There was a good period of my life when I was living in a semi-delusional state. Everything was “awesome” like in the Lego movie. It felt like life was good as I went with the flow and was the easy-going person who said yes to everything and catered to other people’s desires. Conflict with people was not my jam and I did my best to avoid it by being amicable.
Little did I realize that I just had no boundaries and was abandoning myself. This went on for about four decades of my life.
How did I even let it go on for so long? Well, it all started, like most stories, in childhood. Being the eldest daughter in an Asian immigrant family has its duties. Our family had escaped Vietnam after the country fell to communism. We were among the lucky boat people who made it to the US and got an opportunity to start a new life in a free country. As with most immigrant stories, my parents worked very hard to make it, and in many ways they did. But this is not a fairytale. This is real life.
And the reality was that I grew up in a household where I was afraid. Afraid of my mom, who would hit and scream at us. Afraid every time my parents fought in front of us. Afraid because I endured repeated sexual abuse as a child.
I did the best that I could in those decades growing up to appease for peace. I learned to be the mediator in the family and to placate my mom when she went wild with emotion. I also learned to abandon my needs -actually I didn’t realize I had any needs because I was too busy tending to my mom’s.
When I got older, married, and carried on a career, my time and energy had to be divided into other areas in my life. However, the demands and expectations of my mother did not change. As the years went on, my resentment grew as the expectations and guilt continued.
With so much inner turmoil, I sought therapy to understand how to resolve this and came to realize that I needed to set boundaries. This was hard when I fell for guilt trips. Having been taught to care for everyone else’s needs, I had not grown up knowing that my needs mattered. So I started by taking small steps in saying no at times.
The defining moment came when I decided to honor my own needs over my mother’s, during a critical time when my dad was dying. I did not have the capacity to hold myself and her during this difficult time. Everything came to a head one night and I allowed tears and words of truth to flow out to my mom about how excruciating it was growing up with her. Finally, it hit her and she understood for the first time how I felt. This was the turning point of me starting to do for me, without the guilt.
As I turned inward to work on my own healing and growth, my intuition started to come online. I felt the call to enroll in a yoga therapy program called Healing Emphasis Yoga, which had a profound effect on my healing.
I didn’t realize at the time that I was in shame mode and portrayed that “everything was awesome” in my life. But this program taught me to honor the truths I was learning to feel in my body. It taught me SOMATIC EMBODIMENT. I started feeling FEELINGS that were very uncomfortable (rage, sadness, grief) and I didn’t know how to handle them. But then I learned to release stuck energy and stored trauma from the body that I didn’t even know I carried.
What I learned in the yoga therapy program was invaluable: to sit with and allow my emotions to be felt and expressed. This was new to me as I had not been allowed to show any anger or tears. Now, I value feeling and expressing my emotions and love a good cry or a crazy scream in the car. There’s so much repressed emotions, especially anger and rage bottled up in people, that I highly recommend the healthy expression of these emotions.
As I continued working on myself over the years, I explored everything from talk and yoga therapy to self-help books to plant medicine. Mushrooms and ayahuasca have helped me tremendously in gaining perspective, healing, and psychic gifts. However, as I shed the layers of protection from emotional and sexual abuse, I also started feeling very dysregulated in my body.
This is where practicing nervous system regulation over the years really helped me. It allowed me to look at the hard stuff and be able to process it from a grounded place. The more I cleared, the more clear I became. Over time, my nervous system became regulated.
Then, Great Spirit entered. I started receiving messages from people who have passed, from Spirit guides who appeared, from God.
I understand now why the traumatic events in my life have happened. All the inner work has led me to true forgiveness, and to understanding that there’s nothing to forgive actually.
When I started down this path, all I wanted to feel was unconditional love for myself and inner freedom. I can honestly say that I have reached that point of love and freedom, and know that it will only continue to grow.
Following that little voice inside has led me to complete my 500hr yoga therapy training, a shamanic apprenticeship, and become certified in Trauma-Informed Plant Medicine Facilitation and Integration. The trainings and my own lived experiences have helped me gain valuable tools for my own healing, and for guiding others.
Life has led me in so many directions. I attained a Masters in Education to teach schoolkids, and later studied photography to empower women through boudoir photography. Eventually, my personal healing led me to guiding retreats, and empowering people with tools to find their own inner peace.
Finding my freedom was worth all the hard moments. I couldn’t have done it without the guidance that I received from my teachers. Now I have the honor of passing on invaluable practices to others taking this journey.
As Ram Dass said, “We are all walking each other home.”
If you’re wondering about my mom, we have a wonderful relationship now and can laugh and love together as mother daughter. My shift over the years also created a wonderful shift in her. As they say, when you change, the people around you change.
Aside from this beautiful work, Drew and I live a pretty simple life with our two cats. Life is filled with travel adventures, time in nature, creating memories with our loved ones, and giving thanks for all the blessings we have. It also helps that he makes me laugh a lot.
I love so many things about being here as a human – dancing, music, cooking and eating all the amazing food, being in awe of animals on land and underwater, experiencing thrilling moments, giving and receiving warm hugs, and deeply appreciating the quiet moments of admiring nature’s beauty. What an incredible experience it is to be a human on Mother Earth!
With intentional guidance, you’ll go beyond surface patterns and into the deeper layers where healing truly begins. Using somatic tools and trauma-informed practices, we gently uncover and tend to the root causes beneath emotional pain.
The aim of this work is not just relief — but lasting peace, deeper self-knowing, and freedom within your heart.
Sometimes the most powerful shifts happen when we give ourselves permission to step away. Retreats create intentional space to slow down, reflect, and reconnect — with nature and your own inner wisdom. In that stillness, new clarity emerges and something inside you begins to realign. If you’re interested in creating a private, customized retreat experience in Arizona, let’s explore what that could look like for you.