Mending the Soul

I first experienced sleep symptoms in my early 30s. It was the first signs of the artificial world I created cracking, buckling under the weight.

The sleep doctors said I was fine medically. I saw an ear, nose, throat specialist to see if there’s some surgery for sleep apnea. “You’re in the low-risk category, and there’s nothing functionally wrong with you.”

After exhausting every medical possibility, I turned to therapy. As an Asian man, the idea of therapy is taboo, outside the norms of cultural practices. So I asked each one about their confidentiality policy, and kept all my visits secret.

One by one, I gave each therapist my cover story, how I’m feeling stressed from work, but never enough to actually get to anything meaningful. And one by one, they believed me, and eventually terminating the relationship.

Ten years later…

I sat on the floor, next to my soul sister. I looked at her, and said that they didn’t know how to love us, so we had to learn how to love ourselves, and to be there for one another, in finding ourselves.

And sitting there on the ground, as our people once did, I placed my hand on her back, and said I got you, and she said I got you. Tears streamed out gently, the mending of a soul that was once lost, but was actually always there, buried behind layers of anger, rage, and clawing for love.

In the course of about a year, I apprenticed with Linda Thai, a mental health clinician, storyteller, and educator. She, too, was a child of Vietnamese Boat People refugees, and in her own lived experience, accumulated the healing skills for herself and dragged me along when our paths crossed.

I wrote previously about my own work with EMDR, psychedelics, and so on, yet it wasn’t until I started doing psychodrama structures, a practice that Linda learned through the Pesso-Boyden System Psychomotor method, and incorporated the cultural context and migration history, that things started to crack for me.

My world was protected behind masks that were designed to push me through corporate. Data held all my emotions, so I could be robotic and not feel the pain. Dan (the Donald Trump) was ruthless, wanting to win at all costs. They resisted every form of therapy, and they were so good at navigating corporate, they could fool almost any therapist that I was fine.

But in the work of psychodrama, the group forms a container of trust and support, and each group I attended, expanded my capacity to feel discomfort.

I witnessed the crying pains of a child that was molested, the death of a child through suicide, the abandonment, the violence of men against women.

And in doing this work, I played roles, like the ideal father that would’ve sung songs for his child, took delight in a child’s curiosities, and protected the child from harm. I also played the abusive father, who was crushed under the weight of his broken family, a father that yelled at his child because he was angry, and as the broken line of broken men.

This work took me out of my center of protection, and placed me physically and spiritually outside of me, in the shoes of someone else.

And with each repetition, each protagonists’ structure, my capacity to feel the discomfort, the pain, and the joy expanded.

My traumatized self only felt things when it was extreme, and I felt myself wanted to shake people when they hold back their explosive feelings.

And, with more repetitions, I learned to play the notes in between, the notes between all or nothing. The sweetness that I missed by living my whole life in a war zone, always scanning for threats, always on alert for the other shoe to drop.

Over the course of attending eight psychodrama retreats, I witnessed more than 60 stories, both in the witnessing of, and on many occasions, literally holding another being in their suffering, and holding onto the resilience of humanity.

So when I worked with Dr. Jen who wrote Decolonizing Therapy, she saw in my eyes that I was open to something deeper, so she asked if I was willing to go into a shamanic journey with her.

As I entered my trance state, I met an Asian unicorn in the forest and she led me deeper into the forest. Near a pond, a black jaguar came to me. She curled up next to me, and we intertwined our beings, and she said that she’ll be with me, in this part of the journey, deeper into the darkness of the soul, alone.

This past year, doing this work, I felt alone, because I was so focused on my own work. The later psychodramas, when my capacity to feel expanded, I started to enter that work in service of others, without projecting my wounds, without the ego feeling good that I was “so experienced.”

When I showed up just to be in presence, I was finally able to hold another, just to be, in the moment, with them, in our humanity.

And as I pushed myself beyond that point when I was the savior, that I had found the answer to the world’s problems, that I was capable of fixing it, that I learned that I am simply mean to exist, to be a witness, and to see and feel it.

Where do I go from here?

Is what my past self would ask.

I’m just here.

Just am.

I.

I am past the 5-step methodology to finding your soul™ with a certification program for trainers. Every one of those paths lead to stroking the ego, to monetizing the healing, and to a world that’s no better than today.

At some point, I will put something out into the world.

But until then, I love you for being here.

Write me back, let me know how you’re doing.

We’re all just walking each other home in this life.

Gently,

and with love.