my wellness journey
the short version
2020: Started exploring yoga & meditation as a way to relieve stress
2021-2022: Burned out living & working in Manhattan
2023: Completed my 200 hour yoga teacher training and spent a year traveling the world learning about wellness across cultures & traditions
2024: Starting teaching “full-time." Currently working to combine these experiences in yoga, business, travel to build a wellness business
the long version aka storytime
childhood
These journeys often begin in childhood: how we grew up, what our communities taught us to prioritize and what shaped our worldview.
I grew up as a high achieving 2nd gen Asian-American in the Midwest. I remember struggling a lot with identity, self-esteem, microaggressions, regulating my emotions, but the current dialogues in mental health weren’t there yet. At home I got my fair dose of Chinese nutrition and medicine, taiji and other wisdom, but didn’t think much of it at the time. Just folklore.
college
In college I was focused on two things: having fun & getting a job. No time for much else.
living in SF
San Francisco was my home for four years. I embraced a version of the Bay Area transplant lifestyle: working in tech, hiking on the weekends, enjoying a good work life balance.
My hobbies revolved around fitness. I traversed around town taking as many classes as possible: spin, HIIT, pilates, strength, even yoga once in a while. I trained for half marathons and triathlons. My motto at the time was “mind over matter.” If I was sore or fatigued I ignored my body and willed myself to go for that long run. In triathlon there was always further you could swim, bike, run, earlier you could start, more races to sign up for. I experimented with nutrition: paleo, intermittent fasting, fasted workouts. One training block where I was doing morning fasted bike rides I stopped getting my period. A thought popped into my head: what was my body trying to tell me? When my period returned a few months later, I brushed it off.
It’s easy to judge her for being extreme & unhealthy, but at the time the more I worked out -> the better I felt and looked -> the more confidence & clarity I gained in other aspects of life. It was a foolproof stress reliever.
pandemic era
During Covid my mental health began to slip. The pandemic and election affected me deeply; racial fighting triggered feelings of insecurity and fear that lay dormant from childhood. I’d been squashing anxiety through achievements and work, and adding in fitness had all but wiped it out entirely, or so I thought. Now I found myself unable to turn away from the news, feeling helpless and hopeless about the state of the world.
This is when I first explored therapy, meditation, yoga more seriously and - fun fact - when I started this blog. (If you go to the 2020 journal entries you’ll find the pandemic ones.) I joined therapy circles, did guided meditations on the apps, followed online yoga classes from the many offerings by kind hearted humans during this time. I wasn’t sure if I was doing any of it right and sometimes it’d feel like I was faking it but I’d feel a bit lighter. And then go back to scrolling.
nature therapy
Determined to make a change, my partner and I packed our stuff, bought a van, left on a cross-country trip and found a new home in Austin, Texas. Van life deepened my reverence for nature and her healing properties: when hiking outside, camping in a field, or driving on the road, I felt connected, open, free like never before. I remember lying in the van under the stars and tuning into a guided meditation or an ambient playlist. It was more like entertainment at the time, but this is when meditation teachings began to stick as I was in such a place to receive. Nature “undid” my pandemic anxiety. I was cured.
This phase was short: just eight months. I began to itch for a career change and landed an opportunity in NYC.
catalyst in the city
I experienced intense burnout 2021-2022 while living and working in Manhattan. It’s hard to pinpoint what triggered it, likely the combo of a stressful job, unhealthy lifestyle and overwhelming stimuli. It was a constant state of “fight or flight.” I remember being so relieved to logoff every day, having zero energy to do anything and just lying on the couch on my phone. Sometimes I dragged myself to a dinner before coming home later than my body wanted, crashing and repeating the next day.
During the day I exhibited “high functioning anxiety,” where you work even harder to combat stress. This gives off the appearance you’re fine and even over performing so you’re confusingly rewarded for it. My brain once again told my body to “shut up and suck it up,” that this was the cost of a successful career and social life in New York City. My resume reflected “success” working in tech as a product manager, but inside I unhappy and losing my sense of self. That mental willpower I’d previously developed was now being used to get myself out of bed and through the day. No one knew I was spiraling.
I’d experienced these symptoms before: as a kid (lacking the understanding to communicate it), during my first job (chalking it up to general stress), during Covid (learning about how to characterize it) and now in Manhattan (finally aware it was something to take more seriously). This was my catalyst for finding new ways to manage it. I started exploring wellness practices, some out of curiosity, others out of desperation, looking for something that would provide relief. I was still adding things rather than slowing down, but these practices kept me afloat by cultivating enough joy to get me through each week.
Things I’d tried before:
Running and cycling - my trusty stress relievers stopped working when I simply lost the energy to expend on them
Weekend trips - fun escapes but when they ended the dread returned
Spa treatments - quick dopamine hits that masked stress, didn’t do much to treat it
Surfing - loved being in the ocean, though as beginner surfers know, it’s a frustrating sport and my mind turned it into another thing I had to master and was failing at
New things I added:
Yoga - started going to “slower” styles: restorative, yin, nidra where I’d fight my mind telling myself I should be doing something more productive
Zen meditation - took an online course where we’d meditate and then write
Buddhist dharma talks - sometimes felt cult-ish though the teachings resonated
Holotropic breathwork - remember getting the fuzzy T-rex arms and feeling pretty light after
Still, by the end of 2022, I was in a constant state of disarray & discordance with my body and values: I’d gained weight, had trouble sleeping, was constantly stressed and unhappy. It was time for a bigger change.
taking the sabbatical leap
In January 2023, I quit my job. Something told me it was now or never, a last ditch effort to get off the infinite treadmill. Despite fears of making a poor career choice, I felt immediately lighter, like it was finally a step in the right direction.
While finalizing our travel plans I spent a couple months in NYC as a fitness instructor teaching yoga sculpt classes. I’d signed up for the training on something of a whim. It seemed like a good way to get back into shape and surround myself with people who valued health. I started to recover, feeling more like myself with energy and empathy to meet up with friends again. It was like coming out of a dark cave. Some knots begin to unravel.
We then embarked on our year of travel. Over 13 months, these knots unraveled more and more. I immersed myself in wellness practices across cultures and traditions, one of which was a Vipassana meditation course in Nepal. It completely changed how I view and integrate meditation in my day to day. One takeaway from Vipassana was that stillness is a profound teacher. I realized more impactful than any travel experiences in isolation was the space. Space and time away from the grind I thought I was destined to be on forever. I believe this meditative and literal space is what taught me the most. Other experiences simply facilitated a deeper connection.
these days
When someone asks “How did you get into yoga / meditation / etc.?” it amazes me too. I was so resistant to all of it and then somehow did a complete 180 and now here we are. It started with taking steps to improve my own wellbeing and wanting to learn and explore more. Then I started helping others on their own journey which felt like the right path to continue down.
These days I view wellness as so much more than a quick fix; it’s a journey, a culmination of choices each day to get us just a little closer to our baseline health and authentic selves. I’m still figuring out what that looks like and plan to share what I uncover.
Sincerely hope it helps someone else along the way <3