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Two years ago, I put my most personal lessons into a book — a snapshot of my unlearning up until that point… but growth never stops, and the words I wrote then have continued to evolve as I do. In this anniversary episode, I’m sharing what it’s like to look back at my own teachings and add on with lived experience: the ways my understanding of love, family, success, self, and spirituality has deepened.
I reflect on everything from embracing seasons of effort and ease, to realising that true love blooms alongside deeper self acceptance, to unlearning inherited patterns that no longer fit.
Most of all, I explore what it means to keep becoming — to live my own story as an evolving process rather than a tidy, completed chapter.
If you’ve ever wondered what happens after you say, “I’ve learned this,” this episode is for you. Let’s honour the journey together and embrace the beautiful unfolding that happens after we put pen to paper.
Resources from today's episode
Two Years of The Great Unlearning
Hi there, we’re so back. Had a little mini unexpected but expected break. Things have been really busy in my world and a month ago I ran the Flow Retreat in Vietnam and this evening I’ll be running the kick off call for the Recharge and Renew Bali Retreat in August which is sold out. The final retreat I will be running in 2025 is also in Bali at the end of September if you’re interested, send me a message as it hasn’t been publicly officially launched yet.
Today happens to be the 2nd anniversary of my book The Great Unlearning: Awakening to Living an Aligned and Authentic Life. Happy birthday to my baby and in honour of this birthday and celebration I thought I would talk about my journey Two Years of Unlearning My Own Teachings. Growth is expansion.
You know, it’s funny how a book can feel like a time capsule — a snapshot of who you were and what you believed in a particular moment. Two years ago, I poured my heart onto those pages. Every word was true to me then. I guess what I didn’t fully realise at the time is that those words would also become seeds… seeds that would continue to grow in me as much as they might grow in you.
So as I reflect on these two years — celebrating this book’s anniversary — I’m less interested in rewriting what I wrote and more interested in adding on. Adding those subtle new threads that life, practice, and my own unlearning have revealed.
Unlearning Success
Expanding on success and abundance feels like opening a wider door — beyond just seasons or mindset, into the energetic dance that happens between us and the flow of life.
Since writing the book, I’ve become more aware of how deeply our relationship to success is intertwined with our inner alignment — not just what we do, but who we are in each moment. Success isn’t just the visible achievements or milestones; it’s also the invisible states of being: the patience in waiting, the trust in timing, the surrender when things don’t move as planned. These inner states carry an energy that either opens the channel for abundance or blocks it.
I notice when I’m pushing against my own values and boundaries — when I’m forcing myself to hustle out of scarcity or fear. That kind of push drains my energy and leads to frustration and burnout. When I align my actions with what truly matters to me, honouring my boundaries and staying true to my values, I move from a place of deep alignment and joy.
This energetic awareness has become my compass — guiding me to recognise when it’s time to step forward with purpose and when it’s time to pause and protect my energy. It helps me navigate the flow between effort and ease, so I can create space for growth without losing myself in the process.
Money itself — it becomes less a goal and more a mirror. It reflects back my beliefs about worth, deserving, and security. This deep dance between who I am energetically and how I move through the world has taught me that true success feels expansive, not just productive. It invites me to celebrate the fullness of my experience — the work, the rest, the receiving, and the giving — all woven together in a cycle that’s uniquely mine.
Unlearning Self
Unlearning self has been one of the most profound parts of this journey — especially as I approached and entered my thirties.
There’s a lot of cultural noise about turning 30 — the stereotypes and fears that come with it, like it’s a deadline or a crisis point. Many people feel this pressure wondering they have arrived or are I somehow running out of time.
What feels like the best part of this decade so far is how well I know myself. The confidence and centeredness that come from years of both struggle and growth have created a steady foundation inside me. I’m less swayed by external expectations and more anchored in my own truth.
Aging is a privilege — one that allows us to shed illusions, embrace our full complexity, and move through life with a kind of grace and clarity that only time can give. Unlearning the fear around aging and the self-imposed limitations that come with it has been liberating. I welcome each year not as a countdown but as a new layer of wisdom and freedom.
Unlearning Masculine to Feminine Energy
Deepening my embodiment of the feminine has been a sacred and ongoing journey — one that touches every part of my life, especially my relationships and my work.
In my relationships, embodying the feminine means embracing receptivity, vulnerability, and intuitive knowing. It’s about allowing space for softness and emotional depth, even when the world around me feels chaotic or demanding. This isn’t about weakness — far from it. It’s a profound strength that comes from being fully present with my feelings, honouring the ebb and flow of connection, and trusting that surrender can be just as powerful as holding steady.
In my work with clients, this embodiment translates into creating a container where deep listening and gentle guidance open the door for transformation. It’s less about pushing or fixing and more about facilitating a space where clients can access their own inner wisdom and healing. Teaching from this place requires me to embody patience, compassion, and trust — qualities often associated with the feminine — which invites a different kind of growth: one that happens in cycles, not linear progressions.
The feminine energy I’m cultivating is grounded in embodiment — in knowing my body as a source of intelligence and power, in moving through the world with grace and presence. It invites me to balance action with stillness, to honor intuition alongside strategy, and to lead with heart as much as mind.
This deepening feminine presence feels like coming home to myself again and again — a reminder that strength and softness coexist, and that true power flows from embracing all parts of who I am.
Unlearning Love
This isn’t the fairytale ending one would have hoped for, but it is a happily-ever-after story. That’s what I wrote in the chapter “Love Story,” and I still believe it. It was never just about the ending — it was about the journey and all the ways we grow along the way. In the two years since writing those words, my understanding of love and partnership has deepened in ways I couldn’t have imagined back then particularly now.
Especially moving into my early thirties and stepping into a post–Saturn Return version of myself, my priorities have shifted. I’m not just dating for myself anymore; I’m dating with my future children in mind, with their father in mind. That adds a kind of sacred weight to my choices — not pressure, but a deeper commitment to honouring what I truly value. I look for someone who can grow alongside me, someone I can build a life with, not just a fleeting romance. Be with the man who wants to be a husband and father not just one that wants a wife and baby.
As I’ve learned to embrace myself more fully — making peace with the parts of me that once felt too much or never enough — my capacity to love my partner has grown too. The more of myself I embrace, the more of them I can embrace. Love feels less like a checklist of what someone can do for me and more like a practice of showing up for one another in all our humanity. True love isn’t easy, but it can feel effortless in the sense that you want to grow together. Even when it’s challenging, there’s a shared sense that becoming wiser, softer, more real is part of the deal. That’s the version of “happily-ever-after” I wish I’d painted before — one that feels alive and evolving, just like we are.
And here’s something I’d also add on, something that only experience could have taught me: always trust your instincts. Even those small pink or white flags that feel easy to overlook — they rarely disappear. They tend to grow into the very red flags that can end a relationship. That gentle, persistent hesitation you feel? That’s your intuition trying to protect you, and honouring it is an act of deep self-love. Safety — emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual — is not optional. It’s the foundation for real intimacy. Without it, you can’t truly open, and without openness, you can’t truly grow together.
That’s what I want to leave you with now: knowing that it’s never just about a perfect ending. It’s about a truthful, wholehearted process. It’s about the courage to recognise when something is off, the compassion to grow through it, and the faith that real love will meet you where you are — in all your honesty, all your softness, and all your strength.
Unlearning Family
You are restoring your family to the core of what family is: love. You get to be the one future generations will remember as the remarkable soul who was the turning point of change for the betterment of the family tree… that’s the thing about family and lineage — it isn’t a closed story.
Since writing those words, I’ve come to see just how much deeper the roots go. Visiting Vietnam these past few years, meeting relatives I never knew existed, hearing their stories told in my mother tongue — all of it has opened a door in me that I didn’t even know was there.
I thought I was breaking generational patterns to make my family’s future lighter and freer, and I am. But reconnecting with my ancestry has also shown me the richness that was already there — the resilience, love and heart that carried my family through hardships I could hardly imagine. Unlearning family isn’t just about shedding pain and expectations; it’s also about rediscovering the treasures that were lost or forgotten along the way.
It’s making me proud — so proud — of my culture and my roots. I’ve realised that part of this unlearning is also cultural unlearning: releasing the shame or disconnect I inherited, embracing the beauty of my language, my food, my traditions, my people. It’s like weaving my ancestors’ strength into my present story, so my future children will grow up knowing they come from something powerful and sacred.
Most of all, I’ve learned that the most healing version of “family” is one that honours both where we come from and where we’re going. It’s choosing to hold the best parts your lineage and yourself to evolve beyond the patterns that no longer serve. That’s the real work of becoming the turning point of change: we don’t just unlearn what was painful, we also reclaim what was beautiful, so that love is truly at the core of who we are becoming.
Unlearning Spirituality
When I look back on my unlearning around spirituality, one of the most freeing realizations has been that God — the Universe, Source, Spirit — isn’t “out there,” waiting to be reached. It’s already here. It is me. Being human is the spiritual practice. Every breath, every misstep, every tender moment is a ritual.
In that practice, discipline becomes devotion. Showing up for myself, the divine that lives within me every day — whether it’s meditation, journaling, movement, prayer — feels less like a duty and more like a sacred tending. My teacher in India once told me that each of us is like gold underneath the dust. It doesn’t matter what life has covered us with; the gold itself never tarnishes. It only needs gentle polishing to reveal its brilliance again. That’s what this devotion feels like — a daily return to my own light.
And as I polish my own soul, I’m also honoring the sacredness that weaves through all paths. The divine doesn’t recognize the borders we draw around names or traditions. Whether I whisper prayers to Goddess Isis under an Egyptian sky, offer my heart to Ganesh and Narayani on my altar, bow to Quan Âm in Vietnam, or feel the compassion of Fatimah — it is all one light, one source moving through different hands and different histories.
That’s what I want to carry forward in my practice: that every culture, every path, every deity reflects some part of my own humanity back to me. Every ritual, every prayer, every lineage is simply a different way of polishing the same gold. And when I remember this — that my divinity is already present and my discipline is just devotion — I feel at home in my soul again.
Celebrating The Great Unlearning
Your journey with this book is alive — it’s not a one-and-done experience. Even if you’ve read it once, you’re a different person every time you come back. Life changes us, and so does what we need from the words we return to. My hope for these “add-ons” is that they give you permission to read your own life the same way — as a living, evolving story that’s constantly unfolding.
Unlearning is never finished. It’s a process of peeling back old layers, challenging the stories you’ve been told, and making space for new ways of being that feel truer to who you really are. There’s so much more for all of us to grow into — more freedom, more joy, more self-love, and more connection. Sometimes, that growth happens more easily when you have someone walking beside you, reflecting your light and helping you navigate the parts that feel tricky or stuck.
If you feel called to deepen your unlearning journey, to step more fully into your power, or simply want support in creating a life that feels aligned and meaningful — I’m here for you. Working together through life and or business and or human design coaching, we can explore your unique path, uncover what’s holding you back, and build new habits, mindsets, and practices that honour the fullest expression of you.
You don’t have to do this alone. When you’re ready, I invite you to reach out, and let’s walk this evolving story together. Your next chapter deserves to be the most vibrant and best one yet.
Until next time.
