Art of Ahimsa

Ah, the joy of being a woman. I know, I know, most of us don't necessarily feel "joy" when we think of our monthly knock on the door by Ms Uterus Cramps. Yes, I've been there, she visited me as her most wrathful self every single month for years and I know how it feels. The struggle is real, ladies. Over the past 3 years, my perspective on periods has gradually changed. How I experience my period has also shifted greatly for the better. And I can tell you as a woman who is on average predicted to endures some 456 total periods over 38 years which adds up to 6.25 years of her life, the sooner we form a holistic relationship with our monthly cycles the better. In this post, I will share with you how I went from having extremely painful cramps which even the strongest pain killers couldn't numb to having almost no cramps with no painkiller at all. I will also share my journey into forming a deeper relationship with Mother Earth through experiencing p

"To all the souls who had to navigate through the world being nested in bodies bearing guilt, shame and trauma that they were never meant to carry." Memories of certain experiences can lose its rawness in our minds with time, but they hold space in our bodies long after the experience has ended. In my pre-adolescence years, I had an experience of such kind, the experience of childhood sexual abuse. The statistics are disturbing. Let's take the United States for example, according to RAINN , an anti-sexual assault organization: "Every 92 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted. And every 9 minutes, that victim is a child." I know, it's revolting. And I can tell you from my personal experience, it's not so different in the rest of the world. I have had numerous friends who were sexually abused by some caregiver growing up and they never spoke out about it until someone opened up to them about their own sexual abuse story. Keeping silent about abu

My skin had always been the part of me I felt deeply discontent with. I can't quite pinpoint where it all started. Somewhere in between being bullied, comparing myself to seemingly "perfect" models I saw on television and having an abusive memory of my childhood days, I began developing a toxic relationship with my skin. The untamable teenage acne was the exact "cherry" on top of the cake(no pun intended) I needed to take my self-loathing to the next level. The honest but dismal reality is that there are many teenagers who feel this way. And yes, in a perfect world where we are able to let go of this self-hate once and for all as soon as our adolescence acne perishes, it wouldn't be such a bad thing. But that is usually not the case. From my personal experience, I know I had carried my incapability of being able to love myself far into my early adulthood long after my face cleared and I lost the baby fat I sore was the sole reason for my unhappiness.

I still remember the day around 3 years ago when I decided to do yoga for the first time. I had hit one of my life's lowest lows and everything I did to escape my reality had failed me. I guess if I decided to join a yoga studio things would have taken a different route. In my case, I decided to let Adriene Mishler from Yoga with Adriene be my guide and the privacy of my own bedroom be my studio. The conditions worked perfectly for me because it meant I wasn't competing with anyone and I had no one to please. I wasn't trying to get anywhere and prove something. My curiosity about the philosophy of yoga had already started rolling long before. I had picked up books on the human energy system prior to buying a yoga mat. My intention was to learn about me through yoga. And the fact that it was my solitary practice set the perfect atmosphere for such introspection.  It wasn't long before yoga became a regular part of my life. There were many many misconceptions I

"Acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality, it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, a subtle energy vibration, is consciousness." - Eck hart Tolle The dualistic nature of our reality is expressed in the way we define feeling good from feeling bad, the right action from the wrong action. Our logical mind is designed to split our experiences into categories of acceptable/good experience and unacceptable/bad experience. When one walks in the path of spirituality, a tendency to neglect and turn away from the dark parts of ourselves can develop. It certainly happened to me, and it is something I still struggle with. The obsessive desire to only feel the moments when I was fully aligned and be in denial of the moments when my mind navigates through the unconscious parts of me was one of the main reasons for my suffering. A lot of us experience this in varying degrees. Ironically, the gripping desire to always feel spiritually connecte

"Compassion is the highest form of intelligence" We live in a world where knowingly or unknowingly harming ourselves or others is deeply ingrained in our daily habits. It is hidden in the daily actions that we fail to observe clearly because of our predisposed filters of perception. Filters that formed from our childhood experiences. A limited perception keeps us going in circles, chasing a fleeting sense of contentment that somehow seems to escape our grip as soon as we think we have grabbed it. Our awareness is so diluted by the past and future, we fail to be present at the moment and act in synchronization with our highest nature, compassion. It is a challenge we face individually and collectively. Our entire planet, all life on it and our own personal wellbeing are affected by this "sleep-walking" state of being. We know intrinsically that compassion feels good. Caring for ourselves and others with the sole intention of love feels good. But how do we