សួស្តី suostei (Hello),

If you’re considering starting your healing journey with me, I think it’s essential that you know who I am—because I don’t believe in the idea of therapists being a “blank slate.” Let’s be real: how are you expected to connect, trust, and be vulnerable with someone who hides their own humanity?

You can’t. So if you’re curious to know more about me, stay a while.

I come from a lineage of Kru Khmer, Cambodian traditional healers, and carry the memory and medicine of my ancestors with me. Reconnecting with the animist roots of Cambodian spiritual practices and the grounded teachings of Theravāda Buddhism has been an ongoing homecoming for me. It’s been a way to reclaim not only who I am but also who I come from—healers, spirit-guided ritualists, and survivors of genocide, displacement, assimilation, and diaspora.

My own trauma-healing journey began when I realized how unhealed wounds from the past were still living in my body and shaping my present. I grew up with both playful and painful memories. My father’s stories as a Khmer resistance fighter and refugee shaped my earliest understanding of our innate strength and survival. I also carried the weight of love interwoven with abandonment, of being a first-generation American born trying to manage two often-competing cultures.

Without consistent space to reflect or process, I adapted in the ways so many of us do… by armoring up. I learned to survive through hyper-independence, perfectionism, and people-pleasing. My nervous system was often stuck in survival mode, shaped by both family lineage and lived experience. I became someone who held everything together for others, even when I was breaking inside.

Everything shifted when I was serving overseas in the military and experienced a painful relationship loss, thousands of miles away from home, with no one to lean on. That was the moment I cracked open. I reached out to my best friend and whom I now recognize as my soul sister and, for the first time, shared my heartbreak and vulnerability. That moment of connection and honesty was the catalyst for my healing. It led me to explore somatics, attachment, trauma work, and the ancestral ways I had once been disconnected from.

Through this newfound vulnerability, I gave people a chance to support and care for me leading to feelings of safety to build and trust my ecosystem of support and care resulting in an integration of a sense of self and community. This ongoing experience of building collective care and community sparked a deeper exploration of Interpersonal Neurobiology (Dr. Daniel Siegel) and Polyvagal Theory ( Dr. Stephen Porges) and eventually integrating it into the healing space with clients and their healing journey.

My somatic and spiritual healing deepened with experiencing my first reiki healing session in 2016 as a new postpartum mother which uncovered hidden traumas that I didn’t realize were affecting my present life. Reiki introduced depth to my transformative journey weaving spirituality and science to my personal healing and professional identity. My lens continued to widen as I witnessed the echoes of colonization and imperialism on Guam which led to a deeper exploration of my family’s history of displacement, living in the Khmae diaspora, and the trauma of war perpetuated by the US and its recognizing the effects.

I now channel these experiences to guide others towards liberation, relational healing to self, land, others, and radical self-care. I help individuals divest from the hooks of capitalism, perfectionism, and colonial thinking through somatic and spiritual resourcing, empowerment, and agency, strengthening their intuition, inner wisdom/guidance, and community building.

The collective interconnectedness, empathy, compassion, and overall collective well-being is accomplished through our own individual healing while in community. My vision is to cultivate a space for individual and collective healing where we all can embody love, joy, and compassion. This journey isn’t just personal; it’s ancestral, spiritual, and political. I don’t just do this work; I live it. And I’d be honored to walk alongside you as you explore yours.

In liberation and community,

Mao