If it’s appeared on your life radar, this is why: to teach you that dreams come true; to reveal that you have the power to fix what’s broken and heal what hurts; to catapult you beyond seeing with just your physical senses; and to lift the veils that have kept you from seeing that you’re already the person you dreamed you’d become.

And believe me, that was one heck of a dream.

There are no accidents, Yi Lian.

Tallyho,
The Universe

This may not be my first experience with Shanghai. But somehow it feels new. I sit here wondering while staring at the Pearl Tower and started the self-questioning.

While waiting at the airport’s arrival hall, instead of getting flustered by the typically inconsiderate behaviour of most locals, my eyes and mind went into frenzy – admiring the slew of fashion treats around me. So the behaviours may not have changed when I last came here but the sartorial choices sure have. Proportionate silhouettes, attention to interesting details and understated designer pieces – I must admit I was a little bowled over as I looked on.

Then the car took us past The Bund. Instead of focusing on the ever-gloomy weather of the city, I mused how breathtakingly beautiful the heritage buildings along the water are. An imaginary scene of flappers with shapely bobs and fine-looking dandies mingling in the early 20^th century flashed across my mind and it made me smiled.

So the people and landscape have remained since my last presence two years ago so what changed? Then I realised the inner landscape of my mind and heart have. And I guess that may not be such a bad thing after all.

Hello Shanghai. Nice meeting you. Again.

Dissatisfied with the storyline, I went on to Wikipedia Sigmund Freud and then with his grandson Lucian Freud’s recent death, I’d been reading a bit about the latter in several publications. The more I read, the more intrigued I got. Beside the comparison on both Freud’s roles (a patient sit on a couch to be psychoanalysed by Sigmund while a sitter poses on a couch to be painted by Lucian, which is very similar to being psychoanalysed too, no?), I was also drawn by Lucian’s (and Jung’s, while we are at it…) inability to commit.

I think it was in the latest UK edition of Vogue where in an article on the younger Freud, an ex-lover said something along the lines of: “It wasn’t so much that Lucian was unable to commit to a woman, it was more that he wanted to have a baby with every woman he met.”

I sat alone, enthralled by that comment. And I stared into space for a bit. A little dazed. A little bewildered.

And I wondered, “so who the hell equated love to commitment?”

Didn’t some very wise people said freedom is the heart of love?

What’s wrong with Lucian’s behaviour? Because society said so? Isn’t the ability to love more more beautiful than the simplistic ability to commit? How can we have the audacity to promise forever when we can’t even promise what tomorrow will bring?

Why is it that when I insist breakups and divorces are quite necessary sometimes, I was named a cynic? Why must we insist all the ‘good’ things last forever? It’s kinda greedy, no? It’ll be awesome if the love stays forever but when it doesn’t, you call that 10-year relationship/marriage a waste of your time and claim yourself a fool when only the last quarter of the time together was challenging. How about the happy times in the beginning? Was that all forgotten?

Now, who’s the cynic?

My point being… Why do we get so fixated on getting the future ‘right’ when all we can be sure of is the here and now?

So we can’t promise we’ll live together happily ever after. But we can promise we’ll live together happily right here and right now. Sometimes, that’s all we can promise but we know that’s the best we’ve got.

Does that make us love each other any less?

Absolutely not.

I left the office today at an untypical hour where the sun still shone. That perpetual guilt of “I could have done more” plagued me but I had to go. I wanted to spend the evening before my birthday with my family and I was adamant I didn’t usher in my birthday at my work desk.

Thanks to good ol’ Stars, my mood lifted a little as I plugged in and walked and I realised it’s been a while since I had this persistent sense of… unhappiness – if that’s the right way to describe it. You know, the feeling that you want more out of your life yet you know you may not entirely deserve it because you ain’t giving more anyway.

It’s probably a combination of factors. First, a relentless flu bug that threw me off track physically and professionally. From there, it was a downward spiral of feeling demoralised and in a state of isolation and self-disappointment. This whole journey is almost… expected. I’d been in a great place for months now and when I recognised its presence, I chuckled a little to myself. Life is all but a cycle, no?

Then when you ain’t feeling so invincible anymore, suddenly different sets of truth seem to make themselves more apparent. And that sense of “I could have done more” persists… I could have been a better friend, daughter, sister and aunt. I’m not caring enough. I don’t communicate enough. I’m not selfless enough. I don’t spend enough time with them. Hell, I’m not even a good enough yogi, what with just a weekly practice…

And as I witness some friendships and relationships die a slow death, I cry a little to myself as I debate between being a victim and a student. I tell myself nothing lasts forever and I can only be grateful they once were but it’s a hard pill to swallow…

I don’t mind all these pensiveness, really. And no, I don’t quite mind turning another year older either. I was telling KT last night that it’s hard to hate ageing when you love the lessons you’d learnt that could only come with age.

We all complain a little as the number scales up bit by bit, but will we really exchange what we have right now for where we were five years ago or even two years ago? I’d loved my life then but I love new lessons too much to wanna stay forever 25.

So, here I go… A happy little birthday to myself. :)

PS: Sorry if you’re expecting the usual uplifting post. I’m sure I’ll be back in no time. ;)

I’ve been saying this for months but sometimes I still want to pinch myself. I’m happy. I’m so truly happy right here and now that everything seems so perfect at the moment. (well, other than the impending deadlines that are scaring the hell outta me…) I’ve came a long way this year. I really have.

I may not have gotten married or pop yet another baby like some of my peers. And despite not having these generic milestones the past year, there are still so many things I’m grateful for. So many. Even the seemingly bad moments.

Right now, I’m grateful for:

1. My job. A younger me took my previous jobs for granted but now, after a year of freelance writing (not that I didn’t love that year of freedom, haha), I know I must always be grateful that I have a job. And one that I absolutely love? I must be crazy not to be thankful. I marvel how everything had happened in the past year to allow me to land this great gig. Truly – every thing does happen for a reason.
   g
2. My boss and colleagues. Is it too fast for me to declare this? Things may change in the future but right now, thank you Life for putting me in a work environment where I just adore my boss and colleagues. Each of them and their idiosyncrasies amuse me to no end everyday and despite our multinational and multicultural backgrounds, we are all the same. I love exchanging knowing looks with a few kindred spirits among my colleagues and I love how they make me laugh my ass off just by being themselves. And the ex-colleagues that were never quite mine to start with – AS and MJ. Fast friendships do happen in real life!
    g
3. Fashion, art, photography and architecture. In my own little mind, I categorise this group as “beauty”. Beauty is everywhere around us – all day, every day. In good fashion, good art, good photography and of course, good architecture. I’m grateful that they’re such awesome sources of creativity and how they inspire me endlessly with their beauty. I love how my exposure to them makes me learn so much about history, sociology and psychology.
    g
4. New friends. The girl and boy friends I’d met through the course of yoga both locally and while I was travelling, thank you for being the epitomes that one is never too old to make new good friends. Regardless of our nationalities and backgrounds and whether you’re skyping or emailing from Toronto, Tokyo, Sydney, San Francisco, Beijing or Amsterdam, you are amazing examples that we’re, again, all the same.
    g
5. BADSPY. Our friendship is like an elastic band and I’m grateful that despite the fact that sometimes it stretches thin, it’ll always rebound to original form. Maybe cos I was the runaway child who left for two years and came back again, I feel the evolution of our friendship more. Nevertheless, I absolutely love us for who we are. I was rereading the Christmas cards we exchanged this year and as cheesy as it sounds, they warm my heart. :)
   g
6. My travels. Thank you for opening my eyes and mind and allowing them to rethink our so-called set of ethnics and morals. Who said we would always stay the same and never evolve? And of course, letting me realised I’m more independent than I let on and that I’m amazingly open to every possible experience Life may have to offer.
   g
7. My mistakes. Whether grave or trivial – you’ve opened a floodgate of lessons that I would have never learned if I’d never committed you. Thank you for the wealth of knowledge and teaching me that learning gracefully from mistakes are just like passing our school examinations with flying colours. Yes, even the ones that I’d made at the sake of losing some people from my life for good. It’s OK because they were meant to happen.
    g
8. My family. A father who relentlessly fetches me anywhere I wanna go and makes sure I have my dinners that there’s no such thing as “out of the way” when it comes to his daughter. A mother whom is generous and loving to a fault, and also ridiculously innocent yet endearing. A sister who’s ethereally unfazed by anything. She’s my role model at living a simple but loving life.  She embodies the saying “keep calm and carry on”. And the small little people she’s given birth to who love and adore me unconditionally and the best teachers for teaching one how to appreciate the little things in life. Candy is no longer just candy. They’re EVERYTHING.
    g
9. Music and movies – the perfect escapes and yet one that often allows me to connect to another. Sometimes they transport me to other worlds and sometimes they bring forth a whole slew of epiphanies. My creative little soul needs that outlet that ignites all my senses.
    g
10. My best friend who, somehow, seems to have mastered the perfect mix of goofiness and grace. Thank you for creating this friendship with me that’s so strong and effortless that it befuddles me to think of a situation that can possibly rock it.
    g
    and most of all,
    g
11. My Self for being relentlessly optimistic and hopelessly romantic. For continually surprising me at how strong I can be without going all girl power and feminist and I can walk my talk. For being able to always seek the lessons in every dire situation instead of blaming the world. And most importantly, for never taking myself and Life too seriously.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

“Hi my dearest!

Let me begin with I love you.

I am taking the time to write to the profound people who have supported and impacted my life over this past year of growth and transformation!

In case I have not said it enough. Thank you.

Thank you for your spirit and energy and sharing the villa and your beautiful broken heart at that time with us last year. Thank you for wanting to continue to be a part of my life even though we are worlds away from one another. Thank you for providing me with so much soul and inspiration through your words. Thank you even if there is much time between our conversations, for always returning and asking me how I am. Thank you for listening to me. Thank you for all of your support and encouragement and for relishing and accepting my deeply rooted sometimes wise ways along with my silly, playful goofy ways. Thank you for believing in me and sharing it with me often. Thank you for listening. I hold and provide space for a lot of people, so it means a lot to me when somebody just takes the time to listen.

I am so proud of your spiritual growth over this past year. I am so proud of your revelations and understanding about yourself in relationship. For your divine appreciation for your alone time. For your travels and romantic escapades. For your wisdom and yoga practice. For this beautiful job that you manifested for yourself as you merge your love for style, travel and professionalism with your gift for words and perspective in seeing this truly magnificent world and sharing all of your questions, emotions and details of your existence with so many of us through your blog. You are growing into this rooted calm woman. And although our time together was epically brief, it will forever charge through my spirit as a rush of excitement, honesty, playfulness and adventure. While it is true, I do not spend massive amounts of my time reminiscing in the effort of staying truly present, I can say that each and every part of my physical body, my mental body and my spiritual being remembers and is nourished by the names Yilian and Bali. The two will forever be connected in my sense memory and forever grateful for your generosity during this time of finding my way back to my feminine wild and the Divine Feminine as my roots!

May this year bring you much balance between this new found job and the delights in your desire to travel, explore, eat good food, meet quality friends whom you can share all of these spiritual revelations and your growth in person with! May your deepest desires, whatever they might be, however they likely are changing find their way to you effortlessly. And may you remind yourself oh so often that this is all just an experience. The goal is not one of happiness or sadness. It is simple a cycle. Constant cycles present in every area of your life. Ride the cycle. Enjoy. And know that at the end of the day, you want a FULL experience. It is the fullness and the reverence for the ups and the downs I am learning by which this acceptance, understanding, calm and peace for this crazy sensation that we call life is able to find its way to us!

Blessed be my kindred spirit!

Love Always,

Becca”

And it made me so, so happy. :D

Becca, me and my skeletal arm from one year ago

Merry Christmas guys!!! Hope you are winding down to the festive period. Meanwhile, I’m running around town like a headless chicken, trying to get the perfect gifts for the 20 people on my list. So tonight, I’m gonna do a final round with the best pal in town and order “HAM” (only close pals will get the joke on this…) before tomorrow, which is apparently the last day to order.

And at work, Feb 2012 issue is closed and immediately, I’m feeling the heat from our thick March 2012 issue! Hong Kong and Bali to look forward to next month!!!

I continued with my day in a hazy state. I felt disconnected. And while most of us unwind as the year comes to an end, I’m panicking inside about next year’s Feb and Mar issues (job hazard). Self-doubts sunk in.

When the work day ended, I didn’t even want to head to yoga, a first for me in a long time. I didn’t even have the patience I usually have with public transport. I had envisioned that little imaginary cave I’d dug and I wanted to be there right away.

And I am there now. Listening to music that feeds the soul. Barzin is hauntingly good:

The day does get better. It always does. This too shall pass. But while that we’re here, why not relish the moment for a bit? It’s all for good reasons.

XX

“Detours, challenges, and crisis, Yi Lian, are simply covers for miracles that had no other way of reaching you.

It’s all good,
The Universe”

So anyhow, by the end of the first week, I wasn’t exactly in a great place yet but at least I made the decision to stay on for the rest of the month, thanks to Wendy’s encouragement. Due to her cajoling, I also found myself in a yoga class called Venus Yoga.

Wendy loved the class. I didn’t.

I didn’t fancy putting my hands underneath my top to, well, get in touch with my femininity. I was, after all, a city girl, who was all about sweating it out during exercise. Why all these getting-to-know-yourself stuff? I didn’t enjoy that spiritual aspect of yoga and I didn’t pretend that I did. In fact, I remembered asking the receptionists at Yoga Barn if they offered Pilates instead. I wanted something straight forward without the yoga chatter.

And of course I didn’t know any better then that we should all question the things that make us uncomfortable in life.

But at least I was open to giving things and people a second chance. I’ve always been a huge advocate of second (or even third and fourth!) chances so I decided to walk the talk and turned up for another Venus Yoga class.

The beautiful space at Yoga Barn

I found myself loving it after the second class. Not because it was then I became an airy fairy but simply cos I love dancing and Venus Yoga combined free-form dancing with Hatha yoga. Also, I have a very curious nature and I LOVE finding out more about people because every one has a story to tell. And Shivani (the teacher and founder of Venus Yoga) always started her classes with a round of sharing.

It was also in the second class where we had a partners’ exercise where we had to look into a complete stranger’s eyes for one whole minute in silence. We can smile, we can cry but we have to maintain the eye contact.

It sounds simple but it’s daunting as hell. It was awkward initially but if you pushed at it, you find the walls we build around ourselves torn down. I had no idea meaningful eye contact could be that intimate.

And being held in the afternoons, I found myself wandering off to tea at Kafe or Clear Cafe on Hanuman Street with the other women in the classes. And from there onwards, I became a social butterfly of sorts in Ubud. It was completely hilarious. I found my schedule filled with social commitments. From not knowing a single soul to having company for every other meal, I suddenly found myself craving for solitude.

Which I took as a good thing. My yearning for solitude has always served as a measuring factor at emotional well-being. Even when I managed to sneak in time alone reading in a cafe, company, somehow, found their way to my table. I must had, thankfully, stopped looking so bloody depressive and off-putting by then. Random strangers would start striking up conversations with me and soon after, we became fast friends.

And at the topic of dancing, I can’t forget my two favourite dance classes at Yoga Barn – Biodanza and Ecstatic Dance. The latter was a two-hour long class, which always have me completely drenched in sweat and grins after. I hate to say this but damnit, ecstatic dance is freaking beautiful. There’s no such classes in Singapore but one can hope someone will eventually introduce it to the thousands of yogis here…

It was at the former class where I met two gorgeous Canadian girls – Karla and Rebecca. Out of a class of 20, we somehow found ourselves keep flocking to each other during the 90-minute class. I kept wanting to dance with them. I didn’t realise then that they were travelling pals but somehow, it all came together. We headed off for dinner with Wendy at Bali Buddha and when I learnt they’d been travelling for two months and their funds were running a bit low, I insisted they came to stay with me at the villa. So suddenly, I found myself having roomies!

The three of us. :)

And the nights we spent at the villa made up one of my favourite memories of my month there. For the first week or so, I found myself returning to the eerily dark and quiet villa every night, which was rather depressing at that point of my life. But there were nights where Becca and Karla would return to the villa first (they were undergoing a month-long yoga teacher training course and found themselves drained at the end of the day) while I had my social obligations (hahaha). And the sight of them chilling in the living room as I stepped into the villa’s compound? Bliss.

We took turns at the bathroom and we had even established a routine. It was usually Karla, me then Becca. Then we would chill by my MacBook to watch an episode of Modern Family. I would laugh my hyena laughter, which in turn would make the girls laughed (albeit, it was directed at me…). There was a night of full moon so Karla led a little ritual where we confessed, cried, laughed and danced till 1am under the gorgeous moon and to Ingrid Michaelson on my iTunes. And there was that other night we got high on shisha in a bar and I found myself agreeing to go to the Gili Islands with a stranger since the two girls had already gone before they met me.

I would awake in the mornings to find them gone (since 6am actually!) and they would see me around 10am at Yoga Barn (where they also had their yoga teacher training course) running to my 10am class. I would throw them air kisses, kick off my flip flops and run upstairs for my classes. Sometimes, we’ll have dinners together but on Sundays when they had the day off, we’ll find ourselves shopping for jewellery, attending one of the many different workshops available in Ubud, gallery visiting or eating pastries at Kue on Main Street.

OK! Word count of 1,000. Time to end it here and till the next entry… Have a lovely week ahead!! <3

And it doesn’t help that I’ve just watched the latest episode of my all-time favourite TV series Grey’s Anatomy. Ahhh, that show always get me all emotional! But in a good way.  (Because, apparently, the word ‘emotional’ has earned quite a bad rep over the years…)

The episode started off with: “‘I had a terrible day,’ we say it all the time. A fight with the boss. Stomach flu. Traffic. That’s what we describe as terrible when nothing terrible is happening.”

Don’t we do that all the time?

We’re resistant to any thing, relationship or situation that is seemingly negative so when such things, relationships and situations happen against our will, we complain. We protest. We blame and blame. We become guarded. We assumed the worst of every one we meet for the first time and if they turn out to be even slightly better than our original expectations, we get surprised.

“He’s an asshole.”
“She’s psychotic.”

How many times have we heard ourselves saying that of our exes? So are all exes assholes and psychos? Then, doesn’t that make all of us assholes and psychos?

Maybe we were at some points of our lives but just like how time will always keep ticking, our psyches are also constantly evolving.

Or we continually believe that the future will be better than the present so we just put up with what we have to bear now in the hope that that future we envision will come soon.

But what if it doesn’t? It’s good to keep the faith that the future will always get better. But we gotta remember that the well-lived presence can ascertain that than just blind faith without being active in ensuring that.

It’s not just about positive thinking and feeding yourself positive affirmations. What good do they do if we don’t grasp the fundamentals of those so-called positive thinking?

Why don’t we not realise that right now is the best that we’ve got? That happiness is really not a destination. But it’s available right here and right now.

Those bad breakups or challenging work situations we’re now experiencing will only serve to teach us invaluable lessons about ourselves we can’t otherwise learn. So they’re all actually really really good things to happen right now!

Really. It’s really not that bad. ;)