love is the central work.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from years of studying, falling, failing, crying, healing, practicing, and integrating it’s that love is the work. It’s the core work that I come back to time and time again. It’s the ache in my chest, the wild joy and deep grief I feel. It’s the metaphysical, mystical, and all-consuming driving force behind all the most powerful, radical, and liberatory transformation that I’ve experienced personally and even had the privilege of sharing, facilitating, coaching, and witnessing in others in my life.
Bell hooks wrote: “We do not have to love. We choose to love.” And more than anything, I choose to love. And I choose to be with people who also choose to love. Who choose it even when things get hard, scary, and darkness creeps in to envelop us. I know that it’s a choice that requires courage: to stop bypassing, face ourselves honestly, and be accountable in truth with ourselves and others. I believe most of the world’s pain stems from cycles of lovelessness on a personal and collective level, and at the core of my work, it’s about helping myself, and those I walk with, come home to love; to create from and with love.
practice relational wholeness
We are beautiful whole beings. We have dimensions and multitudes. And it took me years to realize that most spaces in this late-capitalist world don’t actually want mine and your wholeness. They even reward our fragments, our masks, and our survival selves. They don’t care how loud our inner critics, judges, or victim parts are because the pain and insecurities that comes from operating in them makes us more susceptible to manipulation, control, and exploitation.
The work is to develop the scared skill of discernment of who, where, and what still perpetuates those old narratives. To build enough deep inner trust and compassion to bring back all the parts we’ve pushed away, shamed, or even exiled. To stay whole even while in relationship with others. And hardest of all, to believe and even contribute to building new reimagined worlds and spaces that we can coexist, collaborate, and be as our whole selves.
prioritize creativity
I didn’t choose to value my creativity until after I turned 30. It always pains me to realized how long I’ve neglected the powers of creativity, and I’ve met so many others who feel similarly. It’s not entirely our fault because it’s the prevailing message a lot of us received our entire lives, all the way into adulthood. That creativity is a hobby, a distraction, or even at best a bullet point on a resume if you can spin it in an interview. This painful disconnection to our inner child and the creativity that comes with it is at the root of so much unfulfillment in our personal and professional lives.
The practice is retracing our steps to that inner voice, intuition, and ember, even if it sometimes feels impractical or irrational, and reclaiming all the gifts you have to offer. It’s about coloring outside the scripts, boxes, and fences we were handed. It’s about playing, dancing, and rebelling in ways we can finally give ourselves permission to. And ultimately, daring to treat our lives as ever-winding, ever-evolving art. To embrace creativity is to slowly remember that we, too, are part of and conduits of the source.
listen to earth and the body
It took chronic pain in my upper back for me to finally hear the cries of my body. And it took the pandemic, the climate related disasters like increasingly more severe fires in California, and witnessing the genocide in Gaza (& Sudan, Congo) for me to finally start hearing the weeping of the earth. And in that listening, I found so many things within me, within my family, lineage, that I have been so scared to face. In that avoidance, I also were disconnected to knowledge and resources that were always available to me to help me keep going.
Today’s personal development and wellness world emphasizes the narrative that you need this and that to get through your day, to ground, to preserve your peace, and to become “better.” And they capitalize on this scarcity mindset that if you don’t have it, you’re doomed. But when we refocus our attention on the body and earth, especially to all the juicy goodness that is already available to all of us, we naturally find abundance. And from that place, we find collaborators, co-creators, teachers, guides, coaches, and allies entering our lives who continue to remind us of our connection to what we already have.
root into your ancestry
I once read somewhere that in indigenous culture, the purpose of ceremonies and rituals is to “remember to remember” and that has always stayed with me. I realized that so much of the work is about remembering—remembering our feelings, our dreams and desires, our love and zest for life, our connection to the land, our love for ourselves and the people around us, and who we are before the world told us who we should be. And as someone whose grandparents fled from China to Taiwan during the cultural revolution, and later from Taiwan to California when the cross-strait tensions were high, I’m also still learning to remember through writing, archiving, painting, and other ceremonies to help me remember where I came from, and who I am within this history of displacement. This journey as been a constant ebb and flow of remembering, and allow it to inform me where I’ve been, where I’m going, and where we’re all going collectively.
updated 2025-10-18 13:54