12/08/2026
51 today. And a total solar eclipse in my sign: Leo. A liminal space in which the current reality collapses and a new one begins.
I don't post often. Social media has never quite felt like home to me, as I've always deeply valued being able to go incognito. But today feels different enough that I wanted to put words out into the digital ether.
For most of my life, the personal and the public have never really been separate for me. What happens in my inner world tends to reflect in how I show up in the world, whether I like it or not. What I value in life transmits through how I offer my work to it. This year, that fusion feels more alive than ever. So this is, in part, a personal reflection. And in part, something else.
18 years ago, in 2008, the rug was pulled from under my feet. I lost the anchor of a corporate job. As lost as I felt, I knew it was time to move into a different kind of life. I didn't know what I could offer with a business degree, but I went with my first instinct: to work in the humanitarian sector. I packed up my life in Singapore and went to Cambodia to volunteer. What I realised in that time was that my desire to give wasn't yet matched by the skillset I had. I wasn't ready to do what my heart was pulling me toward.
So I started down a path through yoga, bodywork, and somatics. Course after course — Yoga Therapy, Bodywork, Body-Mind Centering®, Polyvagal Theory, Craniosacral Therapy, TCM, fascia trainings, dissection labs, dance and Contact Improvisation, Developmental Coaching…
All this knowledge ran parallel — it didn't feel like a coherent body. It felt more like restlessness, like never quite finding the framework that held everything I was sensing in the body. I left trainings that felt incomplete or compromised. I kept starting again.
What I understand now is that I wasn't failing to commit. I was quietly assembling something of my own, one discipline at a time, without knowing that was what I was doing.
2018 was another turning point — my first surgery for endometriosis, and shortly after, my father's passing from a cocktail of stress and chronic conditions. It sent me down the rabbit hole of trauma physiology, to understand that shadow work means learning the delicate, fractal nature of what gets passed down through generations and systems as truth.
I moved back to Singapore in 2020, right as the world went into lockdown. Borders closed. Everything changed. And my private practice grew, and thrived.
The private, one-on-one work that's carried most of these years has been a genuine gift, something close to karmic, honestly. The depth of sitting with one person, one body, one nervous system at a time. That deeply intimate way of knowing one human from the inside out has taught me, and integrated, almost everything I actually know. And now that body of knowledge is full. Bursting at the seams.
So for the last two years I've been feeling another kind of restlessness. This time a pull toward something more systemic. Toward the collective, not only the individual. Toward the subconscious and psychosociophysical patterns that move through groups, organisations, generations, and communities, not just through the person in front of me.
I'm also finding myself moving away from wellness as a frame. Some I've spoken to thought I was crazy to give up the "healer" label, but I can no longer look away from the sociopolitical weight of this moment in time. The scale of what communities are actually carrying is asking for something with more depth and more reach than the wellness industry, as it currently exists, is built to hold. I don't want to help people optimise. I want to help repair what's actually breaking, at a scale bigger than one client at a time.
So this birthday, I've finally found the words. I'm refocusing my energy back into teaching, but not the teaching I used to do. I'm building something called Embodied Systems Intelligence: a body of knowledge, finally coherent enough to name, that reads the body — individual and collective — as intelligence rather than as conditions to resolve. I hope to let it take shape as practitioner training in healthcare, organisations and institutions, as well as, hopefully, a set of skills to bring me back to where I was trying to go in 2008 — as an offering to humanitarian and crisis contexts.
My wish as I step into my 51st trip around the sun is to put what I know into the hands of people who can carry it further than I ever could alone.
I don't have it all figured out. And I'm done waiting until I do before I say it out loud.
More will come. For today, I'm grateful for every hand I've held, every body that has trusted me, and genuinely, quietly ready for what's next.
