I wasn't happy with the life I was given.

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From a very young age, I knew I wasn't happy.

I was born and raised in Singapore, in a family that, from the outside, looked like many others. We ticked the boxes of what life was supposed to look like.

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But within our home, things felt very different. It was chaotic. Dominant masculine energy reigned supreme and while we had so much materially, we were poor in other ways. In how we spoke to one another, in warmth, connection and the values that mattered.

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Success, money and what other people thought of us mattered enormously. Everything else seemed to come second, or sometimes not at all.

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There is a saying in Mandarin, 家丑不可外扬 (jiā chǒu bù kě wài yáng), which translates to family troubles should not be aired outside the home.

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And this was certainly true in my family. Everything looked perfect from the outside. Relatives and friends constantly told my siblings and me how lucky we were. The only problem was that I didn't feel lucky. When I was younger, I would have switched my life for almost anyone else's.

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But inside my home however, there seemed to be room for only one way of being. To survive, I learned to give in, apologise, take responsibility for things that weren't mine and cut off parts of myself that didn't feel welcome.

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The journey that changed my life

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This led me through some of the darkest parts of my soul.

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By the time I was a teenager, I was struggling with depression and anxiety.

 

Eventually, I experienced a full breakdown. The kind that pauses your Master's degree at NYU. 

I did go back and finish it, for the record. 

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Somewhere in that mess, a doctor sat me down and told me that anxiety and depression were mine for life. Something to manage, rather than something I could move beyond.

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While I innitially believed that doctor, eventually, I allowed myself to change that belief. Because I believed I needed help, I went to therapy every week and began learning about what it meant to come from a dysfunctional family.

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Therapy gave me language for what I had experienced. I began to understand family dynamics, trauma and why some of my patterns existed.

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That understanding mattered. But eventually, I wanted more than an explanation. I didn't only want to understand my past. I wanted to process it, make peace with it and discover what life could look like beyond it.

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I spent the next decade becoming a student of healing.

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One day, I asked for help in a different way.

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I asked not for more help coping or more understanding. In utter desperation, I asked the universe, or whoever was out there, to help me release my past and move forward into a life even I couldn't imagine.

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That led me to one of my first teachers, who introduced me to Reiki. And that opened the door to a completely different relationship with myself. 

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Workshops. Trainings. More books than any one shelf should hold. Podcasts on long walks. And just about every modality I could get my hands on. From Reiki to NLP, Regression Therapy, Inner Child Work and eventually Family Constellations. 

 

Everything I learned began with a desire to heal my own wounds. And eventually, something else became clear to me: My family matters deeply to me.

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I began to understand that I didn't need to wait for everyone else to change before I let go of the past. I was willing to do the work to release some of the burdens that had travelled through our lineage. And perhaps most importantly, I didn't want the generations who came after us to continue carrying the same pain.

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Living life for the first time​

 

And so, fast forward 15 years, and here we are.​

Today, I love what I do because my work and the things I love are so intertwined.

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One of my greatest loves is travel. And strangely enough, I find myself travelling even when I'm sitting with a client, journeying with them through their memories, relationships and ancestral wisdom.

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One of the most important lessons I take from my work is that family dysfuction often has its origins in trauma's that began generations before. And when that original trauma is acknowledged and those ancestors honored, we open ourselves up to wisdom and an abundance of resources. 

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I've also discovered my inner detective.

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I've learned to use my natural curiosity and love of investigation to help people explore their inner worlds and question where their pain, patterns and wounds actually come from.

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Because too often, we find an explanation for what we're experiencing and stop there.

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To me, that's a little like finding the answer to a maths equation without understanding how you got there.

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And in life, I think the magic is in the equation.

​Because when we begin to understand our own equation, we can start changing it.

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And perhaps that's what I love most about the work I do today. I get to be a detective alongside someone else, helping them understand their own equation and discover what they might want to change to create a life that feels more like theirs.

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Today I've opened my heart to new relationships, new experiences and ways of living that, when I was younger, I could only dream about.

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My life isn't perfect.

But it feels like mine.

And perhaps that is what I was searching for all along.