EPISODE 57: [MINDFULNESS] FIND YOUR INNER STRENGTH
SHOW NOTES
Let’s cultivate a sense of play in today’s mindfulness practice! And, I hope that this exercise shows you that there is so much beyond what we can see with our two eyes, and beyond what our ego mind tells us. With this Reiki-inspired practice where you can connect to the energy around you, you can start to embrace that you are actually made up more of energy and magic, than physical presence. You’re greater than you know. Discover just how much today.
We also explore:
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Judy Tsuei 0:06
Welcome to the F*ck Saving Face podcast. I'm your host, Judy Tsuei, and together we'll explore mental and emotional health for Asian Americans, especially breaking through any taboo topics. Life may not always be pretty, but it is indeed beautiful. Let's make your story beautiful today.
Judy Tsuei 0:24
So we talk a lot on this podcast about you master yourself, and that this journey is for you alone. I've been doing HIIT workouts on peloton and some of the instructors say, nobody's gonna work that ass out other than you. So I feel like this is kind of similar in regards to as much input as anybody can provide this as your journey in your life on this planet. And your experience will be unlike anybody else's. So I think that sometimes it's helpful to remember who we are and what we're made of, I think it's helpful to give ourselves the effort and energy that we deserve.
Judy Tsuei 1:02
So this week, we've been talking with Chi Pham, we've been talking about plant based diets, I don't really like the word diet, plant based lifestyles, we've been talking about, you know, standards of beauty of understanding where your parents are coming from equity. And I think it requires a lot of courage to live a life by your design.
Judy Tsuei 1:26
I've been sharing with friends recently that I live in North County, San Diego. And affluence is the norm here. I am also a single divorced parent, and I don't get any support from my ex husband, and I don't provide any to him. So all of my life, I have been self sufficient. My parents were in hundreds of 1000s of dollars in debt growing up. So I worked two jobs at 15 and a half to pay my own way. And while it might have been nice to go shopping for clothes, I went to Beverly Hills High School, even though I didn't live in the district.
Judy Tsuei 2:02
So keeping up would have been a nice thing, I use that money to pay for ICT classes to pay for my college application fees. And then when I got to college, I also worked two to three jobs at a time, in addition to getting financial aid to support myself. So from a very young age, I knew that my parents didn't have access. And so I was going to figure out a way and I wanted to figure out a way because I didn't want to get into debt.
Judy Tsuei 2:27
What's interesting is that through the course of my marriage and the unhealthy relationship that we were in, I ended up pulling a lot of my savings and my reserves my retirement funds to get us out of debt, and even still found myself in a situation where I had a lot of compassion for what my parents went through. I think that the system, and you can study this in, especially if you're learning about cryptocurrency or anything like that, but the systems are not set up for us to succeed, they're set up for us to fail. And especially if you're a person of color, if you didn't come with the same access to opportunities and privilege that you've got to work harder.
Judy Tsuei 3:06
And in a future interview. I'm excited to bring on Natalie Malina Nino who wrote leapfrog the new revolution for women entrepreneurs. And in it she's speak specifically to what happens when you are a woman and a woman of color in this field and how it might feel like you're doing something wrong if you can't get ahead with the same amount of effort. But then she's exposing how there are so many things that are not set up for our success, and that they were set up in a patriarchal hierarchy. So it makes sense, if we experience more hurdles to have to jump through.
Judy Tsuei 3:46
Her book actually helped encourage me to understand why I am working on the memoir that I'm working on why there's an audience for Asian Americans to directly speak to and even the term Asian American is this huge, broad umbrella term for so many different subgroups, and cultures and ethnicities within this. So even not even what I'm doing, I feel like isn't enough to highlight all of the stories or it is always surprising to me that it's Asian American men who actively reach out and send me messages and notes because I feel like that's yet another invisible community that needs a voice and needs to be heard.
Judy Tsuei 4:21
So I'm just doing my little part in hoping to bring a lot of that to light. So all of that is to say that today's practice is to remind you have how powerful you are. That even if the opportunities my partner often says fair is not equal.
Judy Tsuei 4:37
And my daughter's and her friends have recently been in this phase right now where they're saying that's not fair. That's not fair. So and So got this so and so got that and I've been doing my best to demonstrate that there is no real sense of fairness if everyone were to get the same, because we're not built the same. And the needs that we have are different. And some people need more support and some people need less and so if We're gonna say that's not fair because so and so got this, you know, it's going to create a lifetime of hardship.
Judy Tsuei 5:05
But instead, how can we find our personal power? How can we find gratitude what we have? How can we give back to the greater good? How can we be part of this collective framework?
Judy Tsuei 5:17
So I used to do this practice, when I would teach about Reiki energy, about healing energy, and how there's universal energy all around us. What I love is when science meets spirituality, so a lot of physicists now are demonstrating, you know, this kind of collapse idea of linear time, or that there potentially might be multiple universes simultaneously happening, or how we truly are energetically all connected, and that there is energy that surrounds us, and energy within us, and how do we tap into that.
Judy Tsuei 5:51
And also, I hope that you can cultivate a sense of play in today's mindfulness practice. So if you can get into a comfortable seat. And I hope that this exercise shows you that there are so much beyond what we can see with our into eyes, and beyond what our ego mind tells us that we are made up more of energy and magic, then physical presence. And we are greater than we know.
Judy Tsuei 6:24
So from here in a seated position, just taking a few breaths to get centered and grounded. I always begin all these practice with a connection to your breath, because your breath automatically drops into the present moment if you can bring all of your awareness to your inhalation and your exhalation.
Judy Tsuei 6:46
And I like to envision that breathing in you're breathing in new energy or clearing things out. And breathing out, you're letting go of anything that doesn't serve you anything that you don't need to hold on to any stressors or worries.
Judy Tsuei 7:07
So now with Reiki, I'm channeling energy through the palms of my hands, I'm the conduit. So I'm accessing this universal energy is moving through me through the palms of my hands to the person that I'm working on. Or sometimes you can do this work remotely. Even as I'm talking to you now, and I'm even just thinking about it, my palms are getting hotter. When I used to teach yoga, people would feel these invisible hands that I would lay on to them. If I were doing an adjustment, they would feel that, that energy, that feeling of my hands there would stay with them even after I'd moved on to another student or to the front of the class to continue teaching.
Judy Tsuei 7:41
Other clients of mine when I work on them during Reiki sessions, they would palpably feel the heat that was emanating from the palms of my hands, they would start to see colors or start to remember memories they hadn't thought of in a long time, or simply feel a sense of peace and being fully present. I also did this exercise when I was leading a meditation session at a startup venture. And all these engineers and people who were very used to using their left brain. I gently peeked open my eyes while I was encouraging them to do this practice. And I could see the sense of bewilderment on their faces, that they were tapping into this energy that they hold within them all of the time.
Judy Tsuei 8:26
So from here, wherever you are, I want you to bring the palms of your hands together at your heart center. So in prayer pose, you'll allow your palms to touch. And then on your next inhale, I want you to breathe your palms open so that your palms are facing one another but they're about shoulders distance apart. We're going to start to sync up our movement with our breath. So you'll Breathe in and expand your palms outward. Breathe out and bring your palms a little bit closer together. And this can be a very subtle movement, breathing in bringing the palms away from one another. Breathing out, bringing the palms closer together.
Judy Tsuei 9:09
And you'll just continue to sync up the movement of your palms with your breath. As you breathe in, palms moving away from one another. Breathe out, palms coming closer together. So each time that you breathe out, I want you to bring your palms a little bit closer together than they were before. continue breathing in pulling your hands apart, breathing out and then bringing your palms closer together. And by now, your palms, maybe just a few inches apart, maybe less. And as you're doing this do you feel the palms of your hands pushing away from one another as though they're opposite ends of magnet.
Judy Tsuei 10:00
Does it feel as though you're holding an invisible ball in between your hands. If you are at that place where you are feeling that energy that push away from one another, continue playing with moving your palms around this sensation. Or you can imagine that you're holding that invisible ball of energy. And you're just slowly padding around it. as you would if you were playing with some dough. You're playing with some sand trying to make it into a ball, or playing with some snow. And you can continue playing with this in terms of breathing, and pulling your palms far apart, breathing out and bringing your palms closer together, maybe seeing at what point as you bring your palms closer together, do you start to feel that energy of the opposite ends of magnet pulling away from each other.
Judy Tsuei 11:04
So I can feel this very clearly and distinctively between the palms of my hands. And if you allow any of the stories and the doubts to move away, and instead, continue to connect with your breath and your presence, see what it is that you're experiencing. Now, maybe you're not experiencing anything at all, and that's perfectly fine. That is your experience. And maybe you want to come back to this exercise at a future time. Maybe without there being too many thoughts, maybe your heart or your mind is very cluttered right now. Or maybe simply for you. It's a different sensation. Maybe it's the tingling that you feel. Maybe it's a sense of nervous anticipation, almost that fluttery feeling. This is again, your journey with yourself.
Judy Tsuei 11:59
What I love about this exercise is that if you feel that, if you feel it, where it's the palpable sense that there's energy in between the palms of your hands than to remember that you are also made of this energy, and that this energy exists around you all of the time. So you can tap into it at any time to replenish you to know that you are more powerful and greater than you can see with your own two eyes. And if you are not experiencing the sensations that I'm talking about, perhaps for you today, this is a practice in a leap of faith.
Judy Tsuei 12:39
Perhaps it's you uncovering more magic in your life, however, that's going to look for you. Perhaps it's you standing in your own personal power and writing your own story in your own narrative. Wherever you are, in this practice, let's take one more deep breath in. And deep breath out. Tomorrow breaths in out. One more thing, breath in and out. And if you like you can take that energy that you've cultivated that you've tapped into and place it with the palms of your hands wherever it's going to feel good for you. So maybe it's that your heart center.
Judy Tsuei 13:26
Maybe there's an ache or a pain that you want to help add a little bit more tender loving care to. Maybe you want to offer this energy out into the world as a gift. However it looks for you. Remember that you are powerful. It's sometimes easy to forget, especially if we're comparing our insights based on someone else's outsides. If we're defining our successes or failures based on someone else's core values, how can you come back to the sense of magic, wonder, playfulness and power. When you're ready, gently floating your eyes open. Coming back into this room back into this moment.
Judy Tsuei 14:21
If you enjoyed this exercise, I would love to hear how it was for you. share it on your social media tag me, tag this episode, and let me know I'm so curious. And thank you so much for joining me remember that starting in season two, these mindfulness practices will become a paid feature to support the podcast. And if you like them, then I hope you will continue listening and joining us joining our community. You'll get more details about that soon.
Judy Tsuei 14:48
Have a beautiful day, wherever you are, and see you next week.
Wilder 14:52
Please support my mom's podcast has a bad word in it, but I think you'll know where to find it.
Judy Tsuei 15:00
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you liked what you heard and know someone in your life who might also benefit from hearing this episode, please feel free to share it with them. Also, if you'd like to support our show, you can make a one-time donation fcksavingface.com. Or, you can make a recurring donation at patreon.com/fcksavingface. That's “fck” without the “u.” Subscribe today to stay tuned for all future episodes.
