a bit about me

my passion for CATHARSIS was ignited through the agony of self-repression.

I deeply feared what was on the other side of my good, amiable, like-able self. I realized that most of my life I’d been unconsciously pushing down painful feelings. I didn’t yet have language for the interior felt realm, so it was almost as if it didn’t exist. Since I couldn’t access what I was feeling, I was at a loss for expressing myself, standing up for myself, comfortably BE-ing myself. I realized there was no concept of an authentic Self to express, because I grew up feeling invisible, or conditionally visible based on what I achieved. There was no attention or value on what I felt.

As the 2nd daughter of immigrant parents from South Korea, a highly sensitive empath & introvert (Sun in Cancer Ascendant Scorpio Moon in Aries fyi) I absorbed their struggles, and made a decision as a young child that the only way to survive this was to take up as little space as possible. Be quiet. Deal with everything on my own. Don't burden their already challenged lives.

I somehow got by living this way, thinking everything was cool, until Dark Night of the Soul came upon me. Dark Night of the Soul is a spiritual term for the metamorphosis you undergo, that can feel excruciating because the “false” conditioned parts of you are dying in order to be reborn into a new complex wholeness.

It's the healing crisis where it seems like major things in your life stop working. You're blocked, sickness happens, relationships fall apart, you fall apart. The healing crisis is when you're unable to bypass or cope with your usual strategies anymore. It's the Universe's way to corner you into facing what's been buried all along, so that you can heal and pivot your life into a more aligned direction. It's what feels like a curse that's a blessing in disguise. The transformation into becoming the butterfly.

I spent years studying the “curse” of my shadow, undergoing initiations with plant medicine ceremonies and learning from teachers Teal Swan, Ana Forrest, Arnold Mindell, Grinberg Bodywork, Lori McCormack, Jason Lamberth, Pitaka, on shadow integration, inner child work, soul retrieval, yin yoga, meditation, and the zen art of self-inquiry.

Motivated by chronic emotional suffering, creative impotence to actualize my desires into form, and bad relationships, I continued to keep excavating to get to the root cause. What turned the key for me was recognizing my blindspots to my own self-compassion. These blindspots that had been inherited from my family, and the recurrent cycles of violence and attempts for self-improvement coming from beliefs about my unworthiness.