Hi, I'm Holly. Let's go on an adventure...

Learning to Overcome

I was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the youngest of four in a Chinese family. At four, we immigrated to Houston, where I grew up a little Asian square-dancing Texan.

When I was twelve, a financial crisis fractured our family and scattered us across three countries. To make a long story short, I ended up on my own at a hostel in Singapore, attending a local school, taking care of myself for the next four years.

The sudden rupture—leaving Texas, my school, my childhood home, my friends, my family, and everything familiar—brought profound culture shock, loneliness, and confusion. It became one of the darkest and most disorienting periods of my life. There were times I didn't want to be alive.

It was also the beginning of an accelerated journey into self-inquiry and resilience.

As a teenager, personal development became my lifeline. Books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Awaken the Giant Within, and The Road Less Traveled became some of my earliest teachers.

I learned how to overcome. How to achieve. How to keep going.

And I became very, very good at it.

The #Winning Years

In my twenties and thirties, I built a remarkable career—first as a civil engineer helping build a billion-dollar global air hub for UPS, and later as a founder and social entrepreneur building and leading internationally respected organizations in China and the U.S.

I collaborated with brilliant thinkers and leaders around the world and taught workshops at Harvard, Johns Hopkins SAIS, and UC Berkeley on something I knew a great deal about: Leading Change.

Life was fast, global, meaningful, and exhilarating.

Intelligence and hard work were my badges of honor. Achievement was how I understood my value. And I was really good at the hustle.

Until my body said no.

Burnout: When the Body Breaks Down

By 2017, I was deeply burned out. For much of the previous four years, I had been running two organizations across two continents while sleeping ninety minutes a day. I had learned how to keep going long after my body was asking me to stop.

From the outside, I had everything together. I was leading organizations with an inspiring mission to “serve, inspire, and transform lives." Inside, something felt broken. I knew how to achieve. I knew how to lead. I knew how to solve problems and make things happen. But I was beginning to realize that I didn't really know who I was without what I could accomplish. I was physically and spiritually exhausted, and I didn't know how to do life any other way.

Eventually, I walked away from the titles, identities, and career I had spent decades building. It was one of the most terrifying decisions of my life.

A Time of Deep Surrender

For the next several years, I stepped away from a world organized around grit and effort and entered a much deeper inquiry:
Who am I without achievement?
Why am I so tired?
What is my true life purpose?
What is the meaning of life?

I traveled, studied, and trained with teachers across many traditions—ancient and modern, scientific and mystical. I immersed myself in healing, embodiment, consciousness, sacred medicine, wisdom traditions, and eventually Traditional Chinese Medicine.

And slowly, something shifted.

I stopped striving so hard.
I started listening.
I learned to feel my body again—which led to feeling and perceiving things I couldn't have imagined before.

As I healed and changed, I began sharing what I was learning with others, eventually guiding people through their own processes of emotional and spiritual exploration.

And then, in 2024, the journey took another unexpected turn.

After the difficult ending of a romantic connection, I began experiencing what I now understand as waves of a kundalini awakening.

Sometimes the energy is subtle. Other times, powerful currents move spontaneously through my body and up my spine, beyond anything I could consciously manufacture or control. There are periods when insights seem to arrive faster than I can integrate them.

But perhaps the greatest shift has been in how I experience life itself.

Life has become more magical.

Synchronicities that I once might have dismissed as coincidence are now a regular part of my experience. My relationship with animals, plants, and the Earth has deepened in ways that are difficult to explain. I feel more sensitive to the subtle, more connected to the natural world, and more open to dimensions of life that cannot always be seen, measured, or understood by the rational mind.

The world feels more alive to me now.

And strangely, so do I.

It has been beautiful, bewildering, humbling, and at times intensely physical. I don't pretend to understand all of it.

But perhaps that is part of the lesson.

Awakening, I am learning, isn't an arrival or a state of having all the answers. It is an ongoing practice of listening, discerning, surrendering, integrating, and allowing what we discover to change the way we actually live.

Awakened Intelligence

Through all of this, I have come to understand intelligence differently.

There is the intelligence I relied on for most of my life—the intelligence that analyzes, strategizes, solves problems, and makes things happen.

And there is another kind of intelligence that becomes available when we stop trying to control everything and become quiet enough to listen.

It emerges through silence. Through presence. Through coherence. Through intuition. Through the body, heart, and spirit—as much as the mind.

When these dimensions of ourselves begin moving with greater consciousness and coherence, something more becomes accessible.

I call this Awakened Intelligence—our capacity to access a greater intelligence from within.

It hasn't made me less ambitious. But it has changed the source from which my ambition arises.

I still believe in creating, leading, building, and contributing something meaningful to the world. But I no longer believe our greatest power comes from striving for something outside of us.

I believe it comes from clearing away what is not essential within us, so that more of our innate genius can come alive.

Today, my work is devoted to founders, executives, and leaders who sense this too—people who have accomplished a great deal and yet know there is so much more.

More freedom.
More truth.
More joy.
More aliveness.
More magic.
More of their essence destined to be expressed.

If you're ready to discover what becomes possible when you stop performing who you learned to be and begin leading from the deepest truth of your whole being, I'd be delighted to walk beside you.

Let's see where the adventure takes us!