My Korean name, Hae Won (혜원), means bright, intelligent, wise 慧, hope, wish, prayer 願.
I am a student of direct experience and the Mystery.
I practice a synthesis of multiple fields and foundational practices of healing, integration and growth for a comprehensive approach to the multidimensionality of human being — quantum energy work, parts and shadow integration, neurosomatics and trauma work, animist understanding and shamanic practice, shaped by my training in yoga and non-dual tantra, meditation, Qi Gong and internal alchemy, Chinese Medicine energetics, bodywork, herbalism, hand analysis, Human Design and core energy coaching.
I have had the honor and privilege of helping hold space for and co-leading hundreds of people through many plant medicine ceremonies.
Life has led me to become an initiate of IFA and a training AMEGANSI, priestess of MAMI DAN.
The Elders have my ear, and I am a channel for and from a place of knowing and beauty.
Learn more about my story
What drove me in early life was my devotion to my parents, who survived two major wars, the end of World War II and the Korean War. Despite so much hardship, they managed to emigrate to the U.S. and start a prosperous life together. They had built great abundance, but I was very young when the family business collapsed due to cheaper labor found across the border, and there was no way to compete and sustain their clothing factory in Los Angeles. Many difficult years elapsed as neither parent could return to the work force, and by my teenage years, I was working to help support the family financially while going on to achieve high academic marks and other school and community accolades, with my heart set on pursuing a degree in medicine.
My bachelor’s education is in Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley. I had worked in medical and clinical settings since 15, and during my early college years, I was part of the Berkeley Free Clinic, a volunteer health collective, and honored to be accepted as the youngest medic trainee. I was en route to achieve “conventional success” despite a very difficult childhood with a personal mission to remedy the family’s circumstances. These experiences were then halted by an immense rupture, what I didn’t realize at the time was the beginning of spiritual emergence expressed as crisis, and what Korean shamans refer to as “dis-ease of the spirit”, an indication of someone who must undergo initiation.
Years of living through multiple diagnoses, harrowing medical, spiritual and financial experiences, chronic pain, difficult relationships and loss ensued, until my awareness broke open beyond a conditioned and limited sense of self and reality multiple times over. I entered an ever expanding spiral, along which I was unwinding and shedding gravity-bound layers of grief, sorrow, rage and identity that been my entire existence since I was a child and beyond. I learned to pray, to surrender, and to wield my mind in favor of revealing and dissolving blockages and to not remain a victim to its patterns. I began to acknowledge and awaken my innate gifts and buried senses and to hone them for the sake of love and service.
My journey progressed to extensive ancestral healing rites facilitated overseas, work which unexpectedly led to the gradual uncovering and acute recall of intensive early childhood trauma. I was brought to the heart and marrow of my personal pain, as well as a visceral understanding of the karma of my lineages, the repetitive fractal of injury, betrayal and addiction. It was an unveiling and witnessing of the nature of the primordial wounds binding humankind to its suffering. I continue to alchemize this through my body, continuing to release, cleanse, integrate and transcend.
Today, I live with profound levity and joy as my creative reality, study, and ceremony of life continue to unfold. My relationship to the Dream, to the Gift, deepens. I live in awe everyday.
In Korean shamanism, we understand that we all in some way inherit our lineage and become stewards who continue to “polish the stone” through both transmuting ancestral karma, sometimes radically, as well as harnessing and cherishing the gifts we receive. Our ancestors, guides, and teachers stand at our backs, and we stand on their shoulders, no matter what shape our individual paths take.
What we collectively face today, the precipice we are arriving to in this time, represent the quickening evolutionary impulse of consciousness and nature. We, as their agents, learn to trust and listen to cosmic intelligence, the innate wisdom of the body and Earth, the truth in our souls, and allow light to pour through and from us. Some of us delve into depths of our inner landscape, train as spiritual warriors who become adept at digesting shadow and moving mountains, for our personal growth and for the benefit of all beings.
The wheel of collective liberation turns with each individual who can cultivate the strength, willingness, courage, humor and levity to answer this call in their own way and emerge more whole, coherent and alive. As more and more humans cross this bridge into spiritual adulthood, we clarify and fortify the path with light and expand the field of human awareness; as we embody and orient from our central axis, relate from our core wisdom selves, we find our place in the world and restore the spiritual core of humanity. As our coherence grows, so too grows our impact as part of the rising tide of peace and beauty. We return to the state of belonging within the greater resonant field of Oneness.
All of us have the opportunity to realize the greater octaves of our destinies and genetic potential.
The spiritual journey is a process of expanding, deepening and becoming a whole human: embodied, creative, lucid, and acting as a lamp of the light of awareness within. This is the work of alchemy.