come to me? And I am getting back into writing to explore all the new knowledge I am acquiring and all that I have to offer the world when it comes to working with energy.

If energy healing is something that interests you, you can find me on Instagram as @lightofwansin and I will be writing a load more about it.

My life is after all my practice, and I hope that by sharing how I live, I can impart some wisdom on working with energy throughout our daily lives.

Love and light

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About two months ago, I was invited by my yoga teacher and founder of 4beat yoga, Marcus Veda, to teach about chakras and the subtle energy system as part of his teacher training. This would be at a top tier yoga studio called Mission E1 in London.

I’ve been teaching, facilitating and designing learning since 2021 for data and AI. It was nice to apply a set of skills I’ve become an expert at in my new arena.

I also acknowledge how big of a win it is to have my first teaching gig especially after only three months in the space.

The methods I’d picked up as a learning designer ended up benefiting my session. I sat down with the curriculum Marcus broadly wanted covered and started to think about how I would use the forty-five minutes I had. Fifteen of it was dedicated to mantra chanting so I had thirty to play with in delivering a lecture.

The lecture focused on the heart and throat chakra because the week’s training was about working with the spine which activates with these two chakras.

I chose to share real life examples from my own practice to colour in the nuance. The class was engaging with lots of contributions from students as well as questions about how to bring energy work to life in the context of a yoga class and also in other healing fields. I saw a number of people take pictures of my slides and everyone, I mean everyone, was deep in the chanting. It was awesome.

Watching my relationship to gratitude change:

I was subsequently invited back to to do a lunch time session that was attended by a smaller handful of people. The past me would have felt disappointed or perhaps ashamed that of the forty-two students in the class, only three or four came to the kirtan with a few more trickling in as the lunch break ended. But the present day me was so grateful I got to share kirtan with a lovely group of women. I had been hosting fortnightly kirtan and group energy healings in my living room with around four people each time which may have also helped remind me how awesome it is even if one person turns up.

As part of the original curriculum, I was already scheduled for a fifteen minute slot right before their final teaching assessment where they had to teach the whole class. Marcus wanted their throat and heart chakra opened before they did their teaching segment. It was again another beautiful session and I was so deeply grateful to share that practice three times in a six day yoga teacher training course.

Collaboration emerges with ease in the right spaces:

Later I joined their afterparty to get to know the students more. There I spent time with a lovely woman from Prague who wants to get more into freelance marketing. We chatted about how we could help each other out so early in our journeys, with her giving me marketing advice and me helping her to set up her new business.

I also spoke with one of the assisting teachers who ended up lending me two of of her singing bowls. She had brought them from Mallorca where she resides and wasn’t sure what she would do with them as she had wanted to leave them behind in London where she comes regularly, but she didn’t know where to store the bowls. Estela and I then discussed collaborating on a sound healing and group energy healing session as part of the London Sauna Week that another friend of mine is organising in October. And then she invited me to do kirtan at her yoga shala and retreat venue in Mallorca.

Other wins:

Leading kirtan at the UK Ram Das Satsang:

A good friend of mine told me about a community gathering around the teachings of the spiritual guru Ram Dass. I found out that one was happening online on Monday and we decided to join. It was a lovely gathering with a replay of one of his talks on how under the ashes you can find an ember and you just need to keep fanning it to get to a fire again. We then had a chat about it, chanted together and by the end of the session, I was invited to lead kirtan at future online gatherings as well as lead a 25 minute one for the next in-person gathering in London.

Starting my acupuncture training:

I also started a half-year course in Traditional Chinese Medicine with a specific focus on working with energy through acupuncture. I am excited about this journey because I know it is going to take me into the nuances of understanding the life force energy we all have. Already in the first day of training, I learn that qi has six sub categories. The first we all know about which is yin and yang. It can be broken down into three parts and also into four which are the seasons of the year and also the direction (North, East, West, South).

Voice lessons:

I started training my voice with a renounced Hindustani singer last week. This week I had my second lesson. She is helping me tune into my voice, tune into my emotions so my unique voice comes out and work with the energy of sound and its healing properties. I am practicing as much as I can to tune my first instrument - my voice.

Festival costume DIY:

I also managed to find time to make a costume for the masquerade ball of an upcoming festival. I made a beautiful headdress with flowers and foliage, and I made a lovely sash to wear over my dress that is now covered in acorns, leaves and autumnal foliage.

I feel happy that I get to dictate how I use my time, I am slowing down to appreciate all these moments and either cancelling or not scheduling things that just feels like busy for the sake of being busy. I know what my priorities are, I know how I have to keep plodding ahead and I know who I want to spend time with and on what I want to spend my energy.

One foot in front of the other, and keeping going like this as I keep committing to the work.

When I came back from my year away, there was no doubt in my heart that this London summer, I was going to give full-time bodywork and energy work a go. Back in June when I first began the journey, I wrote about this conviction and how it made me utterly embarrassed.

I reflected on the major things I learnt in the past three months.

1. Just get started to move beyond embarrassment

If you ever feel convicted by something even if it brings up weird or negative emotions, my strong encouragement is to lean heavily into it. Everyday, I had my work outfit to wear, my equipment to bring and then I was out the door making my way to the client.

Showing up to do the work day in and day out was the very thing that loosened and eventually dissolved the embarrassment. It just became a game of survival, I needed to do the work to earn the money. That was it.

I’d even started an Instagram account called @lightofwansin where I post about energy healing, my meditation practice and my bhakti practice. These days I don’t think too much about what it means to post or not post. I just try to keep a good cadence of posting regularly.

It has reached the point where I had an inbound client interest as a result of the Instagram posts! This gives me conviction to keep sharing my content online.

I can say that I am no longer embarrassed, I even take time lapse videos of some of my morning meditation practice to share on my Instagram account. It feels like I am getting more comfortable letting the world know what my practice is and what I can offer them.

2. Finding suitable clients is a long-game

Of the people who have paid for my energy work, quite a number have come through the bodywork practice so I know that massage is still a good lead generation method.

Being pragmatic, this is something I am thinking a bit about because even though I don’t want to do massage anymore, it could still be good to allocate a bit of time in my week to it as it is a great way to get new clients.

I had advice about Google reviews as being a fantastic lead generation method so I have also been diligent in asking all my energy work clients to review me on Google maps. I currently have nine five star reviews and I think it is beginning to do the trick.

On Saturday, I had a random text asking me if I still do energy work. I am hoping to see this seed more inbound clients as time goes on.

Having been an avid reader of other people’s flyers at festivals, I decided to print out flyers for portaloos at a festival I recently went to. This is the flyer I created with Canva. It has the same colour palette as my website to start making it feel familiar.

It was called Medicine Festival, a conscious festival focused on kirtan, ecstatic dance, medicine music, rituals, yoga and conscious living, it was the perfect place to find my clients. I also printed business cards. I guess I was hoping to generate some interest but aside from some followers on Instagram, I did not get immediate work from it.

It shows me that lead generation takes time and is something I should keep up consistently in the background if I want to become a familiar face and trusted healer in the space.

3. Doing the work makes you value the work

I have worked with eighty-seven clients across massage and energy work. When I started, I had been advised by a teacher to offer massage clients a free ten minute energy healing at the end. After a few times doing this, I realised I didn’t need to overstretch myself.

Most clients were happy for me to do energy work on them within the time they’d paid for. In a sixty minute massage, I’d usually do forty-five to fifty minutes massage and ten to fifteen energy work, in a ninety minute session I’d do seventy-five and fifteen.

I’ve also had clients request just energy work when they’d originally booked a massage and now I have started building up a private base of clients including some who have asked just to do energy healing. This has given me ample opportunity to practice my energy healing skills and to recognise the potency of my practice in this modality.

I am both even more convicted and more excited by the direction of my work as a healer. I know that energy healing is just the beginning of a wider practice I am developing.

3. In the face of truth, money is not that sticky

I was surprised to find that I had been mostly breaking even. I honestly wasn’t sure how this would be possible when I first started out, and that was quite a big fear for me. I have been operating a meticulous Google Sheet with all my incomings and outgoings.

Before going away to a festival in the middle of August, I was even in the positive by a couple hundred pounds. But since injuring my foot two weeks ago, I haven’t been able to work so I am no longer breaking even. I am monitoring that figure to make sure it doesn’t get out of control.

This money thing does keep me on my toes, I don’t want to be burning through savings to survive in London. And yet, I am less freaked out despite being in the trenches. Back in June, I’d mentioned there was a chance I’d have to continue doing freelance AI work to make this path sustainable and earlier this month I came to the conclusion that it was going to be the way forward. I’ve been speaking with some potential opportunities and reaching out to people I’ve worked with in the past to see if there is any potential work for me. This is still a work in progress.

One of the coolest things though is realising that I broadly feel the same despite making much less money than I’d previously done in white collar work. There are obvious restrictions in my life that having less money creates such as being much more conscious about the activities I do socially but this has not really limited my experiences.

In fact, I might argue that it has enhanced my life to be cooking all my meals, it has made me more aware of the types of food I eat. And through this restriction, I’ve discovered the generosity of my friends who have offered to pay for things for me. It has also meant a lot of wholesome home cooked dinners with friends, catching up while running, or hanging out in living rooms and parks.

There is so much we can do in London and generally in life that doesn’t involve spending money socially. I am pleased that I live a lifestyle and have the types of values to be able to drastically reduce my spending while living in London and not limit my life.

4. The willingness to afford is a matter of values

It has also given me sheer clarity on where I would be willing to spend money on and as a result what I value. I still make sure to buy good quality food and take care of my macronutrients, I haven’t descended back into a pasta-heavy student life diet.

I am still willing to spend money on training that I value. I currently have my eyes on acupuncture training, a coaching training and an energy healing training. I am not sure if I will do any of them but I am contemplating quite heavily on how they may bring value to my evolving practice.

I also know that going to Krishna Das’ retreats once a year at least feels very important for me so even though they aren’t cheap, I am finding ways to make other trade-offs so I can afford them.

Surprisingly, Burning Man still stands as an important thing I want to do yearly. I had to skip this year but I want it back on the radar next year. I have greatly appreciated the insight into where I am still willing to stretch and spend and what I am willing to cut down on.

5. Run lots of experiments and then learn from them

I have run three public and paid events in this time! In the tech world, they always say to ‘ship’ your product before it is ready. I can confirm how good of an advice that is! A friend I had met in London Fields had offered me to use the spacious ground floor of their home for any form of healing work. It was a big space suitable for yoga classes and other events. I wanted to get the momentum going so I decided to run a group chanting and cold plunge event on a whim. I sent the invitations out to people only a mere few days before that Sunday and we were seven people in total. It was fantastic.

Feeling like that event was a success given how short of a notice I gave people, I decided I wanted to host something every two Sundays. I had three people at the first kirtan and group energy healing in my living room and then four people at the second one. The crazy thing was someone who followed me on Instagram also said they were interested, I didn’t see it in time but I hope they can join in future.

I had also put the event up on Eventbrite after encouragement from a friend who also runs events from the space he owns, and someone actually bought a ticket! Unfortunately I had only put the post code of my address as I wasn’t comfortable putting the full address on the Eventbrite so the lady came but couldn’t find where it was. By the time she sent an email, the event had started and I did not check my phone. It was only after that I discovered she had tried to find the venue. I refunded her and had to pay the Eventbrite fee out of pocket so she got a full refund as Eventbrite wasn’t going to refund that part to her. It costed me £1.70 but the proof of concept was proven. The pipeline is growing and I feel excited to find more and more of my people.

The group event was also a good practice for me to feel comfortable asking to be paid for my work. And charging what I felt I deserved. For these group events, I charge a full-price of £20 with a sliding scale down to £12 for those who cannot afford it. No questions asked.

6. How you show up in life is how you show up in work

The way I show up in the world is the way I show up in my work. This is why I am now even more convinced that my own lifestyle and practice is key to doing the work with the level of integrity and earnest truth that I desire. I have developed my morning practice into an hour of meditation each morning followed by harmonium playing and chanting and lately a lot of insights that I journal about too.

One of the biggest realisations is that the deeper I go into the healing work, the less I want to cram my days. My days now feel extremely spacious, often just doing one social thing a couple of times a week rather than every night. I relish in my solid morning practice, a good breakfast, home cooked meals and spaciousness for things to emerge. I am open to possibilities when the week isn’t jammed with pre-planned events, and I love being able to message someone to do something on the same day. There are obvious limitations with this style of living as Londoners tend to need to book into other people’s diaries way in advance. I still do that with some friends, but I make sure not to have my whole week planned in this way.

At the festival I attended, I brought the harmonium everywhere, it allowed for spontaneous connections with people who I cherish and lovely jam sessions. It was the combination of my solid practice being shared with others and allowing the present moment to unfold exactly as it wants to with no forcing.

7. Valuable pivots happens in the trenches

Running around picking up all the massage jobs exhausted and drained me to the point where I had nothing left to put into my energy healing practice. It had put me in a place of scarcity and resourcelessness to grow the practice that I actually care about. It felt like I had come so close to the work I actually wanted to do and then fell short of it and got stuck there. People often talk about this as doing shadow work, like being a producer when they actually want to be in front of the camera.

I was scared to focus solely on energy work because the full-time work and client base is not there yet. My injured foot before a festival was a sign from the universe to slow down and reflect. This time off has made it clear that I no longer feel the excitement or growth in just doing massage. It made me realise I do have to pick up freelance AI work again to make things work in London.

I caught myself and now I want to be careful to make sure I am doing the actual work rather than adjacent work. Adjacent work is not good enough when the actual work is my calling.

I arrived at an understanding that the energy healing practice was part of a bigger intuitive holistic practice. I wanted to offer my presence and my practice to others so that they can learn to come back to themselves. And I have pulled together a website that I am proud of.

The work I am offering draws from many modalities I have been trained in over time. This includes energy work, meditation, chanting, coaching to help people return to themselves. It was only through doing the bodywork and energy healing in a full-time capacity that I got to arrive at this understanding. The unfolding keeps unfolding!

8. Share your offering for opportunities to arise

The most meaningful thing on this solo journey is finding people you want to collaborate with. One day after my regular yoga class at a studio called Mission E1 in Shoreditch, I walked past my teacher having lunch. The conversation we had ended up with him inviting me onto the faculty of his 4beat training, which is a style of yoga I am obsessed with. I am now going to teach about chakras and energies in his training this September and next February.

An amazing DJ I met at a Burning Man rave in Helsinki in 2024 had begun her own spiritual journey into yoga and playing the handpan. We’ve been in conversations about collaborating on a retreat and are now figuring out how we can collaborate on a kirtan event together. We are also in the process of putting a standing call in the diary so we can have a regular space to jam, bounce ideas and allow collaborations to emerge. This feels very exciting for me.

In the time since I started telling the world that I am doing energy work, I have met a large handful of retreat venue owners. While nothing has been set in stone on any of the venues, I know this is an energetic shift towards the possibility of a day retreat and eventually residential retreats.

Until next time!
Love and Light

Wan Sin / Caryn

So for me, running was always something anyone did to prove that they are strong, capable, great because they couldn’t find that self-love in themselves. And as I was a recovering self-hater, I steered well clear of running the way a recovering addict might stay clear of whatever substances they were abusing.

Over time the self-hate dialled down, and I was able to find spaciousness to appreciate myself without attributing that appreciation to my achievement — merely the value of a person alive and breathing in this world. I began to appreciate beauty, I began to appreciate the parts of living that did not need to come from achievement and from cracking the whip on myself. I began to see the world in the way one might see it if one had always understood sheer and pure enjoyment, being able to take delight in little things like a nice cup of coffee or the sun on one’s face.

And one day, I found myself being encouraged by my boyfriend of the time towards running while we were in Malaysia. He wanted to show me that running could be something I enjoyed. He told me about a thing called zone two, and how we all thought we had to run faster than we did and he believed I could really enjoy it. I was reluctantly persuaded. We hopped on the treadmill at a gym in Penang, Malaysia overlooking the ocean and began doing five kilometres a few times a week.

That first run went much better than I thought it would. We started with some stretches, then we began with a slow jog and eventually moved to a faster pace, always keeping an eye on our heart rate. Alex, to his credit, is not Type A like me. He was the yin to my yang, and having him as an accidental run coach was the best thing for the start of my running journey. He showed me how to run from a place of sustainability and how not to chase numbers. This became a regular thing and even after we left Malaysia for Bangkok in Thailand where Alex was teaching for three weeks, I continued running regularly at the gym in the hotel we were put up at.

In those Bangkok weeks, I was struggling with my mental health and so the habit of running became a lifeline. I made sure to run a few times a week supplemented with some strength work, it was the bare minimum I promised myself I would do. Dipping below that was putting myself in a danger zone I yearned not to be in.

My conversations with many people who do endurance sports confirmed that they do it for a challenge. And validating that they can do the thing is indeed an intrinsic part of it, but validation being the only motivator behind such activities turns out not to be a universal truth. I’d projected that onto runners of all time. And I’d later find myself discovering the awe that lives beyond self-hate when it came to running. That is to say I started to run from a place of deep love and awe for my body. And this is how it happened:

After Alex and I split, I continued my travels as planned to Japan and found myself settling into a longer stay in a rural mountainous town in Nagano prefecture of Japan. I’d been offered an artist residency to build a big daruma doll in exchange for accommodation at an old Japanese house (these are known as akiya’s). It took me a few weeks into my stay to feel settled. By this I mean, situated in the place, havin an understanding of how things work, making my way with ease around the grocery shop called Tsuruya in town, and also how things like the meticulous trash sorting that happens in Japan works. And with that spaciousness, I started installing routines into my life like daily meditation and yoga and then eventually I felt the desire to start running again. I’d only been running for two or three months and had then taken a one or two month break at the time.

The town I was in and the area I was staying in was very mountainous so the first few runs were up and down crazy hills or in little roads farmers had around their land where it was a bit flatter. As if the universe knew that I wanted to get serious with running, when I started language class at the local library, the teacher I was paired with (the class runs in a one teacher to one student ratio and is all voluntary - it is pretty amazing) turned out to be an avid half marathon runner. In introducing myself to the whole class, I’d shared that I was trained as a yoga teacher and so he’d asked me for stretches that a runner would benefit from. I then showed him a five kilometre run I’d logged onto the social running app, Strava, to which he instantly responded with encouragement that I should do the half marathon coming up in the city just over. It was in six months, when I had planned to be back in Japan after summer in London. The next day I drove over to Saku and fell into what was the beginning of a half marathon training.

At this point I had never run anything longer than five kilometres. But I knew that I could probably do seven kilometre and mapped a loop of the first section of that run from and to the car. I believe that when things are destined to happen, they happen seamlessly and this was the case for my training as a runner. A few weeks after I began my runs in Saku, more people came to live at the akiya who also happened to be avid and regular runners. I also discovered a running track close to the akiya. With this combination, I ended up running on the track twice a week and as a group we’d drive out to the Saku route and run various parts of it as what became an accidental run club. Those runs in Japan, especially with the friends I ran with, were what made me fall in love with running. And it wasn’t just running the track and Saku route, we’d run in places we travelled to too. I’d planned a road trip as a group of four to a place called Toyama Bay because it was supposedly known for amazing seafood especially yellowtail. And because I had a partner-in-crime for running, we ended up running along the bay overlooking the gorgeous Amaharashi Coast. The bay run against the backdrop of the Tateyama mountains was like a scene from a painting. We were so lucky to do that run. On another trip, my Toyama Bay running buddy — a Danish girl called Alba— who I’d gotten super close to, ran around a beautiful lake called Noriji and this time we did nine kilometres. It was a run that made us both so happy. We were surrounded by luscious green trees, views of an idyllic lake and the alps in the background. I remember feeling overjoyed at the scenery that the distance felt like nothing. I remember feeling so grateful to be alive and to be able to move and run in a place as beautiful as that. A few weeks later, another friend who was visiting from the US, Steph, joined Alba and I on a trip to Sado Island. There we also did a nice big loop around the lake.

The runs in Japan gave me so much joy. The run clubs were a sweet combination of things I loved the most — connecting to a community, moving my body, and going on adventures.

With the help of AI, I’d begun following a running plan of two five kilometres a week and one long run which would increase by one kilometre each week and drop by every four weeks. This was a sustainable and cautious was of increasing my mileage without causing injuries. I had the time to do it this way too since I had begun the training early. Also, at the time, I had not intended to run a specific time, I just wanted to be able to do a half marathon.

I was also fascinated to see my body’s capacity to handle the endurance with each added kilometre. I had never pushed myself in this way before for the aforementioned recovering Type A reasons but now I was pushing myself from a place of awe. I was in awe to see what my body could do. I was fascinated by what should have been obvious but what now felt viscerally true — how an all nighter would make running so much harder, how fueling well could change the way my body felt but how most of all that camaraderie in running made the whole affair so sweet. I was hit with runners high topped with community and connection high. There was nothing quite like it.

After three months in Japan and nearly two months in that community, it was time for me to head back to Europe and spend the summer in London. It was good timing because the weather had begun getting unbearably hot in Japan. Back in London, I knew what I needed to do to keep up the running and quickly compiled a run club. Prior to leaving London the year before I’d gone on a run with my brother, his girlfriend and her friend who lived close by. I asked to be put in touch with him, and Jonty and I began running regularly together. When a friend visited London, who was also training for a half marathon, the three of us did multiple runs together too.

As the runs got longer, the fascination and awe with my body grew. I loved going on runs while not listening to anything because it meant I could be more physically present with my body. Lately, the runs have become solo runs and I have been enjoying that a lot. When I set out for a long run, I know it is both a physical and mental endurance game. I know by about the third kilometre if its going to be a good run or not and lately I’ve felt relaxed and ready for the remaining distance. e

My longest run to date was a nineteen kilometre run that felt very good. On this run, I tried something new. I decided to do an active meditation of feeling each and every part of my body and thanking it as I felt it. I felt the balls of my feet as they hit the ground, I sat with that feeling and then I thanked them for what they do for me. I felt my big toes, and my other toes, I felt the way they balance me and carry me forward. I felt the movement of my ankles in its joint rotation, I felt the way of precious knees help me propel forward. I felt the power of my thighs and my glutes. I felt my the way my lower body carried my upper body and how my losely held fingers as if cupping two eggs also helped with the forward motion. I thanked each part of my body as I felt what it did for me.I realised that I too wanted to apologise to the parts of my body I wasn’t able to love the way it deserved. I apologised to my stomach for shaming it, and my heart for loving people who didn’t deserve its love. Then I found myself tearing up, both in gratitude and in feeling the sadness of not having been able to love parts of my body. The rest of the run was bliss, my body felt so appreciated. I remember the last few kilometres, I was running faster than ever.

Now I understand that one can also run from a place of love, because that is how I relate to running. I run because I love myself, because I am in awe of my body’s capability. I run from a place of appreciation and gratitude. And I run to remember how much of a freaking privilege it is to be alive, to be able to move in this way.

I’d know about Lions’ Gate Portal but hadn’t really paid much attention to this. This year, I felt called to spend a restful day at home, and intentionally think about how I want to manifest the year ahead. I worked with ChatGPT to think this through and here is where we landed:

My Lion’s Gate Portal central theme:

I choose to become deeply rooted in myself, so that I can be fully available for the life that is trying to meet me.

I trust myself enough to stay.

Rooting means finding a base, a place to stay and grow.

I trust myself enough to stay here in London, with the work I am building, with my body, with people I am letting into my life. I choose to remain open when I feel my defences go up, when I become dismissive, when the excitement dies down, I choose to stay with myself when someone else cannot validate me.

These five areas will contribute to the central theme:

1. Devotion over chasing

I no longer chase what I need to convince. I devote myself to what is mutually choosing me.

I am ready to recognise and drop my patterns of chasing people who aren’t choosing me, dismissing what is available to me, abandoning things when the feel uncomfortable, seeking external validation, overriding my body, being scarce with money and clients.

2. Belonging without self-abandonment

I allow myself to be known. I give relationships enough time to become real.

I am surrounded by people who expand my capacity to love, create, play, learn and be myself.

I no longer create loneliness as a form of protection.

I invite sustained relationships with women I genuinely love, energy workers I want to collaborate with, people I admire, a spiritual community and people who know me over years rather than weeks.

I open up to secure love, I can let someone else be who they are and still choose them. I am responsible for creating the safety I need inside myself. No one else is responsible for its existence.

3. Unfolding into a medicine woman

I help people become more fully themselves so they can do their best work in the world.

I become known for the transformation I facilitate, not the modalities I use.

The right clients recognise the value of my work and happily invest in it.

I am not a massage therapist. I am someone who want to establish a body of work as a holistic healer who works with intuition. And my modalities are not the what, they are the how: energy, bodywork, intuition, listening, conversation, chanting, presence, meditation.

4. Abundance without overwork

My income grows without requiring me to abandon my body.

I find ways to support myself financially without abandoning my physical body. The things that sustain me financially do not have to be my identity. My healing practice gradually becomes the centre of my professional life. Ultimately my vocation.

Money is safe for me to receive. I don’t need to panic to create it. I can build wealth through consistency rather than urgency.

5. My self-conviction is true

I am so deeply convinced of my own path that external validation becomes beautiful but no longer necessary.

I am my own witness.

I am convicted by my path not because others say positive things about it but because I have clarity and alignment.

I know what I am building.

I know why I do it.

I don’t need everyone to understand me for me to continue.

To arrive at these five areas, I worked through the following questions:

1. If the next 12 months went incredibly well, what would be different in your life? Give me whatever comes to mind—work, money, relationships, body, home, creativity, spirituality, community, travel, etc.

2. What are you most ready to leave behind? This could be a pattern, identity, relationship dynamic, way of working, fear, or way of relating to yourself.

3. With your healing business, what do you secretly want it to become? Think bigger than what currently feels realistic.

4. What do you want your romantic/relationship life to feel like this year? Not necessarily “find a partner”. Describe the experience you want.

5. Where do you feel you’re currently playing small?

6. What is one thing you deeply want but feel afraid to admit you want?

My answers:

1. As the reflections are quite personal I will share at a high level that my answer to question one emphasised the direction I wanted my business to go, how much of my income I want to have coming from the healing work I do as opposed to other streams like freelancing, and massage work on the platforms I currently work through. I thought about the female friendships I want to continue and to cultivate in my life. I noted some of my patterns of dismissing certain types of people, my relationship to being in grounds, how food has been and continues to be a way I regulate my emotions, I emphasised the importance of my Bhakti practice (kirtan, harmonium and chanting). And I also thought about the things I want to bring into my life such as more training in Traditional Chinese Medicine, attending Krishna Das retreats, going on Arjun Bruggeman’s retreat, host my own day and multi-day retreats and my relationship to London.

2. The things I am ready to leave behind are my patterns of dismissing people especially the women who should be in my life. I also want to be more discerning before jumping into friendships that aren’t going to sustain in the long term. I also have a pattern of feeling that people disappointment. I have a pattern of judging the flaws in others rather than seeing their beauty, psychoanalysing them so that I can keep myself at a safe distance. And through all of this, I have a pattern of creating my own loneliness. The other thing I am working on is my pattern of thinking I am above consequences and being impulsive even on things like my job. I’ve seen myself do this with the massage platform jobs I’ve gotten where I don’t always commit or take it as seriously as I should. I am ready to leave behind this blasé attitude to things, I want sustained consistency in the things I commit to. I want to leave behind the way I am with others so that I can have deep community, I can let the people who should be in my life into my life and leave behind the sense that I am always chasing the people I want in my life rather than letting the ones who want to and should be in my life, be in my life. I am so ready to have a life of sustained friendships, community and relationships.

3. I am working to become the person people choose to go to because I work not just with logic or feelings but also with our unconscious patterns that live in our subtle energy field. I want to become the person people want to work with instead of an executive coach, I want to become the person not only spiritual people seek, but people of all walks of life, especially neurodivergent Asian women choose to work with to return to their true selves. I want to be the bridge between heaven (the spirit realm) and earth (the way we incarnate in this physical world) so people can show up in the best way and do their best work.

4. I want to feel settled in myself as I work through my anxious attachment, I want to be able to love a partner without abandoning my value and love for myself. I want to feel comfortable having a healthy boundary between me as an individual and me within the context of a relationship. I want to be in a partnership where I can show up in my truth, be vulnerable and be honest. I want to be able to ask them for help without feeling ashamed when I need it and yet also be okay if they cannot give it to me. I want to love a partner exactly as they are, I want to love a partner by accepting them in their journey and not try to fix them. I want to be in a partnership that emphasises good and deep quality time together. This means we enjoy making dinners together, a lot of time chilling and chatting on the couch and there is no necessity to be out and about doing things. I want to be in a partnership where I can respect their desires and wishes that may be different from mine, they may be someone who wants to travel to places I don’t feel the need to go to, and live in ways that is different from how I want to but I feel at ease with them doing their thing and me doing my thing. I want to feel the spaciousness, security and peace of letting them flourish in their own way while I flourish in my own way, doing this side-by-side of each other.

5. I have a scarcity mindset around money still and this has meant that I am running around taking up ad-hoc massage jobs and making myself exhausted. I often think my physical body can handle more than it can. I am also in scarcity mindset about finding the types of clients who want my offering, I know they are out there.

6. This one was extremely personal so I will leave my answer off the newsletter.

I realised that all of this stemmed from the discomfort of being alone, the fear that I don’t matter to others and the worry that people will abandon me. Having this as the backdrop of my life has meant that throughout my life, I am the one who constantly initiates things. I am always reaching out to people to make plans, always the first to initiate conversation or to hatch a social outing. Even when there may be times where I just need to rest or be by myself, I’d overextend myself. As I become more and more grounded in myself and in being by myself, I realise how exhausting living this way has been. And lately I wonder if the energy I had to do all that wasn’t just because I was younger but also because there was a lot of adrenalin driving my fears and compelling me to act as if it was a fight for survival.

Perhaps it is also a part of growing up but I’ve come to realise that it’s okay to spend time by myself and it’s okay to have a weekend where I have no plans. It’s okay to not be fixing my calendar and maximising every single slot that’s available. And more than that, it is okay to take it easy and not try to talk to everyone in social situations.

And I was so pleased to see myself put this in action in an extreme way this summer:

For the summer solstice on 21st June, I went to Stonehenge with a big group of people. The Stonehenge solstice is incredible. It is an all-day and all-night affair that is a free festival where the railings around Stonehenge are brought down. People get there to watch the sunset ahead of the shortest night of the year around nine o’clock and then watch the sun rise again around four o’clock ahead of the longest day of the year. Between the sunsetting and rising is waiting time but a midnight picnic with friends, drumming, music and other spectacle. There are food trucks, silent disco, all-night drumming inside the Stonehenge circle, and our group of friends had multiple picnic rugs side-by-side under fairy-lights with a load of picnic food and blankets. This was my second year in a row and it has always been cosy.

A beautiful ritual but also one that can be tiring as it takes a few hours to drive there, you don’t sleep all night and then you drive or take a train back. Even though I didn’t know everyone in the group, I felt comfortable with them and showing up as myself. Instead of trying to stay up all night, I took intermittent naps throughout the night and woke up rested for the sunrise. I’d lie down and sleep, wake up, eat some food, chat to friends and meet new people then go back to sleep again. I cycled like this a few times throughout the night without feeling ashamed or guilty. Nobody said anything about me sleeping even though most of the night I was one of the only ones sleeping. Everyone was very comfortable doing their own thing and allowing me to do my own thing. I was so pleased that I got to show up with courage and got to rest.

A week later I went to a bhakti retreat in Tuscany with Krishna Das. The retreat ran across four days and there were a couple of free time blocks each day. I stayed offsite with three other people and we only had one driver between us so it was decided we would stay onsite throughout the day and only go back at night time. I’d come prepared with ear plugs and eye covers knowing there was a chance I’d have to find a quiet corner to rest during the retreat. Thankfully the venue had lots of shady trees with picnic rugs and pillows underneath where we were encouraged to relax and chill out.

It was very hot in Tuscany at the end of June and because we are also meeting lots of new people and doing a lot of processing, it is quite a tiring time. I also wanted to keep up my running which meant that I ran a couple of times, early in the morning to make it for the 8:30 am yoga which kicked off the day. Every day from the first day I arrived I took a nap and completely wiped out for two hours. I think the younger version of me would’ve felt that was a waste of time and it took away from socialising and meeting like-minded people. We were, after all, a small group of 65 so into chanting with Krishna Das that we paid a premium to spend time with him and his band. Quite a niche community and probably have a lot in common, I’d say.

As it turns out, because I took care of myself and my needs, it meant that whenever I did socialise with people, I showed up with presence and the interactions were of higher quality than trying to keep up interactions while my social battery and general energy levels were low. Even though I chose to socialise less, the times I did were very enjoyable and I am so proud of myself for all the choices I made.

The way I attach to people with anxiousness is still something that is very present in my life. The constant need to message friends or initiate new conversation with friends I hadn’t caught up with, the constant need to fix plans in my social calendar, and the yearning for company when I am by myself even if I’d just returned from social activities, these are all still default ways of being that I lean into. But the growing awareness and the small but significant changes I am making are starting to steer the mothership in a different trajectory. I am excited to see how I continue to unfold with greater and greater ease towards the me that is waiting.

1. I begin my day with a Bhakti yoga practice called kirtan — chanting while playing the harmonium then I do my morning pages (three-pages of journalling) and finish the morning routine with a thirty minute silent seated meditation.

2. I exercise discernment in who I see and who I give my energy to. My energy is precious especially as I work in the field of energy work, I have to be careful with how my energy is influenced and consumed.

3. I trust my gut even if my brain tells me not to, I can choose to leave when I feel bad energy, I can disengage when I feel drained. I value my own instincts. I don’t need to explain my choices.

4. Two early clients who were showing signs of red flags taught me that just because I am the service provider, it doesn’t mean I just take on anyone who is willing to pay. I am in a privileged position to be able to be discerning about who can become a repeat client. If my clients do not respect me and my time, I do not need to take them on as a repeat.

5. One of the most basic but incremental ways of loving our own body is to ensure it is always being moisturised. I have traditionally been good at moisturising my face, a habit my mum made sure I picked up but moisturising my body has never been as habitual. After my three months in Japan where I always moisturised after going to the onsen, I now make sure to moisturise in my last shower of the day.

6. As I work with people’s bodies, it is possible for me to pick up other people’s energies especially unwanted ones. My good friend Irene who writes taught me to clean myself with Himalayan salt at the end of each work day so that I don’t store the energies that I pick up. I have been washing myself with it and just had a two kilo bag delivered.

7. I am careful to make my room and especially my bed a sacred and safe place of rest. I do not wear the clothes I wore out especially to massaging others into my bed. If I need a midday nap and haven’t showered, I will take a shower or I will have a nap on the couch in the living room.

8. I pick up energy easily and it affects me, therefore I am now also careful where I put my mat down for yoga practice. The energies of those around me especially those close to me can affect my practice. My yoga practice is a sacred routine of meditation and synchronising with my breathe, I want to keep the practice as ‘pure’ and grounded in myself as it can be.

9. I trust myself to lean into my impulses, if I want to do something crazy and it doesn’t harm anyone or kick the can down the line on some consequence, I am self-led, I take the leap and I go for it.

10. I prioritise the things that are important to me, right now it is my bodywork practice so it means I am opening up my weekends to client bookings and may have to see friends less or see people on weekdays. Prioritisation is about trading off, knowing what matters most and being willing to let go of other things.

11. I don’t drink alcohol, at times I have found myself choosing to drink it just because people around me do. I love myself enough to take note of this when it happens next and am willing to be socially different by saying I don’t and prefer not to drink.

Eleven ways I am getting better at not abandoning myself:

1. I play the long game by not pushing beyond what feels right for my body, this is especially true in yoga where I have had a pattern of performing in class.

2. I absolve myself of the need to take emotional responsibility for others especially as I have had the habitual pattern of doing this for the men I am romantically linked to and other people I care about. I continue to have empathy but I don’t need to over-extend beyond my capacity to be worth it of their love. I don’t need to lend others my nervous system and burn myself out to feel valued.

3. My line of work is extremely manual, especially now that I am just starting out, I have to carry a heavy massage bed on public transport across London to clients. I choose to be able to sustain over the long-term by taking care of my body — I take the lift where I can, I accept help where it is offered, I do not overexert myself just to make the client happy, I am unapologetic about choosing to sit down when I can even during massages.

4. I honour my two weekly strength sessions at the gym, even though I prefer yoga and running so much more. I trust myself to know if there is a reason to skip, I maintain disciplined but not through self-flagellating.

5. I have reverence for my body, what I eat is what I become so I choose to cook at home as much as possible, using unprocessed foods where I can.

6. I do not take my stomach for granted, I take time to eat, I chew thoroughly and I remember to slow down when I start eating fast. Eating deserves its own time and presence, I choose not to rush or be occupied with something else while eating.

7. My natural body clock is to be alert and up around six am, I work with this by going to bed early, prioritising good rest and waking up when my body wants to wake up without feeling frustrated that I can’t lie in for longer.

8. My habitual pattern of making a lot of plans and jamming it all in comes from an anxious attachment style mixed with my high extroversion, I want to be around people all the time. I long for closeness even after I have had a lot of socialising. By understanding this, I do not keep defaulting into it and can make more space in my schedule where I am not with others, where I am by myself, resting, doing my own things and feeling calm and grounded even with no one around.

9. I make sure to take time to drink enough water. I carry my one litre bottle around and have a sip bottle by my bed side.

10. I have take supplements to enhance my lifestyle — this includes protein powder, creatine, which is one of the most researched supplements good for muscle mass, enhanced athletic performance and brain function and magnesium glycinate.

11. I am very active, I go to yoga at least twice a week, and the yoga is very intense. I run three times a week with one of the runs being a long one, and I strength train twice a week. Aside from that I work as a mobile massage therapist, this is why I honour my rest day, currently Monday. I take her seriously. My body needs a break to recover from all the activities and making sure that Monday is set aside for that allows me to keep going.

Those two months would be time to begin to work with people’s bodies and their human energy field. Up until that point, I’d found every excuse for starting the work.

They were plenty and full of fear. To do work I actually care about feels too ‘true’ and too vulnerable. I was scared by what it would mean to really care, to be earnest about my endeavours, and there were other easy excuses too like questioning the financial sustainability of the path and why I would venture into a profession that is looked down upon (at least by some people who’s opinion I care about) .

Perhaps one of the biggest issues is that I’d always been good at ‘white collar’ work where money is abundant and the work is more respected. It has always been easy to get freelance or full-time work even after taking chunks of time off work and I found that type of work to be stimulating and interesting enough. I convinced myself that the body and energy work ‘stuff’ was just a side gig while my main gig was more serious and impressive in AI.

But the ten months off, ironically enabled by the white collar work, gave me enough space and time to parse the truth from the near-truths. Across this time, my body understood that bodywork and energy work had risen to be my calling, and it was the work I had to do. I could try to escape it, I could try to deny it but it would always call me. And as for making the path financially sustainable, I’d have to find ways to reduce my expenses and perhaps I will still have to do some freelance work in AI to keep things afloat.

Back in London, the setup was already there, I’d known that I could easily get bookings on a mobile massage platform I’d used before, as the algorithm prioritises therapists who can get to clients easily. These clients tend to be central and my flat is in the literal heart of London. All I needed to do was to get massage therapy insurance, re-activate my account and get another massage bed after having sold my previous one. I knew I’d start to see bookings come through as soon as I put my availability up.

The week I was back in London, I put the wheels into motion and the last thing left to do was to pick up the massage bed I’d found on Facebook marketplace.

What I didn’t realise was how embarrassed I’d feel about the earnestness of this endeavour when a very dear friend, Jonny, came with me to get the massage bed. I’d told him along with all my friends that my focus this summer is to get as many bookings as possible on the platform so that I can practice bodywork on many different bodies while earning money. And I had also hoped that I could offer an additional ten minutes of reiki at the end of each session to gain more experience.

As we waited for the seller to finish with their client so I could pick up the bed and pay for it, I instantly felt a deep sense of cringe and embarrassment at myself. So many different parts within me emerged, asking what the hell I was doing, who I thought I was, why I was buying this bed. I felt silly, stupid and small. Jonny’s willingness to help me made me feel horribly exposed.

That feeling was so visceral. I felt the helplessness in my heart, and it spread all over my body. In my effort to not deal with it alone, I let Jonny know how I felt and we explored why together. Through that conversation I both avoided truly dropping into the feeling but also discovered that my embarrassment was a sign that I was on the right path — one of being a healer working with people’s bodies and energies and holding space for them.

When I got home, I laid down to rest and had planned to take a nap when the platform notified me that someone had booked a ninety minute session with me that evening. I’d put myself as available for that whole day earlier in the week and thought I’d removed it but turns out I hadn’t. That first booking instilled so much faith in my choice. It was a woman who told me she picked me out of three options because my bio talked about my work with Reiki. She also really liked my massage. She ran a retreat company and was looking to bring more people like me out on her retreats. Her partner also ran a gym and had space for massage therapists to work there. That Sunday I ended up with three more bookings across London. Three days into getting my massage bed and I’d already attended to four bookings. It felt like a pretty neat early outcome.

It is still early days and I do wonder about the sustainability of this path especially as I want to solely do this work without supplementing it with freelance desk work. And I want to do this while living in London. My outgoings are definitely higher than my incomings at the moment but I have a bit of a runway to see if this could work.

As I write this, I’ve had two days of zero bookings and now I’m on the way to my fifth booking. I don’t know how this journey will unfold, only that I have conviction it’s the journey I have to go on. It feels like the most skin in the game I’ve put into anything, and on the cusp of turning thirty-three I am doing something that feels peeled away from social pressure, validation or approval, something true to who I am unfolding into.

I sense this is a period to grind seriously, a period where I will be putting my head down to do honest work, make my way out to my clients, dragging my massage bed across London with me and use this as a period of inquiry into the art of body and energy work. The work feels very laborious and manual. It reminds me of the repetitive work I see people having to do when they pack up outdoor tables daily or set them up daily — I’ve often wondered if those people get bored by the menial task of dragging tables out and setting the chairs up around them, then dragging them back in every single day. But now I see myself embarking on a similar way of living, dragging this massage bed across London to homes. I feel like I am allowing myself to have some sense of repetitiveness in my life, the act that is required to gain mastery in a craft, and honestly I am quite excited.

This has had a profoundly positive impact on me. It feels like my dad finally understands me. I haven’t taken any money from him, independent girlie and all, but five years ago, when I brought up wanting to leave my corporate Accenture job, he was extremely disapproving. My dad didn’t understand why I would leave something ‘so good’ and ‘so stable’ where I had such good career prospects. By then, I’d been promoted twice in quick succession, and was probably one of the fastest analysts promoted to manager ever. I’d also made my way into the enabling and protective wings of many partners at the company. It was true that my path there was set and if I’d stayed, I’d be a partner by now. But I’d outgrown what the place had to offer me and when I told my dad I wanted to leave, I’d been wanting to leave for years. Being met with his discouragement felt like a blow and made me question my own intuition and wisdom.

I was already a twenty-something, living an adult life in London. Of course, I didn’t need his permission but I not only wanted his permission, I wanted his approval too. And more than that, I yearned for his blessing. I left the Accenture job anyway and my work has become a meander of interesting projects and initiatives. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Lately, instead of asking the types of questions I’ve come to expect of our conversation — when are you going back to work, how are you thinking about making money and all the rest of the career related questions — he hasn’t been pushing that agenda hard. No more forcing a circle (me), into a square peg.

I cannot pinpoint what changed but I wonder if it is something to do with being a full-time nanny to my sister’s fifteen month old baby and/or being retired in his sixties.

Throughout my twenties, I was a diligent therapy-goer. Almost all those sessions would be spent exploring why I found it so difficult to accept myself and why I was such a harsh critique of myself and hence the rest of the world. One of the things that kept coming up was my relationship with my parents, my unending sadness at how they couldn’t see me for who I am and accept me as I am.

By dad offering to fund my sabbatical and nomad lifestyle, he is showing through his action that he not only accepts my journey but is also willing to embrace it. This simple act has been immensely healing for me. Thank you, dad.

I’ve been on video calls with my parents a lot lately— almost every morning this past week, in fact. A part of it has to do with the spaciousness of living in the Japanese mountains in a house with Starlink Internet, another part of it has to do with our growing closeness because of them seeing me and, as a result, me being willing to share more of myself with them.

On a call a few days ago, I mentioned to my dad that I felt his gesture of offering money has made me feel really seen. And his reflection surprised me. He said that maybe he and my mum have been overprotective of us and that they should trust us to do what is best for ourselves. It was so cool to hear that since I know he and my mum think they are already chilled parents as Asians. (And they are!)

I’ve always found it frustrating that my parents cannot see the world the way I do or at least try to respect that my views differ. I know this is something they have been trying to work on, especially as I’ve made it clear that I do not want to engage in any conversation where they attempt to push the Christian agenda on me. My original intention with writing this piece was to express my gratitude for my dad’s ability to see me but in exploring that, I’ve also come to understand how their perspective was formed too. The world is a scary place and when you are parents, you want what is best for your kids, even if ‘best’ is incorrectly defined by the protection mechanism of fear. I am now aware that my parents’ fear for me has always been fueled by love. It goes along the lines of: I love you therefore I feel scared for you, I feel scared for you therefore I want to protect you. Their need to protect me has often led to them imploring me to make risk-adverse choices, to stay in the comfort zone and be safe. I don’t agree with it but I get it.

To watch your child grow up with so much ‘potential’ in the ways society approves (e.g. with a normal corporate job) and walk away from it all to live a nomadic life draining money from savings in their thirties instead of diligently saving for a house and retirement must be a scary thing.

I have been wondering about the origins of this and think it could stem from our history as Hokkien-Chinese migrants to Malaysia. Hokkien people come from Fujian, a South China region where many people migrated abroad in search of economic opportunities. In Chinese culture, filial piety emphasises a deeply held responsibility to take care of one’s parents and the future generation so money quickly becomes a core focus. With China and Malaysia not having the type of government welfare I grew up with in Australia and the UK, saving for ailments and rainy days is also expected. Finally money is also tied to having ‘face’ and securing social standing and identity in the community.

On top of that, my parents are from an era where leaving university meant entering the job market meant starting to think about a family, buying a house and working until retirement. That progression into a ‘flourishing life’ of stability is what most people envision and want for their kids.

As I write this, my body is slowly registering that they didn’t purposefully choose not to see or accept me, their construct of the world was just built to more closely align with a way of living that I don’t see as fitting for me. I know my choices are not conventional and I always thought they were simply another way of living. But I can see that especially for my parents’ generation, it is a concept that takes a bit of getting used to. It makes me awed at his ability to change his view of the world and to adapt in his understanding to meet me where I am!

My desire to live the way I do, where I follow the unfolding of opportunities and seek experiences in building large art, in travelling, living as a nomad, feels right to me. I trust myself to be savvy with money, I believe in my capability to seek freelance opportunities from past clients whenever I feel ready to work, I lean into my unyielding ability to hustle for what I want such as building an art piece, something I’d have done for free, in exchange for living in this rural Japanese house. I know at a guttural level that if I ever found myself in deep need of money, I would always find a way.

When I left the second try at a full-time job just after one year, it triggered my dad’s protective mechanism and fear. I remember telling him with glee that because I left just a few months into the new tax year that my taxes, given I was not planning to work for the remainder of that year, were going to be heavily reduced. I was celebrating because I was already not going to work that year so to get a big refund from the tax office felt like a major win. For him, it was the opposite, he didn’t see why I was celebrating, given it was the outcome of having quit yet another very good job., He felt like the ‘win’ was just me being myopic. Maybe on the outset it looked foolish and careless to quit again but deep down it confirmed an inkling I had the first time around — the full-time job lifestyle just isn’t for me. Now I fully accept that.

With the way my ADHD brain works, I need to be doing lots of different things all the time. I want to be doing art builds, writing, energy work and teaching yoga. I want space to fully explore all the possibilities in this life such as take up an impromptu residency in rural Japan, travel without a return ticket, go to Burning Man without rushing back to work the next week and find myself in weird and wonderful places. I want to be the owner of my time.

I fully appreciate this lifestyle has its downsides, in my two previous full-time jobs I had private healthcare, employer-contribution into my pensions and other perks that comes with full-time employment. Thankfully, I am a citizen of two countries that believe in universal healthcare — in the UK access to healthcare is free and in Australia it is partially funded. Having an employer co-contribute to your pensions over thirty-something years, if I were to live the corporate life until retirement, is surely a significant amount of money but one that I accept not being able to access as I choose this lifestyle.

I went to a business school in London where many of my classmates are now high-paying and high-ranking employees of large banks, private equity companies, management consultants and some are also successful start-up founders. Even when we all started working, the difference in my pay compared to theirs —a proxy for elitism — impacted me a lot. I felt like I was as smart and capable but not earning big bucks like them. I worked hard to move up the ranks fast to close the money gap. But as time went on, I realised that it was just me trying to win my parent’s and society’s approval. Being rich, having a fancy LinkedIn title, and climbing the ranks are things that have been feeling more and more foreign as I lean further and further into the life that is built for me. But I also do not reject those things. I applaud my friends who have staying power at institutions like that. In the past, I’d compare myself but now I have a deep level of acceptance of myself and understanding that we are just built differently. I know I am able to feel proud on their behalf and joy for them because I am wholly and deeply on my unique path. Being here brings wonder and joy for myself and I can radiate that outwards to others. And maybe my path has become an encouragement for those living a more conventional life but want to experiment with their path. I imagine I already have in big and small ways.

One of the cool things about being on this meandering road is comfort with the unknown and becoming more assured that only the unknown is certain. Earlier I mentioned being awed at my dad for being able to embrace my lifestyle, I also feel awe at myself for the growth I have had in getting closer to living this type of life. Five years ago, like dad, I would have had too much fear to dip into my savings for an unknown period of time. And now as I pass nine months of unemployment, I don’t feel panicked about using my money in this way. I feel very comfortable in my ongoing unfolding and having my dad in my corner feels like a bonus achievement.

Eyes, they say are the window to the soul, a peek at the interior of a person. When I look in the mirror it is often my eyes that I focus on. It feels like a check in with myself, how I feel today by way of how I look.

When I am sad, my eyes lose their sparkle, and when there is no sparkle, I can’t see the beauty in me. I don’t mean this metaphorically or as a question of self-esteem, I just mean that there seems to be a connection between an internal flame of aliveness sparked by joy that makes me able to see my own beauty.

Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I have had comments on my beauty even when I haven’t felt beautiful. I think that to be able to feel beautiful without pride or comparison with others is one of the most loving acts you can give yourself. An act I think every single person deserves to feel about themselves, doesn’t matter if the rest of the world doesn’t. It took me a long time to arrive at this feeling about myself. In Asian culture, there are two things aunties love to comment on. One is the colour of your skin, especially if dark, and another is how fat you are.

To have dark skin is to be frowned upon so throughout my childhood and even now I am constantly frowned upon. While I was in Malaysia in December and then again in February, I had an aunty who took the liberty of letting me know every single time I met her that my skin was too dark. Why are you so dark? How did you get so tanned? Have you spent a lot of time in the sun? Asked negatively too, like I’d done something wrong, which in her eyes I had.

Those comments immediately made my inner child curl up and want to hide away with shame of having a skin colour that is distasteful. The adult me just grit my teeth, swallow the comments and try not to let them linger. It is hard to have people negatively comment on your looks, especially aspects of it that you can hardly change without having it affect you. That is why for almost all my childhood and even through my early twenties, I never thought I was beautiful. I’d been affirmed too many times by others that I wasn’t and their version of reality became the truth that I bore.

At some point in my twenties, I became friends with and then briefly dated a guy who I could count on to be honest even when it hurt. I remember that it genuinely shocked him to hear me say in casual passing that I didn’t think I was beautiful or even pretty. It had been a truth I’d absorbed and no longer wished was different or questioned. I shared it the way one would simply comment on the sun being out again or the sun is setting again as mere facts. It was him who sat me down and laid out the logic as he saw it.

In his view beauty can be defined in two ways: self-perceived beauty as in how you rate yourself, and beauty as defined by others as in how others rate you. Imagine you are just swiping for looks on a dating app, and rating the person out of ten, he said something to that tone. He then followed by saying that in what he thought was the general view of men, I was at least an eight on the latter. It meant that I should feel at least an eight in the former too, though he understood that self-love and self-worth are complex matters that can get in the way.

Looking back, it feels too mathematical that it required this kind of formulaic reasoning for me to begin thinking that I could actually be beautiful. But I guess that is how belief systems work. When you spend your whole life being exposed to one belief system it becomes hard to unlearn it. I had been told that my skin was ugly, so how could I be beautiful?

By then I’d dated a number of people who told me that I was beautiful in their eyes and they assured me, what they thought were the eyes of others too. Somehow I just couldn’t internalise their view as my own. I’d been to enough parties where I knew my entry was turning heads but that understanding evaporated when the heads turned back. Maybe it was that this all had happened enough times for me to begin questioning my own deeply-seated beliefs because they did start to shift, and I was able to start feeling like I looked good in the mirror. When the shift first started, the voice in my head would always say something like ‘they think you are beautiful’ rather than ‘you are beautiful’ or ‘I am beautiful’.

It stayed that way for a while as if my belief system needed transit time to properly integrate. Eventually, I managed to arrive at seeing the beauty in me.

One of my friends once told me they believed themselves to be hot, and I could see that she both truly meant it and that it wasn’t meant in a I’m-better-than-others sort of way either. I guess the closest thing I can compare it to is white male privilege — the ability to have unabiding self-confidence that leads to all sorts of opportunities in life. I remember leaving that conversation thinking wow, I love this person’s confidence in themselves, it didn’t matter if she really was or not, the fact that she had the self-confidence to think that of herself was an attractive quality. Carrying herself around that way probably meant that men found her hotter than whatever hotness she already was. This conversation felt like a permission to feel that way about myself too.

As you can imagine, whenever I look at myself in the mirror and sad eyes look back, it isn’t just the sadness I feel in the moment that weighs on me, it is also the fact that it took me so many years to feel beautiful in my own skin.

My time in Japan has been restorative to the point where lately whenever I look in the mirror I see how overjoyed I am and feel beautiful again. The beauty I am referring to isn’t to do with my self-confidence, it is more to do with how much my eyes sparkle, how much I yearn for life, how much joy I feel in the moment.

I kicked off a walking pilgrimage on Shikoku island as soon as I landed. Shikoku eighty-eight is a pilgrimage called henro in Japanese on foot, bike or public transport visiting eighty-eight temples in a clockwise direction and requires at least forty-five on foot. The pilgrimage is broken into four friendly stages and I did the first stage which is called the awakening. Across seven high-energy and exciting days, I walked 181 kilometres up mountains, by seasides, next to waterfalls and highways. I visited twenty-three temples, bowed too many times to count and got my temple stamps called goshuin. I met incredible locals as well as Japanese henros and foreigners who I still stay in touch with and I am making plans to see two of them again.

I got to experience Japan in a very pristine, quiet, gentle and rare way, far from the hustle and bustle of Shibuya in Tokyo. It was just what I needed and I quickly fell in love with this country. There were periods on my walk where I was the only person in an expansive forest hearing the sounds of bamboo clacking against each other in the wind. There would be times where I’d do a 360 and all around me are cedar trees that keep reaching up into the skies. I got to experience the definition of Japanese forest bathing. There was also a sense of achievement walking fifty thousand steps a day as I hadn’t done much preparation or training and yet it felt easy on my body. It was a visceral experience in wondering what else my little body can do! I am keen to explore that.

After I finished the walk, I explored Naoshima, Kurashiki, Hiroshima, Miyajima, Kyoto, Tokyo and Hakone. And in each place I went to, I kept bumping into friendly people who I ended up having dinner with or swapping contacts with or doing activities with. I ran into an AI ethics researcher at a bathhouse on the art island of Naoshima who knew my friend. I ended up having dinner with her and her recent fiancé, who’d just proposed to her that day. I got to cold swim next to the Kusama pumpkin one morning. I had dinner with a Dutch lady I met at the next hostel who was about to start the henro. The universe was generously bringing people into my life across the trip. I had planned my Japan trip so I could overlap with my brother and his girlfriend in Kyoto and Tokyo — I hadn’t seen them since July! And I caught up with a friend who now lives in Tokyo the day they left. In Hakone I ended up at a very private and hidden onsen that has been the best onsen experience to date. Private tatami mat rooms to rest in between dipping in magical volcanic hot spring water. I went twice and the rest I got from being there was out of this world.

I’ve been ‘freefalling’ into life’s unfolding. Freefalling is scary but it is also exhilarating and something that you can learn to enjoy. I’ve started to enjoy freefalling more and more. As I got closer to my flight out of Japan, I realised that I was just not ready to leave yet. I decided to contact a not-for-profit called Akiya Collective run by someone I’d been connected to. I was hoping to stay at their renovated akiya (abandoned Japanese house) which had become a communal makerspace for artists and creators. I thought that the chances were low since I hadn’t participated much in their activities but leaning into freefalling has taught me to always shoot my shot. After I told the founder about the art I’d built for burns, she asked if I was interested in helping build art in exchange for staying at the makerspace. I was delighted. And that is how I ended up where I am now for the next couple of months.

Komoro is a rural town two-ish hour journey west of Tokyo. I didn’t know anything about it or anyone here when I arrived ten days ago. But there has not been a day here that I haven’t had something to do. I’ve met the foreigners who live here, attended a language exchange that happened to take place the day after I googled ‘language exchange in Komoro’, made friends with a few Japanese people, taught a group of six people yoga, gone to three different onsens, started learning Japanese, did a hanami (flower gazing during cherry blossoms), attended a local party, hosted a few people for dinner and so much more.

Each day, I wake up and journal, do my yoga self-practice and meditate. I am in the mountains, the air is nice, there is often sun and blue skies. I feel like I am starting to enjoy the freefall and trust in the process. My eyes sparkle, I am alive. And because of that I feel beautiful again.

I finally made it to Japan after wanting to come for a long time. I thought I’d make it here in 2024 and then 2025 but it couldn’t work both times. When we planned our nomadic journey, I’d mentioned to Alex that I wanted to go to Japan in April without him because I wanted the experience to be hugely about sashimi and he’s vegan. It was all in the works and then I managed to align with my brother and his girlfriend’s one week in Japan so we spent a couple of days in Kyoto and Tokyo together.

They are fantastic at literally everything I love like sashimi, the bathing culture, nature, art, the ocean. I also love that I’m in a country with majority Asian people. It makes a big difference for me as an Asian myself.

But the thing I wanted to muse on today is the bathing culture and my life in bathing here. I’ve bathed either in a tub, at a bathhouse or in an Onsen almost everyday I’ve been here.

I realise that I have a strong relationship with water, every time I bathe I gain a lot of clarity and direction.

I found my way to a hidden spot in the hyped and very touristic Hakone where there was literally no one. You rent a room for two hours, four hours or the whole day starting at 10 am and ending at 5 pm. And you alternate between bathing in the hot spring and resting in your tatami mat room which is heated and overlooks a garden.

When I got there yesterday, the owner tried to convince me it wasn’t what I was looking for. No views of Lake Ashi or Mt Fuji (views of Mt Fuji is extremely temperamental so it isn’t guaranteed anyway but when it is there then it’s highly prized) and just one bath in silence. He told me it was a place more of a healing facility rather than a fun facility. I was deterred and began walking away when I decided to ask ChatGPT if it thought I’d like it based on all the research it’d been helping me do on Japan. I decided to go back based on Google reviews I’d read and that ChatGPT thought it was perfect for me lol. And it was the best thing ever.

I didn’t realise until this experience that the rest in between onsens can be more powerful than the Onsen experience itself. It feels like the integration. I had a two hour session yesterday where during a rest period I fell into a very deep resting state. One that doesn’t come so easily.

I knew I had to go back today. I had wanted to go for the full day but because it was raining and there are a lot of tourists, I only made it in time to have 3 hours and 15 minutes before they closed.

While I rested on a comfortable beanbag like futon block, I fell into a psychedelic state with images at one point. At another point I felt a deep sense of relaxation and at many other points I fell into mini naps. I can’t imagine how a full day there could feel like. I am really hoping to experience that someday.

The lesson this taught me is that integration of powerful experiences could be where the lasting impression lies and I’m curious to go deeper into this.

I don’t have pictures because no photos are allowed. The tatami mat rooms are simple but so pleasant and quiet. The bathing room is simple with two onsens from natural hot springs and I swear there is something about the water and the land because it’s simple but I knew I needed to go back today.

The place I went to was in Ubako: https://shumeikan.biz/

And here is the google map link if you ever find yourself in Hakone https://maps.app.goo.gl/wjnrYnD5nKSt1hw98?g_st=ic

They used to have lodgings but that’s no longer the case.

It’s a bit of a short and rushed one today because I’ve been onsen maxing.

I also climbed up Mt Fuji to a fantastic view and did a pilgrimage but more on those later because it’s time for Onsen again haha!

Caryn

Eight months ago when we packed our bags and left London for an indefinite period of time, the only thing I knew was that this decision felt good and right. There was nothing more to it than that. As someone who has struggled to trust my intuition, often denying it for a more rational choice, this clarity felt worth following. So I did.

I imagined a beautiful period of exploring, eating and generally having fun, but the universe had other plans. I felt unhappy at many points and for long stretches of time. In Goa, we couldn’t find solace and resigned to accepting the fate of our noisy hotel above the main street and a beach that could have been peaceful but just wasn’t.

We arrived in Penang, our next destination worn out and sick. I wanted Alex to see where I was born and I also wanted to spend more time getting to know a place I left at the age of nine. I didn’t realise that my desire to spend more time there stemmed from a feeling of needing closure. I had romanticized this place and held so many memories about different parts of it from shopping malls that are now derelict to the waterfront on Gurney Drive that no longer exists due to land reclamation. I don’t know what I needed at the time, only that I wanted to be here for a couple of months. Alex told me that I was a very sad person while we were in Penang, because small and unexpected things would cause me to cry.

A few days after we arrived, we went for dinner with my aunty and her family. There were eight of them, ten of us in total. After we finished dinner and took some pictures to show my parents, Alex and I got into the car to head home. As soon as we got on the highway, I was choking from my tears. It took him by surprise. A year ago, my mum and dad were in Penang and we had also had dinner with this aunty at this exact restaurant. Back then I had felt like crying but blocked myself from doing so. This time, just with Alex, it came flowing out.

I cried for many reasons. The first being that the few tables next to us also had a family with an elderly mother. It upset me that I did not live in the same place as my mum and dad, and they were growing old but not by my side. My sister lives in a different country to my brother and I and our parents live in a third country. The situation is a bit better with my parents living with my sister, her husband and their daughter currently. I think I felt upset and maybe a bit guilty that I was not living this crucial and fundamental family value in Chinese culture. The second reason I was crying was because my aunty and her husband were old and getting older. It was visible. And this dinner was both a beautiful occasion of getting together but also a stark reminder of all the gatherings my family missed throughout the twenty-something years after we migrated abroad. Migrating abroad has its benefits, and that I do not deny, but this dinner brought back to reality the trade-offs of our choices, the family gatherings accumulating over time with our absence. The ‘yet another family’ gathering was not something I got to experience. We left and we never got to take part in them. I cried for that too. I think I also cried because community is something I have been yearning for all my life and here was an extended family offering a familial community that we haven’t been able to take part in for a long time.

Over the course of our time in Penang, I’d cry on walks, in markets and various other places where the energy of memory was particularly strong. I cried for myself, and I cried on behalf of my family, for the things that we missed out on. I cried for our loss.

By the time we made it to Bangkok, my mood had plummeted. I wasn’t able to enjoy the city, and all that it had to offer. And that impacted Alex’s ability to enjoy it too, which I wish could have been different because he loves Bangkok. I felt like a horrible person in Bangkok for getting in his way. I had a lot of guilt. Things were better for me but deteriorating for us when we made it to the islands. We spent a beautiful week in Koh Phangan where we began the process of consciously uncoupling. We had a sad and lovely last day before dressed in our matching outfits for the final time, he took me and my backpack to the Thong Sala Pier where we said goodbye and continued our travels solo.

It was easier to have Alex around, to be supported by him, to be able to dump my trauma onto him and for him to regulate my dysregulated nervous system. He could make me whole again when I felt broken, and I often did. But we needed to make ourselves whole again, otherwise all the things we’d been struggling with would just keep resurfacing — both of our tendencies to try to please the other rather than share what we truly needed and felt. It was occurring for me even at a subconscious level where I’d feel confused by what I actually wanted and blended my desires with what I thought he wanted.

I knew I needed to go and be alone, to find myself again before we explored whether we could be together again. But even that was not a guarantee, we knew. The one saving grace I had was the offer to work with an energy healer I’d met who was going to travel to Malaysia with me. I was going to learn about energy from her and I was excited.

In modern day norms of having a full-time day job, of climbing the ladder, of settling down with a partner, buying a house, having kids, I was working towards those and then I made a swift turn away from all of it. It wasn’t that I was rejecting those notions, it was just that the more I travelled, the more I realised that I was losing myself to my partner and he was over-accommodating me. We were becoming worse for ourselves while trying to keep the other happy. We did it because we thought that is what love was, and we did and still love each other. And I firmly asked that we parted ways because it was difficult for us to work on these things while being in the comfort of the nest — an unhealthy one we’d created. If we were going to have any chance of being together in the long term, we needed this period of separation. And even if we don’t end up with each other, this period of separation would enable us to be happier with future partners or even just with ourselves.

As I throw more and more away — first my career, and then eight months later my life partner, I find myself inching back to square one, to a place of having nothing and needing to face the world who demanded answers of what happened, of wanting to show up but not wanting to excuse the choices I’ve made, of knowing that whatever I’ve decided feels right for me.

And yet, in so many moments, as I lie in bed in the middle of the day, walk in the park alone, sit at my computer, ‘I’m so lost’ sits at the tip of my tongue. I know I am not lost, but it is hard to describe this feeling and state I am in. I am giving up any sense of certainty because the path I’m walking on asks for it. I feel dizzy by my courage to lean into my intuition of what feels right to do. I feel crazy at times, doing the counterintuitive. Even though I am sometimes scared, often alone and regularly lonely, I cannot turn away from venturing further into the unknown. I don’t know what is there but it beckons.

Years ago, a colleague of mine returned to work excitedly sharing the tales of his travels to Thailand. His highlight was a water-based course on holding his breath underwater. As a scuba diver qualified to rescue level, I listened with curiosity. As if I was meant to experience it for myself, it was again recommended by a friend for its meditative qualities, she knowing I was a regular at yoga. The seed was planted, and then watered.

After Alex finished teaching in Bangkok, he wanted to go to Ko Tao to scuba. This was propelled by a student of his building an app to identify underwater creatures. There I decided to do a freediving course. A lady I met who was planning to become a freediving instructor said it is a challenge, even for her, not to panic when she starts wondering if she is purposefully drowning herself. We talked before my first water session.

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When I got into the water, I recalled her words. After dunking my head under water for less than a couple of metres, likely not even one metre, I freaked out and surfaced. And then again and again. Every time I surfaced, the instructor asked why did you come up when I confirmed that I had no pain in my ears and I didn’t feel the need to breathe. My anxiety, I replied bluntly.

In this level one course, we are told we could go up to twenty metres underwater. Alex who had just completed his Open Water course, which is certifying a submergence of up to eighteen metres with a scuba tank did not understand how this was remotely possible. He asked if there was any breathing device we could use while underwater, in case of emergencies, to which the answer is no.

The instructor kept saying how it was much safer than scuba — a technicality matter that I don’t know too much of or care for.

In the first session we made it down to about eight metres but I did not leave feeling like I had gotten the hang of it. What did the lady who said I’d enjoy it mean by meditation? I thought.

On our second water day, I felt the urgency to make the most of our last session helped to stretch me a little. This time I managed to make it down to ten metres. I started to understand the way our minds get in the way.

My brain panics and shouts: Please, Caryn, go back up, you need to breathe.

Once I could sit with that anxiety, and relate to it differently, I gained a renewed understanding of holding my breath for a much longer time than I thought was safe. I also saw that I could tune down the panic.

It helped that my instructor suggested a few rounds of rock-scissors-paper when I got to the bottom of the free diving line before I went down. At the bottom, I played two rounds when he started to go to the surface. I kept wanting to play more rounds. This was the beginning of a change — I could get down there and stay. I was fine.

The night before my first dive, on Walking Street (literal name of the street), we walked past a freediving shop televising famed free diver, Alexey Molchanov, descending over a hundred metres with ease. I was mesmerised and also dumbfounded. Like how is this actually possible?

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We ended up having an opportunity to dive a third time. Before the boat went out, I was blessed to have a breathwork class by a yoga teacher and freediver, Liz. She tailored the class when I shared what I struggled with in the prior free dives. In the class I did a couple of breath holds that grew longer and longer. She timed and told me. She guided me into meditation of welcoming my anxiety, feeling how it feels in my body and then learning to trust myself. It was so powerful that I visualised a white light. This was the big game changer for my entire dive course.

To complete our training, we had to dive to ten metres, rescue our instructor, kick up to the surface with a sandwich grip, holding their chin and mask. Hanging onto the buoy, we had to encourage them to breathe. Mia, my freediving classmate and accomplice, and I both did it. Then we had the opportunity to do a couple of fun dives where I started to ease into the ‘sport’ and ‘leisure’ of it.

In a dive where my instructor videoed me, I went down and stayed down for a much longer time than he expected. He’d gotten used to my freaking out and surfacing that it took him by surprise my staying there, looking at the reef and, he couldn’t see this, but talking to myself in my head. I am fine. I am okay. I am good.

As I prepared to make each of these last dives, I reminded myself of fear and the beauty in it. Fear is a protective part, she wants me to stay safe and alive. But fear when overly managed can also get in the way of expansion and growth — what it seemed to be doing to me here. And as I made the descend, I kept telling myself, that my fear loved me, my fear wanted me to live, I wanted me to live. And slowly, it eased. I only had one dive after that one so I didn’t get to try it out more but I am left hungry for more.

Hunger, I realise is a similar game to free diving. Today is the third day of my coconut water (and flesh) fast that I completed under the guidance of an energy work teacher.

When we feel hunger, we aren’t going to die immediately if we do not eat. But somehow I relate to my feeling of hunger with urgency. Fix. This. Now. As we were approaching the scheduled fast, I saw the parallels fasting had to freediving. I wasn’t going to die by not taking the breathe my brain anxiously believed I needed, which I was far away from needing. I knew that across the three days, I might feel some hunger and I learnt, from freediving, to have a deep trust that I will be able to cross the third day alive.

Surprisingly, I haven’t been as hungry as I have thought. We did prepare three days prior by having raw vegan food. Fruit for breakfast and extra virgin olive oil massaged salad for lunch. It helped me ease into this experience, also a first in my life.

My brain and body are taken aback by how much safety there is in doing things that hits the panic button for me. And beyond the physical safety, how much freedom, taking that leap of faith to do it gives me.

• clarity is priceless, do what you can to preserve it, and invest in what you can to attain it - earlier this week I received a somatic therapy called energy harmonisation. This is where an energy healer channels and works with your chakras to help you find alignment. After the session I felt light and clear, the confusion about priorities and what I had to do in my life was cleared up. I have worked with many modalities including massage, talking therapy of various kinds, yoga, this harmonisation was by far the most clear I’ve felt and it made me realise how we can get stuck without realising. I have a good understanding of how I need to spend my time and on what projects, where my energy is getting drained and how to avoid that and preserve energy. Clarity is also beautiful because it doesn’t abide by societal rules, it helps you align and do what feels right for you.

• treat your mental state with care, it pays off to nip any wobbles in the butt - being in Malaysia brought up a lot of grief (maybe more on this in the future), and while I loved being there I was a much sadder person on average. Already feeling a bit fragile from my time in Malaysia meant that moving to Bangkok amplified the challenges I was already facing. I was now trying to process grief in a big foreign city, which felt overwhelming, disorientated by living in a space designed for permanent temporariness — a hotel — for nearly a month, and ungrounded by not having a routine added to my challenges. The things that would have enabled routine and thus groundedness, such as waking up at the same time and going to the gym at the same time felt difficult which furthered the downward spiral. I am still figuring out how I can avoid falling into this type of mental state in the future. Was it moving places that led to this? Was it moving to a big city that would have felt exciting in a different mental state that made it feel overwhelming? I did feel a bit disappointed that I couldn’t enjoy Bangkok as much as I would have were I in a different headspace. It is a city with amazing food, interesting culture, and so much to do! One thing I realised was when I visited the newly opened gallery called dib, which kinda reminds me of Tate’s turbine room, that having physical space helped me feel like I could breathe out.

• physical acts can strengthen the mental resolve - when we left Bangkok for the islands, I knew that I wanted to try out freediving. A part of it was knowing that freediving was a bit of an extreme sport in that you are going down to 20 metres as a beginner just on one breathe hold! I’d wanted to try freediving but given my mental state, I think I was even more desperate to feel present and to feel like I was living on the edge a bit. I dived down to 10 metres on one breathe hold and it did really challenge my presence, my fears and all the anxieties/voices in my head. I came out of the three day course feeling a lot more present and grounded. In the same way, I had been running regular 5kms in Malaysia and Bangkok and that helped me hang onto resolve, hang onto ambition, hang onto hope. It feels different from trying to prove my ability to do something, it felt like it emerged more from a place of wonder and awe at the human body rather than a need for approval — something I have been working on.

• it is more sustainable to operate from wonder and awe - for most of my life, I’ve related to achievement as a source of approval. It feels extrinsically motivated, like once I hit the goal then I’ve proven myself. But I think there is a better way to do things by operating from curiosity, which stems from wonder. Wonder is defined as a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable. Wonder and awe can be as big a catalyst for growth/change/inertia as grinding for approval, and perhaps even more because it keeps replenishing, you keep surprising yourself when you reach new thresholds/milestones. I think the boundary between wonder/awe and self-hating grind is very thin and I am seeking to be surrounded by more people who operate from wonder/awe. I know they exist and I am manifesting them.

• when you start overthinking a gut reaction, go back to that initial reaction and test how it feels to just follow what it was trying to tell you - I quite often question my gut feeling, usually because I am scared it will disappoint someone close to me, cause them discomfort or because it has to do with spending money in a way I cannot justify. Lately, I have been catching myself overthinking or trying to rationalise myself out of my initial reaction and I try to stop myself, and bring myself back to that initial gut feeling I had. I have become good at seeing if it is a money related restriction I am imposing on myself or if it has to do with being too sensitive of the emotions of people around me. I realise how fantastic I am at deceiving myself, tuning back to that initial gut reaction is something I am learning.

• there is always more room to reach a happy-ground in any compromises - one thing I have been thinking a lot about this week while we have been in Koh Phangan is how I wished we’d gone to Guatemala back in September. There is also a cool conscious community near a lake by a volcano called Lake Atitlan and I would have loved to visit. We had a total of 17 days which we spent just in Mexico because Alex didn’t want to move countries too quickly. We spent those in Mexico City and San Miguel. Reflecting back, I could have been more firm in suggesting spending half of that time in Mexico and the other half in Guatemala, since we were going to travel internally anyway. The other option was to tell him we could go separate ways with me going to Guatemala and him to Mexico, if it really did not appeal to him. Later when we were in India and I insisted we visit Mysore even just for 4 days, those short 4 days ended up being the highlight of both my and Alex’s time in India. This serves to show that I can trust my gut reaction and insist on something I know we’d both enjoy.

• it doesn’t need to be difficult - if things always feel difficult, ask yourself what you can do differently? Is it the people you are surrounded by? Is it the environment you are in? Are you playing out patterns that continue to sabotage or block you? I’ve noticed that for me it tends to revolve around not trusting my gut reaction, fearing my choices will impact those around me — taking on too much responsibility for the well-being of others, the role that money plays as a symbol in my life and how it restricts me from doing the things I want or getting to places I want to go, deferring my judgement to others by asking for their opinions when I can tune into my own intuition.

this list is as much a reminder for me as it is something I wanted to share with you :)

Caryn

One thing I know about myself is that I am a good thinker. I ask good questions, I get deeply curious and I like to dig into the nitty gritty of topics that are foreign to me. In that way, I don’t mind having a beginners mind. But I am a good thinker because I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking.

I’ve spent far too much of my life thinking especially in moments when I’d have benefitted from parking the thinking and move into doing. Overthinking, like overdoing anything — be it food, exercise or work — is a form of indulgence.

And overthinking is also a form of avoidance.

For many years, I’ve learnt to fool others and, most of all, myself that I am doing something because I am thinking. Jobs that are heavy on thinking, strategising my life, taking courses — all different ways to think and avoid doing. The thing is that staying in thinking has kept me feeling safe all these years. It allows me to assess all possibilities, once over, twice over, more if needed and then only proceed with caution, if at all.

No smoothie good enough

Three years ago, I spent my July in New York City. This city swelters at that time of year especially when you are on foot and on the sidewalk as we were. I was craving a smoothie or a shake, something to counter the ever-present heat. I mentioned this to my friend, a Lower East Side local, who navigated us towards a nearby smoothie shop. When we arrived, I looked up at the menu board and mentally froze. There were more than thirty options to choose from. Seeing how many different flavour profiles my choice could take me down, I felt stunted. I remember feeling unable to make a choice. David proceeded to order something brown, probably a chocolate or date thing, while I stood there picking at my fingers, heart racing and fear rising.

I didn’t want him to wait, but I also was not ready to make a choice. As someone who once nearly cried, at work no less, because I ordered a bibimbap which upon unpacking, revealed itself to contain roasted green capsicum, flavours can viscerally impact my mood. I’d envisioned the traditional Korean bibimbap, which does not contain this ingredient, and was deeply disappointed. So after a few drawn out minutes of running through the list of options on the menu board, including many flavours I have happily enjoyed before, like blueberry, we walked out of there with David happily slurping a big and deliciously icy cup of whatever-it-was-he-ordered and me empty handed. I’d been the one with the idea of getting a smoothie or a shake.

Analysis paralysis

Over the years, I have come to see how this pattern plays a big role in my life. In picking new pairs of prescription glasses, in deciding whether to buy something I kinda want but don’t really need and the worst one — in deciding what colour to paint my nails when I treat myself to a manicure and pedicure. Things that come in different colours are the worst, because somewhere in my brain, there is a fear that once I settle with one colour, I might regret the choice I make and so back in New York, it was safer for me not to be disappointed with a flavour that could let me down than to have it at all.

I am much better at this now. But I am still working on being better with this.

A combination of my fear of making the wrong choice, and my judgemental inner critic, when I do make the wrong choice can often times paralyse me. Since leaving the smoothie shop empty handed, I’d ordered and been disappointed and wish I hadn’t ordered many more times and I’d ordered and felt ok with whatever I got and survived another day to tell the tale.

I will be fine

The first time I went out to Burning Man, I was stressing day after day about my outfits. I wanted to have the perfect outfits for each day and it was causing me a lot of grief. I remember telling a colleague of mine at work, who is also neurodiverse with ADHD, and fully understands how overthinking can hijack our brains reminded me without condescension, that the stakes aren’t really that high. It is ok to make a mistake, it is ok to have a mediocre outfit. I will be fine. I have been wearing this like a mantra of late, reminding myself that it will be okay if I order the wrong dish, I will survive if I picked the wrong flavour bubble tea and I can get my nails done again if I decide I don’t like the colour after all.

Little experiments to rewire my brain

I decided to make myself live out this belief today at a clothing market in Bangkok. I told myself I was not allowed to leave the market until I bought a thing or two that I liked. Having observed myself in past, I am very good at thinking my way out of wanting something. I don’t really need it. It isn’t exactly what I want. The price is a bit high. All the ways I overthink when all I want to do is a bit of retail therapy or to just buy the damn outfit.

As I walked around, I spotted a few items of clothing and decided to try them on. In the same way that I had become a good thinker, I wanted to give myself the low stakes playground of learning to become someone who doesn’t overthink before doing. I wanted to give myself the room to feel what a gut-level yes feels like and how to not ignore a no.

I bought a elegant tie dyed top (I know it is difficult to imagine elegant tie dye!) with matching trousers from one shop. At another shop, I tried on a few things I liked, and as I looked at them in the mirror, saw that I was falling into the endless pit of overthinking which I knew would most definitely result in me walking away with none of it. I said to myself, if you like it just buy it, don’t overthink it. So there I picked up three more things. As I was leaving, I walked past a shop selling handmade bags, that were crocheted. I fell in love with a blue one with smiley faces. All those smart thinking parts appeared, the price probably would be lower at the weekend market, you don’t need this, and as I walked away I saw that all my thinking parts were denying me the act of having the bag. In that moment, I decided to walk back, see if it would fit my laptop and when it did, I just went ahead and bought it.

Becoming a doer in 2026

I am learning to find a balance between thinking and doing. And hope that with more rewiring of my ways like these that are low pressure, I will slowly find myself harnessing that balance. There are a couple of projects I feel ready to and want to embark on this year. I hope to sustain these for a longer duration (more on this when I am ready to share). I am manifesting a year that leans more into doing than just thinking about doing.

Alex was invited back to teach at a university for the next three weeks and I am the lucky one getting to tag along. Our accommodation in a high-rise hotel was provided by the uni and it is LOVELY. We have a pool, onsen, sauna and gym as well as a co-working space and multiple outdoor areas to work and chill. Thong Lor is also a wonderful neighbourhood filled with incredible food, cool cafes and great massage spots.

The inability to be grateful

It seems the obvious thing to know how lucky I am to be in such a situation. At large, to be on this nomadic period marked by creative endeavours (in art and writing) and explorations across the globe while getting to CHOOSE not to work. But I have not been able to feel lucky. Instead, I have been feeling bouts of despair marked by crippling shame about me as a person, my choices, my ability to show up as a partner and my purpose in life.

I am in the depths of this work and want to process it further before writing more about it but I bring this up to share that self-doubt has been clouding who I am and what I am here for.

As I write this, I reach within my memories for the times I have felt a deep sense of self, made choices that were distinctly mine and arrived at places unique to me. Filled with conviction, I remember applying for another installation grant when I didn’t even know how I was going to build the structure I had in mind. And then how I proceeded to just make it happen! During undergrad, I found a much cheaper version of the required textbook online, so I ordered a bunch and sold those for a good margin. I made a few hundred just like that.

I yearn for those versions of me. One that doesn’t second guess; one that doesn’t overthink my overthinking; one that doesn’t need to parse what I actually think from what I think I actually think.

Keep her small. Keep her safe.

The freedom of this nomadic self-directed journey has meant walking away from ready-made structures of work and life. This unearthed something more true to my core — what my authentic self wants to become but what my fear parts are resistant in letting me venture towards. And what I experience is an internal battle of awe and wonder to experiment and forge my own path fighting with the voices that warns me from venturing too far.

The voices have been winning because this past month, I have been a diminished version of me. One lacking in conviction, low in enthusiasm and filled with uncertainty.

Overthinking the grant opportunity of a lifetime

Back in November, I worked hard on a request for grant money to build a bigger structure at Burning Man in 2026. I remember pulling long hours on it, hopping on Zoom past midnight with an architect in Finland while I was in India and asking for help from burners on engineering, lighting, sound and solar power. I remember feeling like I had given it my all when I hit submit.

Not long after, an email notified me that I was invited to submit a full proposal. From five hundred, only seventy-five full proposals would be picked. I knew a slew of hard work laid ahead if I was to be serious about the application. And even then, it was competitive. Extended plans on lighting, power, fire, leave no trace, crew, fundraising as well as a line-by-line budget was to be submitted. You can see the questions here.

I had twenty-six days to work on it but by then I was in a different headspace. I wasn’t sure I wanted to build the structure anymore…

Why did I apply again?

What is the point?

What ego trip am I on?

What am I trying to prove?

These questions and others to keep me small and keep me safe kept swirling in my brain.

So the days ticked by. Christmas and then Boxing Day. New Years Eve and then New Years. Then we were packing our bags, on the flight to Bangkok and suddenly I only had four days to attempt a fifteen-page set of questions as well as attach a detailed budget and images.

I tried to chip away at it but I loathed doing it for the sake of finishing the race rather than earnestly trying to win it. So I let it sit promising myself that if the spark was lit again, I would give it a real go.

Sparking the fire again

The night we landed in Bangkok, we decided to go to Alex’s favourite place called The Commons - a cool hub for creativity, food and co-working in a leafy environment. There we bumped into my friends, Kirsty and Alex, with their two friends, Simon and Mei. Kirsty and Alex had to leave because of an early flight the next day so we ended up with Simon and Mei for another hour.

Simon and Mei had been wanting to go to Burning Man, Simon actually tried to get tickets in 2020. Our hour became filled with reminiscence of the burns we’ve had, the joy of building art and the magical experience of Burning Man.

The universe was conspiring and on Monday I got to work.

The compressed window meant I had no time to overthink. The concept was already clear in my head, inspired by Qing Ming Jie and a relic to impermanence (not ready to openly talk about the full concept yet). I explained why this piece was important for me to build, reminded myself of how I wanted to represent non-Western dominated narratives including bringing a Chinese diaspora inspired art to the burn. I talked about my love of climbing Burning Man art and how it meant I understood the importance of safety engineering. We calculated the sheer amount of wood needed for our structure, I learnt about very technical things like what is required to have an open fire, how to anchor large structures to the ground, what materials are needed and how much that costs. Then I got to calculating the materials and requested for a budget.

Hitting submit knowing my effort had integrity

Everything was ready to go at 1 am last night. I decided to sleep on it and do a final read through this morning. I read each section’s answer out loud as if I was being interviewed. I felt how the answers sounded. As I read more of my work, my conviction not just in the piece but in me regained momentum. I remembered why I had bothered in the first place. I remembered the satisfaction I had felt building and bringing art out. I knew my sense of self was there somewhere, maybe shy, maybe hiding but she was there.

While I flip-flopped between trying and being lacklustre across the four days, I eventually got to a place where I was applying for the grant with the energetics of giving it my all. It feels scary to share that here especially as I don’t know if I will be successful until March.

Giving anything our all is vulnerable. To say you tried, and it didn’t work out is a harder pill to swallow than to say you didn’t think it was worth bothering at all. It is easier to judge and criticise from the outside — a position I am all too familiar with.

As this year unfolds, I want to become the type of person who is willing to be vulnerable, to try and risk failure but still walk away proud that I had tried at all.

I’d begun learning about qi gong so we practiced a little in the park. After we finished, I shared that for most of my life and in almost all respects, mastery was always my main goal. Whether it was surfing, yoga, painting or writing, I’d place an enormous amount of pressure on myself to attain mastery. The faster the better. I’d studied texts about it, analysing the best way to get towards mastery and knew that deliberate and routine practice was key. So I often found the whip of practice being cracked on myself by, well, me.

If I was going to try at anything, I might as well go all the way. If not, what was the point?

I once had a conversation with a friend, , who’s thoughts on this stayed with me long after our conversation ended. He shared that it was possible to have lots of interests and not to require such a high standard of ourselves for each of them. Just go give it a try, see if you like it and see if it sticks. If not, that is okay. He encouraged me to treat all my curiosities as experiments that didn’t need to have a big outcome. I saw the rationality in his arguments but I wasn’t ready for those lessons yet.

Then I started learning about Qi Gong. Qi Gong is a traditional Chinese practice combining slow movements, breathwork and meditation to direct and balance our life force energy. Qi in Chinese literally translates to energy in English. I’d become drawn to it by way of training as a yoga teacher which led to an interest in bodywork and then eventually my belief that the esoteric world of energies and vibrational frequencies carries a lot of knowledge. I wanted to both practice it and then, of course, master it. But, while I’d been drawn to Qi Gong for close to a year, I was never able to go beyond telling people I want to learn about it. Ironically, only while I was sick here in Penang, and at home with nothing much else to do did the practice begin.

It had been hard to begin qi gong earlier because a big part of starting is breathing, slowing down and seemingly doing nothing much at all. It became clear to me that in qi gong, mastery can only be attained by not cracking the whip. I also had to become okay at being in the present moment so I could begin learning about it.

A counsel of qi gong elders I’d created with the help of ChatGPT shared this:
“Four minutes done well is already qi gong.”

“Ten minutes done with tension is exercise.”

“Twenty minutes done with ego is a setback.”

The only way forward is to slow right down, to stop trying to optimise, and to get rid of the whip. And this is very difficult for me since impatience has always been the way I lived my life. Moving forward, always, with inertia, onto the next thing, onto a bigger thing. My friends have come to know me as the person who dives right into something and spends a very focused period of time in the rabbit hole before, often, coming out and leaving that interest behind.

But, as Alex managed to convince me, during our conversation on Christmas Day, not everything we do needs to be about mastery. He shared that often people give up an activity when they realise they are not going to be good at it. But the moments spent doing it and learning it can be a form of enjoyment too. He gave the example of watching skilled basketball players and admiring them. It didn’t have to be a study of their skills. Not everything needs to be a grind. It could just be about an enjoyment and appreciation of the art form — basketball in this case.

Maybe I was ready for the lesson this time but somehow his words struck me with deep resonance. I could learn to love qi gong even while knowing I may never become a master. And I could do that because I could just relate to qi gong as an artform to be admired. In the same way, galleries and exhibitions are put on not just for people who want to study the techniques of others but for anyone who has an appreciation for the art. An opportunity to experience the work someone else has tirelessly created.

Alex posed the question of whether I had ever enjoyed just doing something without thinking about improving or trying to master it. I shared that I enjoyed identifying plants, something that I am ironically quite good at, but I have never thought I needed to be a master at it. I could feel the awe and joy in my body as I recall moments of correctly identifying trees by the shape and color of their leaves or plants of a tree. I started to have some semblance of an understanding of relating to living as not just blocks of time for me to master things, but living as being a beautiful act of appreciation, admiration and awe.

Prior, I’d always thought how can I achieve mastery through brute force? What is the fastest way for me to get there? And more importantly, who gives a fuck about the journey?

When I trained as a yoga teacher, I printed out every single pose on individual pieces of paper so that I could memorize them. I remember feeling the force I placed on myself. I also did the same with painting and drawing when I spent a year doing it most days. There was a three month period where I had enrolled at the Royal Drawing School in London and I would arrive tired and burnt out at the studio. I’d force myself to the point of not enjoying it at all.

And perhaps what was more tiresome and painful was remembering distinctly those moments, I’d get so frustrated that I am not further along in the journey.

It felt like I had my eyes shut the whole journey, just focusing on achieving mastery, not stopping to appreciate the journey. A state of disassociation, a mechanical robot. And then, unsurprisingly, not be able to sustain the practice. So yes, I haven’t painted in a couple of years even though I love and miss it.

This mindset permeates so much of what I do. One day a few weeks ago, we ended up at a vegan restaurant with a thick volume about crystals and chakra. I was excited to come across this book while we waited for our food. But instead of enjoying a couple of pages that I found interesting, I felt this overwhelming urge to flip through the book so I could absorb by skimming as much of it as possible and then narrow my attention to focus on a few specific pages. Whenever something caught my eye and I slowed down, I’d just as quickly rev up again, frantically abandoning it for the next set of pages. All the while, hoping I’d get through the majority of what I wanted to in the book by the time our meal came. Writing this makes me realise how absurd it sounds and yet this is exactly how I had been to date, living my little life!

So on Christmas Day, Alex’s wishes for me to slow down and enjoy the little moments in life became a window into the type of life that was possible for me. In this new year, I dare myself to sit and feel all the things I am avoiding leading to this urgency protocol. And I write this with some cynicism of being able to get there but a growing hope that I can learn to relate to mastery and productivity just a little more differently.

I close my eyes and look inwards to all my parts, the ones fighting to keep productive, the impatient ones, the scaredy-cats, the adventurous, the lost, the carefree, the curious. With a shy smile, and a heart beating with hope instilled by some semblance of confidence amassed over the years, I say to them, in this coming year are you willing to work with me to savour the gift of time, to drop our collectively tensed shoulders, to breathe a bit deeper, to unclench the tight fists and to invite a slowing down?

Caryn