Feminine Reclaimed: A Memoir

By Michele Wong

There comes a point in everyone's life where we find ourselves looking in the mirror and asking, "Who the hell am I?"

Author Michele Wong was living the life. She had a seemingly fulfilling career and a lively social circle, all while living in an international city filled with opportunity. At the same time, Michele fe

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Mar 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889267041

Book preview

Disclaimer

I wrote this memoir with my imperfect memory from the perspective of who I was at that moment in time.

I changed the names and locations to protect the identity of those who were part of my journey.

To those who are reading about themselves, please remember that this was my experience of you when I was a very different person. This portrayal is by no means who you are fully. Our experience together was important to my spiritual growth, and I thank you for being part of my journey of self-discovery and exploration.

With love and gratitude,

Michele

Dedication

To my ancestors before me, may we release our collective trauma with love and gratitude.

To my twin flame, may our eternal fire of unconditional and infinite love manifest realities we cannot even dream of.

To my unborn Spirit Son who patiently waited lifetimes to be born through me, may I be able to assist you in your soul mission.

Contents

Introduction

PART I

Chapter 1. Feminist to Feminine

Chapter 2. Facing My Ancestors

Chapter 3. Seeing Spirits

PART II

Chapter 4. Yes to Molly

Chapter 5. Shedding It All

Chapter 6. Broken Heart Awakens

PART III

Chapter 7. The Search for Sense

Chapter 8. Spiritual Talents Discovery

Chapter 9. The Path Revealed

Chapter 10. Ottoman Mysticism

Chapter 11. Lockdown Fright

Chapter 12. Spirit Son

PART IV

Chapter 13. Finding My Tribe

Chapter 14. Spaceship Adventures

Chapter 15. Rapé Returns

Chapter 16. Hormone Withdrawal

PART V

Chapter 17. Shaman Telepathy

Chapter 18. Fear Coma

Chapter 19. Change Ignition

Chapter 20. Twin Flame Reunions

Chapter 21. Healing in Romania

Chapter 22. The Path Onward

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Resources

Introduction

If someone had told my twenty-year-old self that I would one day experience life-changing plant medicine ceremonies and work on developing my gift as a medium, I would think that person was crazy.

Growing up Chinese in Canada, I watched extended family members become doctors, lawyers, and financial consultants to ensure a life of economic security. And in many ways, I made choices that harnessed the same security and traditional success. But at what cost?

As a child, I heard a lot of messages about what I should or should not do. Those around me tried to pass on their life lessons to me with the hope of protecting me from their traumas. Those were my grandmothers, parents, aunts, and family friends.

I inherited the message that I should be a strong, independent woman, self-sufficient, highly successful with a prestigious career, and that children and husbands would only provide unneeded stress. Even with good intentions, I was still being told what a woman should be, even though the definition of womanhood was constantly changing. These shoulds became rules restricting my freedom to explore and be who I truly am.

By the time I was in my thirties, I had a thriving high-paying career, living abroad in a glamorous city with vibrant and successful friends. I became bigger than the status symbol my childhood self would have dreamed of, as opposed to the historic female role of being married and a stay-at-home mother. All around me, I witnessed successful women and men with thriving careers—people at the top of their game. I strived to be more like them because they were writing books, speaking at events, getting promotions, growing their businesses, and throwing elaborate parties.

But I eventually had to ask myself, what was the endgame? When was it all enough? Why was I striving for all of this?

The truth is, even with my idea of success, I lacked fulfillment. I soon realized all the status symbols I strived for weren’t significant to who I really am. I achieved the perfect picture of what I was supposed to be, but I still felt a swelling void. I was a zombie drifting from one event to another without any purpose, suppressing the sadness that crept to the surface. Eventually, that sadness became overwhelming, and I did not have the tools to engage with my unfamiliar emotions.

That’s when I felt I needed to do some exploration within. I didn’t realize when I began a spiritual awakening where the universe would guide me to a completely new perspective in life, flipping my world upside down.

This memoir contains reflections on my healing, growth, and exploration. It includes experiences of exploring what unconditional love means, reviving childhood gifts of mediumship and navigating seeing spirits as an adult; learning to love my inner demons in an ayahuasca ceremony; getting off synthetic hormones (birth control, then later IUD) after twenty years; uniting with my soulmate, which I absolutely despised when first meeting him—all while exploring multiple avenues of healing and growth in spiritual communities, including various forms of meditation, energy healing, and plant medicine.

As I learned to let go of control and live more in flow, I discovered that people, experiences, and events naturally align in my path to bring me exactly what I need and want. The hardest part was finally releasing the tension of control I had been holding on to all my life.

The journey within, at times, felt incredibly lonely. It often seemed like not many people around me truly understood what was happening because I couldn’t explain it when it was happening. But there is one thing I learned for sure. To know where to go, we have to know where we’ve been. That takes courage—an open heart—to explore within yourself, but it seems to be the only way to fill those pockets of emptiness we sometimes find within.

For all those climbing up the ladder of success who still feel like something is missing, I’m here with you in hopes that my exploration can give you a little insight into your journey.

Thank you for walking alongside me.

PART I

1

Feminist to Feminine

Some women are afraid this deep knowing via instinct and intuition will cause them to be reckless or thoughtless, but this is an unfounded fear. Quite the contrary; lack of intuition, lack of sensitivity to cycles, or not following one’s knowing, causes choices which turn out poorly, even disastrously.

—Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women Who Run with the Wolves

There comes a point in everyone’s life where we find ourselves looking at the mirror and asking, Who the hell am I?

I had several of these moments, which were the darkest periods of my life. I couldn’t tell up from down. Often, these were the times I didn’t want to live. I didn’t get to the point of planning an end for myself. I simply would be okay if I stopped living. I constantly asked myself, What was the point of life?

When I tried to answer this question, I would first try writing an endless gratitude list, as recommended by so many. But this process just ended up making me feel shittier about myself. I started to self-identify as a horrible, unappreciative person for having so much to be grateful for but not feeling thankful for them. Everything around me seemed empty and meaningless.

Another thing I tried was to search for reasons to live. The world is a big place. There is much to explore.

Thus, whenever I found myself in that dark place, I’d make a drastic change. I’d move. Sometimes I’d change jobs, sometimes cities, and many times move to a different country, crossing oceans and continents. To many on the outside, I seemed brave for exploring and experiencing the world, but in reality I was running away from myself.

I ran away so fast with so little awareness that I didn’t know what I was doing. I wanted to escape.

Being alone with myself terrified me. Working on myself? Well, I didn’t get there because I wrapped myself up in the fear and distractions of life. Besides, I liked the ego boost of people seeing me as brave, even though that was the furthest from the truth.

I grew up in a family with strong views about what it meant to be a woman. My mother was a women’s studies major who would sing to me when I was little, Whatever a boy can be, you can be better. She would teach me words she learned from her studies, like gender bias.

My maternal grandmother strongly forced her views on her kids and told them not to have children or get married. She would say, The moment you have children, you will worry until you are six feet under. She even went as far as not to speak with my mother for weeks when she was pregnant with me. My aunts and non-related Asian aunties would share their regrets about getting married and having children. And the most substantial message from all of them was that having a successful career would be the best life for me.

I received many lessons from these women. They shared them all with good intentions. They ingrained in me I needed to get good grades, get a good job, and be a good person in society to have a good life.

But what was my definition of good? It wasn’t this empty feeling that kept growing inside of me. The truth was that avoiding the responsibility of creating my interpretation was much easier than looking for my own definitions in life. It became much more comfortable to accept other people’s commentary on what happiness is.

By doing that, I also took on other people’s fears. I was afraid of being a mother, or being poor, irrelevant, boring, and losing control. I ended up unconsciously fearing men. Comedian Louis CK made me laugh to tears by telling a joke about how women’s biggest risk of death is not heart disease or breast cancer, but men. I wholeheartedly agreed at the time.

I channeled all these fears into holding a strong-headed identity: a tough, independent, in-control feminist. Using logic, I researched facts and reasons why being a mother and wife was not for me. I worked in politics, inspired by making a change in the world to be relevant. I started nonprofits championing human rights and politically and economically empowered girls and women.

My identity and achievements made me proud. But these accomplishments didn’t attribute much to my happiness in the long run nor alleviate the swelling emptiness and void within me. I wasn’t letting go of the feeling of being in control of my happiness. I held onto my identity of strength and bravery out of the fear of unraveling.

Having absorbed the influence of patriarchy, I soaked up the fear of being feminine from the messages shared with me. I experienced a subconscious disdain for the opposite of being in control, strong, logical, and independent. This very real fear ran deep inside me, and I realized that, in truth, I was self-hating.

But I cannot blame my former self. Society usually depicts being feminine—soft, dependent, gentle, showing emotions, being in flow—as weak and less than. That’s why many feminists point out that for others to take women seriously, they often need to exhibit stereotypically masculine qualities such as strength, assertiveness, violence, and domination, especially in the workplace.

This fear of feminine energy serves no one, regardless of gender. Not only does it prevent women from fully being who they were meant to be, but it also prevents men and people of other gender identities too. We all possess qualities regarded as masculine and feminine, and to live fully, we must accept our talents without worrying about following socially prescribed gender roles.

My favorite example from the cultures I’ve encountered is the yin and yang. The two teardrops in this swirling symbol stand for the transformation of yin into yang and vice versa. I used to draw the symbol in my school notebooks as a teenager. Yin represents femininity and yang represents masculinity harmonized in a balance.

When we lose our capacity to embrace feminine energy, we lose our ability to be receptive to what life brings us, to move through life and adapt to our circumstances fluidly, and to connect with what comes with creative inspiration. When this happens, we become rigid, irritated, and overextended instead of feeling at ease and refreshed with a constant sense of needing to be doing and going.

On the other hand, we struggle to manifest the experiences we want in the world when we isolate ourselves from our masculine energy. We lose focus on our objectives and the motivation to make the things we desire for ourselves.

The patriarchy overvalued practically everything connected with masculinity over the previous hundreds of years while devaluing nearly everything linked with the feminine. The world needs an infusion of feminine energy that coexists and cocreates alongside masculine energy.

A particular primary method or guru didn’t lead me to embrace my feminine. It just happened. But not overnight. It wasn’t any one course, workshop, spiritual group, book, person, modality, or practice. It was all of it, collected on my personal journey like the construction of a building, put together brick by brick. It took some time to see what I was building, but eventually, I started to see things take shape. I began to notice I was denying my feminine energy and repressing it too.

The lessons I collected along the way have taught me to view my life and how I experience it from a completely different perspective. Much of what I feared in my life was not that scary at all, or in many cases not actually real. It became clear my fears are an illusion based on my past experiences and traumas I project into my present and future.

And it wasn’t only my own experiences but also other people’s experiences. For instance, I realized I strongly held onto society’s definition of being a feminist, successful, happy, and the list goes on. It transformed into a belief system that I must maintain control of all these things or else.

But a great place to start was to tackle my foundation, where it all started, and that is to look into my maternal ancestry. In my roots, I found the poison of trauma that encapsulated those before me, and they passed on to me.

2

Facing My Ancestors

Children are a great incentive and impetus for parents to learn about themselves, about each other, and about life itself. Unfortunately, much of the learning may occur at their expense.

—Dr. Gabor Maté

The feminist in me is guilty and even angry when it comes to my experience in ancestral healing. Why is it that so much of ancestral healing focuses on the mother wound?

My journey focused on the mother wound, perhaps because of my imbalance of the feminine and masculine energies in my reality. Most people will not dispute that the world is very masculine. From a feminist point of view, we live in a patriarchal society. From a spiritual perspective, we live in a world with an imbalance of masculine energy. But both feminine and masculine energies have equally important traits.

Masculine energy is typically focused, linear, analytical, strategic, and structured, while feminine energy is creative and random. It’s our logical side in doing where we schedule and plan our lives out. We see this in a lot of corporate work. Neither is greater or weaker than the other, and both can be powerful when they coexist in a balance. When masculine energy is in excess, it can be very confrontational, as we can sometimes see in the aggression of drunken men at pubs or politicians at war.

Feminine energy is in creativity and movement, expression, and emotions, and it can go anywhere and do anything, but it has trouble sticking to structure. The part of our feeling side comes up with new and innovative ideas and uplifts the artist within us. If constricted, it can get out of its flow, where ideas and emotions can run rampant like mood swings.

When we balance our feminine and masculine, we live in more fulfillment and harmony. Anxiety doesn’t overtake us by having too many worries about the things we have to do or having too many emotions.

I had to learn there is nothing wrong with our feminine energy. I wasn’t utilizing it to my fullest potential to find my inner peace and balance. I discovered when I cut myself off from my feminine, I lost my ability to move fluidly and adapt to my circumstances. I closed myself off from receiving from the universe and connecting with my creative inspiration from within. Instead of being in a state of peace and balance, I was rigid, agitated, and overextended. I had no clue why or what I was truly experiencing. A sense of continually needing to keep doing and moving consumed me.

In the larger picture, it was partially the society I grew up in. But having explored deeper, I discovered it all started with my ancestors. Their life experiences led to their traumas. Their traumas developed their self-protection mechanisms which established their ideas of success that were passed from one generation to the next.

Understanding our history and where we come from is crucial to gaining clarity on where we are going. This is why it is so important to focus on our ancestral trauma that needs healing to understand where much of our unconscious behaviors and patterns come from. I inherited a plethora of fears from my ancestors, from fear of men to the fear of being dependent on others, being poor, and losing control and freedom. I could not acknowledge this until I took a deeper dive into the lives of my ancestors.

* * *

If abortion and birth control had been accessible even a decade before, I probably wouldn’t exist. Neither would my mother. And if it had been accessible a generation earlier, it’s likely even my grandmother wouldn’t exist. My grandmother wanted to attempt abortion using Chinese medicine, but my grandfather made a compromise with her.

Born in Hong Kong in the late 1950s, my mother and her twin brother, Uncle Stan, were the last of seven children. They would keep the twins in the hospital for the first six months so my grandmother could better focus on work and life. My grandmother was never the type to enjoy the typical duties of a housewife. She preferred going into my grandfather’s storefront businesses to conduct bookkeeping and monitor the employees.

You deserve this suffering, my grandmother once told my mother as she had her head in the toilet throwing up from pregnancy nausea. My grandmother was upset that her daughter had not taken her advice not to have children and to enjoy life.

The trauma of child-rearing seemed to extend beyond my grandmother in my maternal ancestry. Stories from several family members reveal my great-grandmother had eighteen