And the work I do is all about questioning who we are underneath everything we’re told to be and think and believe about ourselves, so that we can express what’s truly alive in our hearts with confidence, clarity, authenticity and creativity.

My work is for bold hearts on the road to transformation, embodiment and self-expression. And, if I’m brave enough to admit it, it’s about opening the self to vulnerability, trust and love. One of the most significant things I was told about love is that we all fall in love with ideas when we’re young. It’s the ideas we fall in love with in our twenties that stay with us for the rest of our lives.

Take a moment and think back to when you were in your twenties. . .

Do you remember the people, places and ideas you were in love with at that time of your life?

I do. . .

I fell in love with the ideas of freedom, individuality, creativity and living a life full of passion, commitment and purpose found in existentialist texts by philosophers like Søren Kierkiegaard, Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche. As a young philosopher and writer, it was much easier for me to love ideas and books than other people. I wouldn’t realize until much later in my life that was because of unhealed trauma and disconnection from my own body and heart. 

One of the movies we watched in my existentialism and film class was a movie based on Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I fell in love with each of the four main characters: Tomáš, Sabina, Tereza, and Franz, who ponder the lightness and heaviness in their lives as refugees of a country that is ceasing to exist, and in its destruction, they become entangled in love affairs with each other, the meaning of freedom, existence and artistic expression. It is an inquiry into the nature of the soul, loss, human relationships and exile. 

It is also where my own self inquiry began to emerge with the simple object of the black felt bowler hat Sabina wore as her sole inheritance from her father, as she undressed down to her underwear and art shirt and posed before the mirror.

When I was 24, I took my first bowler hat that a friend gave me to my favorite coffee shop and sat with it on my head for five hours hoping to experience for myself some of what it meant in the story: an inheritance (or in my case a gift), a masculine symbol made feminine by a woman artist, a playful flirtation, an emblem of power, a memory of past relationships, and a leitmotif for an entire life. It captured my own sense of being, and when I drove home that night, a poem poured forth from my consciousness. 

At the time, I thought it was the birth of my new writing method, but I now realize it was the birth of an approach to loving my whole self using found objects, the body and self-expression. 

I believe in the power of metaphor to give birth to love, especially self-love. As a transnational Korean adoptee surrendered at birth and molested within the first few months my life in foster care waiting to be flown over to the United States, my relationship to love, and my body, is not simple or easy. 

In studying continental philosophy, I was introduced to a form of narrative therapy that came out of The Netherlands called Dialogical Self Theory. I don’t know if it’s the peculiar way trauma shapes a quest for understanding, meaning and questioning, my own personality, or my innate love of learning, but I wasn’t content to accept that change and a better life wasn’t possible for me without being reunited with my birth family. Because I grew up without any genetic mirroring, I decided to create it for myself using these metaphors, objects, and symbols from the women, books and movies I loved as a way of understanding myself, the world, and my place within it. 

As an adoptee, I felt rootless for much of my life, and it was difficult for me to feel tethered to the messiness in myself and in the world. To find grounding, I had to restore the connection to my heart, body, and natural environment that had been severed at birth. One of the greatest gifts I’ve received from expressive arts, a form of therapy that uses dance, movement, drawing, writing and performance-based ritual, has been the witnessing, mirroring, reflection and integration of my whole self. 

I learned how to hold my wounds of abandonment and loss with strength, compassion and liberation. I encountered my heart and the stories of love and worthiness that were being held there, and through drawing and dancing them opened myself to love in new forms. I was able to confront my grief, give it shape and expression in my body, and hold it.

Now, I have come to a place where I no longer feel shattered, abstract, or dissociated from my body or any aspect of my identity. My impact on the world is this embodied trust and wholeness at the interpersonal, heart to heart level. It is what I’m most passionate about, and it is why my work is for bold hearts also on the road to transformation, embodiment and expression of who they are free from the wounds of their beginnings. 

In my own healing process, I now embody all of who I am, spread my wings, don my bowler hat and live my life as The Spiritual Monarch I used to envision myself becoming.