In the Valley of Doubt

I looked back and counted over 50 readings with incredible people mostly in the Fall and Winter of last year. I met strangers, heard from old friends, learned the difference between reading people you know and people you don’t. I developed my senses, tools and language—still quite in development—to connect more deeply to the people and energies around me. I took courses and workshops and did a bunch of therapy, counseling, and learning. Messages from spirit and beyond bring subjective truths (open to interpretation!) joy, hope, sometimes healing. It all depends.

This is probably why I keep coming back to the work even though I have doubt. It feels really good to help someone connect to their intuition more deeply, by voicing what perhaps is just out of reach or confirming what they know and need support on.

But no matter how often the messages unfold beautifully and no matter how much feedback I receive that it’s helpful, I still have doubt. Because energy work is by nature, invisible. Because I’m a perfectionist. Because I’m learning, and also want to be very careful with people’s hearts. And there is no school that can teach you a decolonized and expansive spiritual practice, especially as a Korean American who grew up feeling very isolated in religion, critiquing community in order to escape confines I did not consent to. Because I know there is a gamut of help that each of us needs, and 1 hour of my time is nothing in the scope of work each person does in helping themselves along their path. Working with people much more accredited and experienced in their specific lane than I.

Regardless, I’m really unsure what I’m doing at the moment. But that unknowing is perhaps an invitation to surrender to the unknown. Listen in the moment. Sharing all this makes me cringe sometimes (sometimes it’s OK). But I have always been drawn to sharing, so I am learning to position that cringe as an emotion to sit with, perhaps to clear away one day. I am being judged, so what. My intuition is telling me to continue, and ultimately we are all judged all the time, whether we try to hide or not.

Last year, I shared a lot on social media, and would dip into periods where I shared a little, too. I developed a relationship to listening into the unknown, that is ramping up even more this year. This is my task now, to listen to the silence. A message that keeps repeating, in signs, in messages, in voices…What arises in the silence has been scary, really scary sometimes. But reflecting on it now, I see that this is what has allowed me to process and release fear I had otherwise tamped down, smothered in the noise of my doing, my thinking. Clinging to anxiety is what has stopped me from knowing my intuition all these years.

I heard in a meditation that the crown chakra is associated with silence. I don’t know a lot about the chakras, though I’m learning as I lean into more energetic practices. But that makes sense to me, that above my corporeal body is a silence that connects me to the universe. I am still listening for a voice, when truly it’s the silence I feel I’m being asked to invite in.

I’m consistently wondering about who comes for a reading. It feels like it’s guided, because so often I deeply connect with the clients who book a session, some part of their story is intimately familiar to mine. It’s been a real privilege, and I’m deeply grateful to every person who chooses to come to me with questions, or just to see what comes forward for them. (You know who you are).

The connection with clients was so much so that I wondered, will I eventually stop having these readings, when I’ve met people who reflect every part of my journey back to me?

But then a knowing says: it is and isn’t about you.

Spiritual work is often about where you and I meet. Where we come into awareness that we’re not alone. That we each have an authentic path, and an authentic voice. We each are powerful. I’m seeking my own path alongside trying to help other people wherever they are. I am grateful that anyone looks at my stuff and thinks: OK I’ll try this wiley gyal out. It’s still shocking every time. So I keep putting things out there, trying to reach who will be drawn to it. I do not want to be a figurehead even for my own practices, influence anything, or have a media personality. I’m just inching along because my guides tell me to seek my community. Not an audience, but a community.

A story for another time…perhaps.

For now, I am holding all this self-consciousness and doubt with unease. But I get up every day. I keep going. I do energy work, investing in what makes sense for now. I read my books, I numb my brains on dog and cat TikTok. I go to my day job and continue the work there. I write my poems in my notes app, unable to write like I did in years before. I track my dreams. I watch Golden Globe speeches and wonder if my tearful response is hypocritical. I hunker down in the rain. I meditate in silence, I meditate under the trees, I breathe. I think of the wave, and how it only moves in contrast, it goes up and it goes down. In the valley of doubt, I feel I am down, but still… I really feel it. In the valley of doubt, there’s the pain of being alive. It comes with so much loss and fear. Anger. Frustration. Powerlessness. But in the doubt, I feel a certain gratitude that I am feeling at all. Grateful to the people I love, to the guidance which surround me. No emotion comes alone. I am immensely grateful to be alive, even if I am also, just a teensy bit still afraid.