I’ve always struggled with Western Medicine. While I had been incredibly fascinated by the rapid innovations in medical technologies, from precision medicine to digital health, I found my own experience navigating through the convoluted maze of our healthcare system to be frustrating, perplexing and fragmented. My quest for holistic healing often resulted either in a dead end or some magical pills that could solve all problems. Deeply skeptical of anything that is not “natural”, I decided to search for the medicines of life for self-healing.
My quest for the medicines of life led to the exploration of ancient healing systems from Peruvian shamans to ancient Indian healing arts. I realized that the holistic healing I had been seeking for was not just on the physiological level, but actually pertaining to the five layers of the body, according to yoga traditions. This includes our physical body, energy body, mental body, wisdom body, and the bliss or spiritual body. What I developed was a growing repertoire of my own pillars of self-healing medicine.
My first layer of healing was the permission to feel. For years, I had locked my emotions in the dark dungeons of my emotional basement. Over time, the cry from these big, hairy emotional monsters for attention and self-expression grew louder. From The Body Keeps the Score to works of Brene Brown, I learned that we are not merely thinking machines, but rather feelings machines that feel and sense first before we think. When emotions are suppressed in our bodies, we feel dis-ease. So the first step in my healing repertoire is to give myself the permission to feel. Something I started doing intuitively was to create an “emotional atlas” where I would log my emotions in the form of color in parts of my body. Once I built an awareness of my emotional landscape, I then worked with my emotions, which are simply energy in emotion, through deep breathing exercises. Sitting through an emotional tornado was not easy and can feel like an eternity. However, I would always find a piece of golden wisdom on the other side of the uncomfortable emotion.
The next layer of healing was the permission to dance with the sacred feminine. Born under the era of the One Child Policy in China, I had always felt as if I were the “inferior” gender in a culture that esteemed men and the masculine energy. As a result, I had disconnected from my own sacred feminine at a young age. It wasn’t until a chance encounter with a friend that led me to take my first adult ballet class. I fell in love with the movement of my body that flowed with the elegance of piano music. Dance opened something sacred within my energetic body. As my body expanded its dance vocabulary into belly dancing, ecstatic and even burlesque, I learned to connect with the expression of the divine feminine. Women have danced for generations in the past, as tribal rituals and in celebration of mother earth. Dance created healing through the energetic portals of my body to allow the creative expressions of the divine feminine to flow.
Healing in my wisdom body came through the discovery of Ayurveda, which in Sanskrit means the wisdom of life. Although I had been a long-time yoga practitioner and student, I finally committed to doing a 200-hour yoga teacher training in the midst of the pandemic. Yoga and Ayurveda are sister sciences and their wisdom runs deep and wide. Essentially, Ayurveda is an approach to living in harmony with the universe in order to achieve optimum health. As I learned about my own body constitution and tuned into the rhythms of the day and season, I felt connected to the greater cosmos of Life and its infinite wisdom. It was the first healing modality that truly felt holistic.
On a spiritual level, I found healing of the collective through the power of tribalism and community. For much of my life, communities have formed and disintegrated, with the rapid evolution of our digitized societies. Social connections became pithy texts and social media peacock displays. In the midst of the pandemic, I found the keystone to my healing - the authentic power to connect with myself and with others. It finally dawned on me that my years of food addiction and unhealthy patterns had been a symptom of disconnection to a bigger community. While I have always had friends who journeyed through the phases of life with me, a part of me yearned to be part of a tribe. Some of my major inflection points in life occurred at the cusp of the return to my tribe, the human tribe, and feeling a deep sense of love and connectedness. What I also learned was that it is up to me to create and foster a sense of community within my own life.
Healing can happen in many forms and modalities, whether that is through nature, art, music, or sports. Ultimately, healing comes from finding an inner peace with the truth of who we are. Guided by the current of Life, our task is to follow our intuitive compass and surrender to the path of healing.