This does NOT feel safe, but I need to do it anyway
I thought about how I might write this email for a good 4.5 weeks.
Every time I went to write it, I would feel scared or anxious and delete the entire thing.
It wasn't easy to write this, and honestly, as a WOC small business owner, it doesn't feel entirely safe either.
But if my business and community are built on me showing up as my truest, most authentic self so I can encourage others to show up in the same way, I have to let you know about my recent journey healing my childhood traumas with psychedelics.
It has been a journey that truly changed my entire life.
**Please note that this email is not therapy advice, medical advice, or guidance in any way. This is simply an email expressing my thoughts and events in my own life.
But Gloria, why would you do such a stupid and scary thing, and let 12,000 people know about your drug use?
What if you are judged and scorned and people leave and unsubscribe?
Oftentimes, the thing that is the absolute SCARIEST thing to do, is exactly the thing you should do and share with the world, in hopes that it can help someone else.
Because through seeing yourself in someone else's story, connection and transformation can happen so we can finally address the elephant in the room and get unstuck.
As you know, I have been on a journey to heal myself from scarcity, stuck energy, and my childhood traumas. (see my IG post here about my mother). I have hired therapists, done breathwork, read the books, hired the coaches, reflected on myself and my life, engaged with others on the same journey to integrate our learnings, and every day, I still work on it bit by bit.
And since seeing the 13cm larger-than-grapefruit-sized fibroid tumor (GRAPHIC WARNING) taken out of me last year, I REALLY started to understand that everything is energy, and that your body is truly a reflection of your subconscious.
Energy from your childhood, energy from the big and small events, all the good and bad, and everything in between that shapes who we are today.
They say that your relationship with your parents and your childhood are the most influential things in life.
Now at age 37, I am starting to deconstruct what that means.
For the purpose of this email, you should know that I was never a "kid" person, and told my husband on our first date that if he wanted kids, then it was a deal-breaker for me because I absolutely did NOT want anything to do with kids or being a mother.
I'm 37, and never even thought about freezing my eggs even though I had the opportunity.
I never felt "maternal" or "fertile" because I never felt that I had a connection to my biological parents in a deep sense.
My father passed when I was 3, and my mother worked away from home for many years. I moved 15 times as a kid, living with grandparents, aunts, best friends, and never had a home that was truly mine.
Here's me and my mom, a few months after my dad passed:
I also had an ex-step father I met at age 6 whose last name I ook after tell me he would be my father for the rest of my life and never abandon me. At age 13, that fairytale ended as my mother and I found ourselves with our personal belongings in boxes in his garage as he kicked out out of his ocean-front home in a bitter divorce settlement that sent my mother into a deep depression for many years.
Before we go any further, I have to stop right here and let you know that this isn't a pity story, as I was always taken care of, never experienced financial hardship, and had amazing mentors and adults who acted as parent figures. I count myself luckier than most because I have a best-friend turned sister for life, an incredible bonus mom and dad, and you can read about that here. I would be NOTHING without these incredible human beings I am lucky to call my family.
But because I spent so many years apart from my biological mother, I never felt I was "of her flesh". I realize it makes me sound like a cold-blooded psycho, but if I am honest, I have to admit that I never felt connected to her emotionally, energetically, or physically.
It was only recently that I realized upon counting, I only spent 8 years of my entire life living with her.
Having entire oceans and continents between us (my mother moved to China from the US when I was 13 and remained there) has made both of us hyper-independent to pursue our own desires, and my mother and I got used to huge gaps in shared experiences as our "normal" way of relating.
For this reason, I felt that my biggest job here on earth was to forgive her for not being there for me, never holding me in her arms, and not being emotionally available.
Perhaps this is why when I got married last year, in-law family dynamics became challenging because I had no idea how to be "close" to family.
Seeing my husband be so close to his parents seemed so foreign to me, and the prioritization of time they commit to spending with each other almost felt like an annoyance or burden, so much so that it caused difficulties in our marriage that we are currently working through.
I remember the shattered look on my husband's face when I made a comment about how I felt that visiting his family more than 4x a year was "excessive", and felt instant regret the moment the words came out of my mouth.
My untethered nature and lack of grounding to any roots has made me extremely adaptable and resilient, but also chaotic, constantly moving in all directions, perhaps in an effort to avoid a deeply rooted feeling of never being enough or having enough.
Never knowing what feeling grounded and relaxed felt like growing up, my life became a constant chase for more. More social events. More events. More revenue. More launches. More stimulation. More work.
From biting my nails to the point of my cuticles bleeding (which is something I am deeply embarrassed about at age 37), to having ADHD tendencies, to not being able to sit still and just BE, my nervous system was always super activated, and over-scheduling myself was my normalcy.
This also affected my business, as I was constantly ON, hustling, and DOING MORE, so much so that it led me to a complete burnout last year, which I talked about on this podcast episode.
As a way to find myself again, I started experimenting with alternative healing modalities such as psychedelics with a few of our friends who are facilitators and energy healers.
It was on a rainy night a few years ago that, with psychedelics, I felt for the first time ever, what it felt like to be cradled as a child in a monther's arms.
On this particular journey, I vividly saw myself as a fetus in my mom's belly, surrounded by warmth and love, without any possibility of death, divorce, or uncertainty.
I remember crying as I dropped my body into a deep state of relaxation and surrender, KNOWING that I was loved and safe, and I imagined this must be what a child would feel like in a mother's arms.
After that experience, I understood that I finally had the tools to give myself that love and comfort I never received as child, and that I no longer needed to feel as if I lacked this feeling, because I finally felt it and now know what it feels like.
Then something even more life-changing happened.
During an intentionally curated 7 hour psychedelic-assisted sound therapy journey with the most gracious and kind facilitators I will be forever grateful for, I held my husband's hand and cried as a vision came to me.
I imagined my mother, without her gray hairs and wrinkles from the turmoil she went through, at the ripe young age of 29, the moment when she became a widow.
In my vision, I saw her in the cold, iodine-smelling hospital, holding my littlte hand as I stood next to her, seeing my father's dead body in front of her, while she herself was still developing her own self-identity in a new country, far from her native land and without any support of community.
At that moment, with loud cries coming from the depth of my soul as I was rolled into the fetal position, I experienced, for the first time ever, a DEEP feeling of compassion in my bones for this woman who I never felt really close to.
They say that compassion is the highest form of love.
And at that moment, I felt it so deep that it was like a rewriting of my subconscious to the point of no return. I was forever changed.
I always felt that it was my life's work to "forgive her" and "accept her".
But during that journey, I understood that my life's work was to open my heart and stretch it much, much wider, so I can honestly see myself in her shoes as the woman who had her own dreams, goals, and desires that were cut short due to many unfortunate events.
And at the same time when feeling deep compassion for my mother and a yearning to be closer to her so I can express all the love I never expressed for her, I felt something that was absolutely shocking.
I felt, for the first time in 37 years of my time on earth, a desire to become a mother one day.
You see, this healing of my deep mother wound cleared the way for me to feel something that I never felt because of the stuck energy that was unaddressed.
I am, as you can imagine, still processing all of this. I still haven't told my mom this and haven't figured out how to express this yet.
In late May of this year, I will go to China and see my mother for the first time in 4 years, and my husband will finally get to meet her for the first time.
Since the last time I saw her, I met and married the love of my life, built the business f my dreams, met incredible small businesses (like YOU) who inspire me to do my best every day, and learned so much about myself and the reason I am the way I am.
During this time, my mother also got diagnosed with an extremely rare autoimmune disease that made her body attack her lungs, leading to permanent lung damage, and her taking steroid medication for over 2 years now---all of which are unrelated to COVID.
When I started to do research about my fibroid, stuck energy, and how everything is psychosomatic, I realized something.
In Chinese medicine, organs represent different emotions.
The lungs represent grief.
I realized that the reason I have such heavy energy about this is because I feel my mother's rare lung illness is directly related to her grief.
The grief of losing the love of her life and becoming a young widow in a foreign country, and never having that great love story she always dreamed of.
The grief of not being the mother she envisioned she could have been.
The grief of not being close with her only child and her child knowing this too.
Even though we are continents and decades of un-shared experiences apart, I’ve realized how powerful it is to release the deeper, uncomfortable truths we are holding onto.
Through psychedelics and working on my inner self, I've been able to finally process these emotions and get unstuck, so I can do the work I am here to do.
It was tough to write all of this, and I teared up a few times along the way and thought of scrapping this email all together, but in the spirit of truth and love, we finally got here.
I just released a podcast episode where I go in-depth about this journey and how scarcity from my childhood impacts my business, and you can listen to it here.
Let me know how you resonated with it, and I hope it gives you strength to process your own traumas and narratives that hold you back.
Thank you for being here, for reading this, for holding space for me, and for accepting me to write this.
My journey is only beginning, and I hope that in reading this, you can feel supported in yours.
My inbox is open if you feel compelled to respond or express.
Sending love,
Gloria
PS: What is a favorite parent/child activity of yours you think I should do with my mom when I finally see her in May/June after 4 years apart?
xoxo
gloria
SmallBiz PR coach
My #1 mission is to elevate the stories of diverse founders, because EVERYONE deserves to be seen, heard, and valued.
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