(Chaos) This is so frustrating. Coming back from honeymoon, my life dissolved into a puzzle that I had to piece together. Getting married is not just ticking off a yearlong (or half-year, in my case) to-do list and ended with a massive glamorous endeavour. What nobody talked about, and what I didn’t foresee, are the…
The older I get, the more I understand that I am a creator, the more I am at peace with who I am. This understanding is of utmost importance because it liberated me to create whatever I want to, without feeling the need to fulfil a certain image. Whenever I look back, I was always…
In Septemeber 2018, I left my first Vipassana meditation course with a glorious feeling of accomplishing 100 hours of cross-legged meditation, reaching a state where I felt my body dissolved into a mass of energy. In the span of a year, from the ‘gungho-ness’ to wake up and meditate at 5 am daily, my dedication…
In the weeks leading to the mark of Own Your Story’s (OYS) first anniversary in August, I found myself lost… again. Instead of mesmerising the wonderment in our journey, I was troubled by the urge of monetizing it and turning it into a business, showered in many well-intentioned advices and couldn’t hear my own voice. During the…
I felt stuck… in a perfectly fine life. People would tell me that I was doing a good job building community, touching lives, and getting hitched; but deep down I was lost in the narratives the felt more and more like a cage — what I am supposed to do, who I am supposed to…
When I was able to breath smoothly, it dawned on me how close I was to death. It started with a post-run walk where I suddenly felt uneasy and rested on a bench. Thing got worse when I had difficulty breathing, literally fighting for air. It gradually slowed down to light, long breath, that was…
In the midst of the wedding planning, I found myself in a lot of resistance that often leads to negative emotions. A close friend told me that the root of my resistance laid in the false expectation that I could have things my way. I agreed, and a lot of ‘but’ immediately popped into my…
When we organized a community dialogue about personal transformation and career transition, I didn’t expect ‘parents’ to be a major challenge that many participants resonate with. One of our panellists has an extreme case of hiding her career change from her parents for 6 months; when her parents found out about it, it led to…
From a movie based on the life of a 20 something female who built the most exclusive high-stakes, underground poker game in the world and a book written by a shame researcher on her life work, I learned a common life lesson in these 2 vastly different life stories — the power of owning our story. In…
When I saw Sadhguru on Impact Theory podcast, I was so excited to explore the intersection between the worlds of spirituality and entrepreneurship. While Tom Bilyeu was passionate about inspiring people to be more and do more, Sadhguru’s teaching is about seeing the world as a whole and we are part of the whole. The sense…
When K. Wanderman (a creative entrepreneur and active contributor of OYS) brought up the subject literature for Own Your Story community, my first internal reaction was a huge question mark. Somewhere along the process of exploring our approach, I had a paradigm shift when Kevin mentioned a quote scripted under the statue commemorating Vietnam War in the US — ‘freedom is…
I came across the book ‘The Alchemist’ when I was on a ‘soul-searching’ trip in Vietnam. I was in a noodle shop when a man showed me the book he read on the mountain top that morning — The Alchemist. At that point, I’ve heard of the book but haven’t read it yet. So I thought, maybe,…