I had a transformative experience in 2023 ✨

I am ready to finally share a life-changing experience I had during a three-week trip to Colombia at the end of 2023.

For full disclosure, I meant to release this post much earlier, but it stayed in my drafts since January as I couldn’t finalize it. I needed time to process what happened, what I was going through, and where I am going now.

A lot happened in my personal world in the first six months of 2024. I want to share the retrospective journey of what led me to discontinue Kylan, the game studio I kicked off in Vietnam in November 2023 with two co-founders (more to come in the podcast in August), and soon after what led me to start another business in April: Olivya.

I am excited to share more about Olivya in the coming months. But for now, let me share the personal process that led me to this, as the process is as important as the result. So, back to the end of 2023…

Going on a medicinal retreat 🛖

Unlike my usual end-of-year routine of recharging and celebrating with friends, I decided at the end of last year to go on a medicinal retreat with Yagé to further expand my understanding of myself and humanity. There was no better time to do it, as I wasn’t committed to any full-time job, I had savings, and I didn’t have a family yet. What did I have to lose?

Sure I had many fears of what could go wrong. But I decided to overcome them and embarked on an eight-day medicinal retreat in the heart of the Colombian jungle in the mountains of Guarne, where I was immersed in the wonderful community of AMBI.

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Despite my inability to fully articulate it, I felt a deep inner calling to embark on this journey of self-exploration and transformation. I sensed that this experience would hold profound learnings for personal growth and key choices I needed to make in 2024. Looking back, this retreat was meant to be at this time of my life.

The path of conscious leadership, I realized, intertwines with the journey of self-healing and self-awareness. Despite my extensive cognitive efforts to understand myself, I sensed a limit on a purely intellectual level. To deepen my understanding of both myself and humanity, I needed to go beyond what I could see or think, beyond my consciousness.

While I'm open to sharing the specifics of the retreat privately, I will focus in this post on the insights and transformative outcomes that emerged from this journey of self-healing.

The journey of healing: it didn’t start with you

Throughout much of my life, I've carried deep-seated wounds stemming from my upbringing, inherited from my family's legacy and generations before. This enduring pain, intricately woven with feelings of inadequacy, a fear of abandonment, and a pervasive sense of not being enough or loved, has been a constant companion. As Gabor Maté explores in his work on generational trauma, I've come to understand that this burden traces back through my father to my grandmother and through our Vietnamese family heritage.

Despite years of therapy aimed at unraveling the origins of this pain, it remained ever-present, surfacing acutely in moments when my sense of identity was threatened (at work or in my romantic relationships). The challenge lay in attempting to resolve something not solely rooted in the mind, but deeply embedded within the body, as explored in 'The Body Keeps the Score.'

“Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going inside ourselves.” ― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Drinking Yagé during the retreat enabled me to locate and release deeply rooted pain in my body: past wounds carried in my heart, the tension of unreleased anger, and visceral fear stuck in my guts.

Through the ceremonies, I've experienced a sense of liberation and lightness that I had never felt before. I've finally shed the weight of burdens carried by my family and their lineage long before my time.

With this weight lifted, I was experiencing a sense of renewed energy and an incredible force to embrace new life challenges.

Overcoming the fear of ‘dying’

Behind all human-rooted fears, is the fear of dying.

One of my primary intentions for going on the retreat was to conquer the fears holding me back from my next life steps: becoming a mother and building my own business.

As I delved into those fears during the retreat, I came to a profound realization: what hindered me from becoming my full self was the fear of change, the fear of losing myself.

Who am I without my pain?

What will I have to let go if I fully heal?

Will my life change in Berlin? My relationship? My work?

Will I change so much that I end up in a monastery???

Through several ceremonies, I had to let go of these unfounded fears and undergo a metaphorical death of my ego to embrace a new path, the path of healing.

Usually, this healing and purging process is accompanied by vomiting, crying (a lot!), and screaming, which I experienced during several of the ceremonies.

After I purged, I felt liberated from a significant burden that had weighed heavily on me for much of my life. That suppressed anger, that pain, I wasn’t holding it anymore.

I was healed.

And so I was ready to reexamine my life and purpose with a new lens.

Towards holistic life values

I've always held clear values and principles in life (at least I thought I did!), but after the Yagé experience, I gained a deeper understanding of holistic values that have always connected my personal life, relationships, and work.

There is no separation between the different areas of life; when we are not ourselves in one area, usually at work, we suffer. So it is just easier to be consistent in all areas of life.

Here are the life principles I’ve probably always had for most of my life but couldn’t fully formulate until the retreat.

Leading with Love:

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• I will always lead myself from a place of love rather than fear.
• I will treat others with love and compassion, even when they can’t reciprocate.
• I will choose self-love over self-criticism and self-shame.

Leading with Courage:

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• I will have the courage to do the right thing, guided by my values, not by my fears.
• I will have the courage to be myself and show myself fully to the world.
• I will have the courage to overcome my fears for personal growth.

Leading with Willpower:

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• I commit to enduring short-term pain for long-term growth and good.
• I commit to taking care of my mind and body to heal.
• I commit to serving the greater good over my individual interests.

Deep Listening:

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• I will listen to my inner voice and intuition.
• I will listen to others, not just to what they say but to how they feel.
• I will listen to the world, understanding what it needs and where it guides me.

Writing principles are important because when they are brought to consciousness, we take responsibility for the way we live in this world and in our relationships with others.

Committing to a life of consciousness

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It has been six months since the retreat in Colombia.

Now, I know I want to live a life fully aligned with my principles. And if I want to achieve this, I can’t expect it from others; I need to build it myself.

I also know that I am fully dedicated to my mission of improving human well-being through leadership work, self-awareness, and coaching.

In some way, I started that work with Rise and Play three years ago, elevating conscious leadership in the gaming industry.

Building a new game studio (Kylan) was taking me away from that mission. That’s when I knew I had to stop.

Refocusing on my mission of human development, I decided instead to combine my leadership and gaming skills to build Olivya: a self-guided coaching companion that helps professionals reflect at work every day for 30 minutes.

We are a team of three, fully bootstrapped, and we started in April. Our product is now in BETA testing, and you can join as an early tester here.

I can’t wait to tell you more about Olivya 🤫

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Sophie

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