Today, I’m joined by Winnie Chan Wang, a trauma-informed licensed acupuncturist, Reiki practitioner, shadow worker, and shamanic Tao healer. We discuss how trauma and stress impact our overall health, ways to reframe darkness, and why it’s so important to practice detachment. Winnie shares a powerful practice that she does when she’s facing fear and talks about how she’s processed trauma through the lens of Chinese medicine. Plus, Winnie gives listeners a peek inside her book.
Today, I’m joined by Winnie Chan Wang, a trauma-informed licensed acupuncturist, Reiki practitioner, shadow worker, and shamanic Tao healer. We discuss how trauma and stress impact our overall health, ways to reframe darkness, and why it’s so important to practice detachment. Winnie describes the physiological symptoms that she suffered during her divorce, and how that experience inspired her to write her book, Honoring Darkness: Embrace Shadow Work to Nourish and Grow Your Power.
Winnie breaks down her ‘recycling program’ spiritual practice, which is all about honoring dark emotions like sadness, anger, fear, and shame, and letting out love, light, forgiveness, and compassion into the world. We talk about why it can be difficult to embrace our shadows, but highlight the results that come out of doing that work.
Winnie shares how she processes trauma through the lens of Chinese medicine. She provides some insight into the Yin Yang principle and touches on how that has shown up in her life. At the end of the episode, she walks us through a powerful practice that she does when she’s facing fear. Listen in to learn more about how trauma impacts longevity, and some tools that can help with processing those feelings.
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[00:00:00] Dana Frost: Welcome to Vitally You, a podcast created to introduce you to the tools that will be your roadmap for feeling younger while growing older. I'm your host, Dana Frost, a wellness expert, life coach and energy medicine practitioner. Here's what you can expect: conversations about vitality from the inside out with guests experts in the field of health, culture, and spirituality.
And solo episodes along the way from me, where I do deep dives into the topics of aging, heart intelligence, energy medicine, and your innate capacity to heal. If you want to feel younger while growing older, this is the place for you.
Hello everyone. Welcome to this week's episode. I'm excited to have Winnie chain weighing as my guest this week, when he is a lover of science and spirituality, she is a trauma informed, licensed acupuncturist, teacher shadow worker, Reiki and openhearted Dow healer. She's also a professor and acupuncture at Alhambra medical university.
She is passionate about empowering people with chronic pain to step into their source power, to heal themselves. In her book, honoring darkness, embrace shadow, work to nourish and grow your power. She and her co-author searched deep into their traumas and made lemonade out of lemons. As they navigated the darkness, they gained trust and purpose.
When he was also awarded Las top 25 health influencers in 2021. In today's episode, we talk about how trauma and stress impact our physical health. But really I have to say our conversation dives deeper into the energies of light and darkness and how they are represented in female and male energy. It was really fascinating.
I had a light bulb moment when Winnie shared how the womb or female energy represents the dark night of the soul and all my goodness. You have to stay, turn to learn more. I had never made that connection and I found it fascinating. So Winnie welcome to the Vidalia podcast. It's such an honor to have you.
Thank you. So Winnie, we've talked about, you know, the conversations that we want to have today, and there are so many that we could have, and we really decided that because both of us have experienced. A stressful situation. As our listeners have too, a traumatic situation where we actually had physical challenges afterwards, hair loss, bone density issues.
We know that the body keeps the score. The body records, everything that happens and the body responds and the body needs to let go. And so we have these physiological challenges after a stressful event, and I thought we would just. We're going to just have this conversation about what is happening physiologically.
We know it's a mind, body, soul synchronicity, and through your lens, you have this really beautiful lens of trauma informed traditional Chinese medicine.
[00:03:09] Winnie Chan Wang: Yeah. So one of the things that I noticed in the first year of my divorce, well, first of all, I didn't sleep very well. And then I noticed these physical changes such as losing hair and losing bone density.
And, you know, actually for me, it also manifested as weightless. Quite dramatic weight loss, actually. And of course these days we can all go to Google and find these statistics. But the statistics says that when we lose a significant other, whether it's due to death or due to a divorce, It has a significant negative impact on our health, our heart health, a lot of people get high blood pressure or high cholesterol, high blood sugar.
All of these numbers shoot up. And at the same time a bone density number goes down. So as a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, we have something called the five elements. And the hair and the bones is related to the water element. And that is the kidney. When the kidney is healthy, we have trust.
We have strength, we have support, we have determinations. So what that looks like. The absence of lower back pain, the absence of hip pain, the absence of knee pain, the absence of ankle pain, the absence of hair loss. Right? So we really want a strong kidney and pathologically when we experienced fi. Panic that actually disrupts the function of the kidney and the system.
And so, you know, when we lose a loved one, whether they die or we separate due to divorce, there was suddenly the horrifying thought, oh my God, how am I going to live? How am I going to make it like, you know, it's almost like this. If you've depended on this person, this person that's like your rock. And suddenly whether it's financially or emotionally, that's just been like the rug taken out under you.
And, you know, especially we just had this COVID. So many of us lost parents, child, husband, wife. And when we grieve, we know that there's the grieving process, but sometimes we don't want to just stay at home and sit with our sadness and cry and cry and cry. We still have to go. Make money pay our bills.
And a lot of the times we just to survive as a coping mechanism, we end up suppressing a lot of this fear, this sadness, this anger, the shame, you know, the judgment, the conflicts, the lack mentality. It's like, we don't make time. To process the emotion and the more we don't make time to process the emotion, the more negative consequences that has on our health, finances, and relationships.
And because I basically went through a lot of dark nights of the soul after my divorce, I actually ended up writing, basically everything I learned in the first year of my divorce in this book called honoring darkness, embrace shadow, work to nourish and grow your power. And understanding that there is actually a lot of gift in the, the sadness and the anger, the shame, the fear.
And instead of pushing it away, we learn to embrace it. And, you know, it's really funny. I want to briefly tie in with menopause because you know, a lot of our listeners we're learning how to age gracefully and. So there is this concept in our Madison call, yin and yang. So yin is the feminine essence. It's the water.
It's very nourishing, right? The water dwells in the bottom, right? The water cannot be floating. So the water is anchoring grounding, nourishing. That's the feminine. And also, if we talk about the feminine genital, it's dark, but that's the magic where babies are made. You know, so darkness is actually magic.
It's like the mystical realm. So we want darkness and the opposite is the young, right? The young is like light. In fact, in some tradition, some describe the male genital as a pillar of light. So the light is very bright. So that's the opposite. And it's really funny because we've had thousands of years of patriarchy and there is a preference for the masculine.
We like to talk about love and light. We like to think about sadness. As something that is bad and we have to release, we have to let go. When the feminine healing principle is to embrace the sadness is to hold the sadness like a newborn baby and just rock the newborn babies and soothe and comfort ourselves.
So it's really funny because as a healer, And the beginning I was learning under the patriarchal way, you know? Okay. Inhale. I breathe in love and light and exhale. I let go of my sadness. I let go of my anger. And actually now I run this thing called the recycling program. And so what is the recycling program?
The recycling program is for example, as humans, we breathe in oxygen and we consider carbon dioxide, our waste product, but mother earth, which is the feminine principle, the trees, they have the ability to take carbon dioxide in and give oxygen back out. So every man or woman has the ability to run this feminine program and them.
So for all the listeners out there, imagine that if you channel and connect to your very feminine, Essence. If you learn to honor your darkness, you can actually take in the sadness, the anger, the fear, the shame you can breathe it in and you can actually let out love light forgiveness, compassion. It's like the opposite where we're channeling and being mother.
And so to learn how to do the recycling program, that's where shadow work comes in. And when I wrote the book, because I have four science degree, I'm extremely nerdy. I wanted it to be like an encyclopedia, like a textbook Bible that you can have a systematic approach to doing the shadow work. But I also know that the feminine principle is not to tell you what to do, but to share by storytelling.
So, you know, the, the book, the women who run with the wolves, where we learn the wisdom, not because somebody told us because through storytelling, so the whole book is a textbook. You learn a lot, but it's also just my story. My heartburn. You know, I talk about my rape, my abortion, you know, affairs, divorce, uh, parental alienation, suicide, all these really dark topics, and really how I made lemonade out of the lemons.
You know, it's incredibly empowering. Well,
[00:11:51] Dana Frost: what I love that you're sharing. Thank you so much for sharing all of that. And what I think is so important to highlight Winnie is because there was a light bulb that went on for me, because I've learned it is. It to embrace the darkness, to embrace the feelings that are not as desirable.
We have feelings that we desire and feelings. We maybe don't desire. I like to consider depleting and fueling, but I love this reframe. Around the shadow, the feelings that are harder to embrace that the feminine energy coming in and that connection with the wound, because we really do need, I always say you need a cradle of support when you are moving through a healing process, whether it's a physical healing process, a mental and emotional there they're interconnected.
So if you have one, you actually are moving through all three of them, but when we're moving through. A healing process. We actually need to be in a cradle of support. And so I love that connection with the feminine birthing process and this idea that, yeah, we, we tr we can transform whatever we've gone through.
We can transform it. The only time we cannot transform it is when we push it away. That's the only time we cannot transform it and it is going to hurt no matter what. It's painful trauma, grief, loss. They're all painful. So why not take it in to the womb and transform it? I love that imagery. Thank you so much.
That's just beautiful.
[00:13:35] Winnie Chan Wang: Yeah, Dan, and what you said really deeply touched my heart and part of the reason why as a society, we have so much difficulty with embracing our shadows. Is because, you know, under patriarchy, we judge either each other by the external appearance, you know, we care about. What college you went to, what's your job, how much money you make, what clothes you're wearing?
There is so much this external display of material. Bundance, you know, we don't have the really vulnerable conversation. And it's interesting because we're so care so much about looking good. And, uh, me included that I really liked to look good. And, um, part of the thing, one of the biggest trauma is actually what I did to myself by isolating myself, by pushing away my feelings.
You know, one of the things I talk about in the book is when I experienced a rape. I didn't talk to anybody about it because I thought that, well, if I didn't say anything. Maybe nobody will ever find out. And I can just pretend that that never happened. Right. But that's something that I realize is like, when I keep a lie, why, when I, I hold secrets in myself, I'm not just lying to the world, but I'm lying to myself.
Right. So if I try to pretend it doesn't happen or didn't happen, I'm my biggest violator in the sense that I give myself more pain than anybody else. I think Cabramatta says trauma. Isn't what happened to you, but it's that you feel isolated. And the aftermath. And so it kind of snowballed that. I try to sweep it under the rug and I was like, you know, I'm, I'm a wife and I'm a mother and I don't want to jeopardize, you know, my husband finding out about the rape.
I don't want to jeopardize that people, if I go public with this, people will at PTA meetings or schools like, you know, they will look at me as, oh, that's the mom who. Whatever happened to her. And so I just tried to be like, you know, what, if I keep my mouth shut, maybe I can just pretend nothing happened.
And that was perhaps the biggest trauma. And by sharing the story, actually I have found it's been incredibly empowering and we've had a lot of good conversations about. Apparently, it's very common that, you know, a lot of women have ones that are similar.
[00:16:31] Dana Frost: Yeah, definitely. And we were just talking about how, how do our traumas impact longevity?
If we think about feeling younger, growing older, when we carry the weight and we keep things in secret and we, don't what I say, metabolize, whatever has happened in our life or transform them. The weight, the physical weight on the body slows everything down. And actually we're just, we feel older and older and older and older and older because we're not able to release and find new life to the things that have happened to them.
So I'm really curious from traditional Chinese medicine through that lens. Talk to me a little bit about being trauma informed and I'm thinking, you know, kidney related a water and the feminine energy, and how, tell us a little bit about the systems and when you're looking at your own trauma or other trauma, what are you working on?
I'd love to hear a little bit about.
[00:17:37] Winnie Chan Wang: Yeah. So when we have a lot of fear, then that really affects the kidney system and that's when we start having the bone density loss and their hair loss. And really what it means is we are unable to receive. We're not able to trust. So it's not like I stopped eating, you know, I'm still eating spinach and chicken and rice, but I am not able to app sore the good stuff in my life because I have so much fear, you know, it's almost like I set these boundaries and not allow myself to be nourished.
Right. So I'm still doing the same workout. I'm still doing the same diet. But just because of fear, it's blocking me from being Nora. And you probably will not find a lot of articles or research out there with that because patriarchy has kept women out of practicing traditional Chinese medicine until really the most recent 100 years.
So the thousands of years that the books were written by men, you know, like women. They are not allowed to show their face, like woman was kept out of medicine. And I always wondered, how did they write textbook about reproductive system? If there's no woman author involved, you know, it's just like these men telling women, okay, take these herbs.
And you know, so a lot of these things that I've learned. It comes from my meditation channeling downloading and just personal experience of hair loss and bone density loss, and really be like, okay, what's really happening here. You know, it's just so much fear in my system causing me not able to receive.
[00:19:35] Dana Frost: Yeah. Well, and I'd like to just remind the listeners that, cause I've talked about this on the podcast. We can distill down emotions to one of two routes, love or fear. And so it's very, you know, that's something that we can grab a hold on. If we tune in to ourselves, am I. Flowing through the route of love or am I flowing through the root of fear so that we really can be conscious about what's happening with us?
What's going on in this moment? You know, am I constricting through fear? Am I in flow? And to understand that there are real. Physiological connections. There has to be some research out there about hair loss, because even in at least the conventional lens recognizes that stress is one of the reasons for hair loss.
So we know thousands upon thousands of people would attest to hair loss after a stressful situation. I think bone density, we're not as attuned because we need a test for that. We know that this is real right and experience teaches us that. And so what are some of the tools that you harness that you embraced when you were in this period of embracing your shadow, embracing the fear, understanding it?
What are some of the practices that you held onto?
[00:21:03] Winnie Chan Wang: Yeah, thank you for asking that question and Danna, thank you for opening my heart to you and your teachings. I really love your podcast. Your podcast is so wonderful. So it's this idea of no mud, no Lotus. I actually take my hand rolled the book, no mud, no Lotus.
That when we experience these difficult emotions, Instead of pushing it away. We want to recycle this because for example, animal more fishies or rotten tomatoes, dying flowers. When that decays it's what makes the soil. You know, if we just have no fertilizer, we can't grow the next beautiful flower. So is when we have these very big traumas challenges in our life that we want to recycle it.
We want to receive it. We want to turn it around into fertilizer to grow the beautiful load of.
[00:22:16] Dana Frost: I love that you just brought us right back because you've talked about recycling and it made me think about what I say is the original coaching tool is our breath. And so you share the recycling breath and then to bring that back to the decaying process, the, you know, the hard things we go through, they have to break down.
And then that's when they can be released. I think that that's just such a beautiful, kind of full circle of the conversation of something that's like really is just super practical. We have, we breathe, we have to breathe all the time and we can have that visualization that we're inhaling, whatever it is we're experiencing.
And we bring it in. As we bring in the emotions, we allow them to be, we allow them to dictate. And then what we release is something that's beautiful. I love that. Um, what did you say? The mud and the Lotus? No mud, no Lotus
[00:23:17] Winnie Chan Wang: it's con no mud, no Lotus. Yeah, it's a, it's a title by techno Hahn and what's really fascinating is this death and rebirth cycle.
This cycle of day followed by night night, followed by day. New moon followed by full moon. Full moon followed by new moon is what we observed in nature. There was nothing more natural and organic about it. So instead of feeling stuck, right, the really real reason why we feel stuck is there is an attachment to the.
But if we don't have attachment to the light, we're just like, okay, we'll let it come. And we let it go. We're just a channel. And just let it flow through is actually incredibly beautiful. And I'd like to talk about what actually allows us to do this recycling program. So if. Imagine the Taoists symbol, which is the black and white fish, but has a.in the middle.
Is this idea that within the black fish, there is a. So it's this idea that no matter how dark the circumstances, no matter how painful the trauma, no matter how hopeless the situation is that the light that is inside of us, you know, weak, some people call it the Buddha nature. Some people called the Christ consciousness.
Some people just call it the light. You know, when we say Nama state to light in me sees the light in you and really Dallas, we call it the original soul. So many different ways to say that are true. Is this eternal, indestructible, powerful, spiritual being, and this, this very light that is inside. That, when we connect to that light is how we are able to run the recycling program.
That's how we're able to walk through the dark tunnel of the light. You know, it's not true that wherever in a dark tunnel, because even in the darkest tunnel, the light inside of. Cannot be diminished, cannot be destroyed. That's part of the teaching and heart Sutra, but it's just like nothing in this world can take away that light and us and the reverse is also true.
Like, no matter how much. Service or love and light. We think we're doing the black.is always there. You know, there's no way we can get rid of our ego, right? Our ego is necessary for us to go serve humanity, right. That the ego is like the desire. Right. The desire to serve the desire to make the world a better place, that desire to make a podcast that desire to connect with other human beings.
Right? So within the light, there is darkness, that's our ego, our heart desire, right. And then within the dark. There is the light that indestructable original soul Buddha nature Christ consciousness that we have. And yeah, so that's really what helps us move through the periods of light and dark.
[00:26:48] Dana Frost: Yeah, and I love that Winnie, thank you so much for sharing.
And you know, it made what came into my mind, as you were saying, the two, the light and the darkness and the light there in one another, they embody one another. One of the lessons I had to learn was. In MI exists the potential for so much love and in me exist the potential for destruction. And when I was able, I didn't want to see the darkness in myself who wants to see your own darkness.
We don't, but it's there. And when I faced it and I could see it, it was humbling. And actually that was when the ego broke down. Enough, it broke down. So that actually, I just have no judgment of other people because I realize I could see the potential in me and without forgiveness and acceptance. And you know, Mercy's being new every day.
You know, we, we all have the same potential. It's just, what are we fueling at any given moment? And it really allows us when we have that principle of the light and dark in one another embodying one another. I think it allows us to, to have detachment if you will, and to have non-judgment and to freely love others.
[00:28:15] Winnie Chan Wang: Thank you for saying that Dana, you know, one of the things I shared in the book and this goes back to the kidney system. So in traditional Chinese medicine, kidney is paired with the urinary bladder. And one night in the middle of the night, I have so much anxiety and fear and like all kinds of emotion due to the trauma.
I was literally pacing in my room and peeing every 15 minutes. And finally at 1 45 in the morning, I was like, okay, if I continue this, I'm going to go to the hospital. So why don't I check in to see what's going on? And, you know, I'm very blessed to have an open spiritual channel. And when I meditated, I said, okay, spirit, show me what's going on.
They show me a third eye image of a knife stabbing into the heart. And I knew that my ego would never have the courage to face the murderer and me, but then I was like, okay, because of my spiritual cultivation and my ability to connect to guides, I said, okay, guides. I asked you to take me. To the darkest part of my psyche meet the murderer and me, and then, you know, come back into peace.
And so I actually close my eyes and energetically imagined that I was the one taking the knife and stabbing, you know, the person in the heart over and over and over again until my energetic arm. Couldn't raise one more time. And then they fell into this incredible peace. And I only had to do it that one time and I fell asleep peacefully, and then never had, I had to pace in the room.
Never do I have to pee every 15 minutes again, I just, I was running away from acknowledging the victim in me. I was running away from facing how much hurt the other person has given me, but being able to validate my own pain, basically, that's what it is. It's like giving myself permission. I see how much revenge energy, resentment pain victim hood that I was in.
And then, gosh, it took maybe 45 minutes. And so doing the shadow work for 45 minutes allowed me. To never judge anyone again. And I'm like, you know what? I have the murderer in me and I have met her and I'm not scared of the monster because I know what this inside me. And what's really funny is the young principal is that yin and yang always stay balance.
And what that means, Dana, is that the more darkness we are aware of also the more likely. We can channel. So as an energy healer, the more I am aware of my ego and my darkness, the more so-called healing miracles I can channel because I'm the more, I'm not scared of the dark. The more, I'm not scared of my greatness or, you know, the infinite.
So all of us have access to infinite. Dargon infinite light and the idea isn't to meet the murderer and go around murdering people. The idea is to recognize that I'm not better or worse than anyone, and I have access to everything. And I stand as my source post. That's
[00:31:55] Dana Frost: so beautiful. Winnie, thank you so much.
I feel like we could talk forever. And so we'll have to have you back as a guest, but I wanted, before we wrap up, I wanted you, I believe you have a practice that you wanted to share with us.
[00:32:10] Winnie Chan Wang: Yeah. So whenever I feel a lot of fear, I like to put one hand on my heart and one hand on the lower abdomen. And I would like to connect to the love and light, which is like a fire and also to the darkness, right.
Our womb complete darkness, the water. And I imagine that my masculine and my feminine, my fire and my water, my love, and also the darkness and mysteries is all integrated. And one thing that often guide my clients in meditation is imagine the heart and our lower abdomen is like two best friends. Uh, heart sends a text message.
I love you down to the lower abdomen down into our lower back, down to the hips down through the FI's knees calves and the ankle, the bottom of the feet. She has keeps sending love from the heart. Some of us have cold feet, cold feet is a sign of fear. So keep sending love to the bottom of our feet with the intention of sending so much love that our feet begins to warm.
And when you begin to feel this vibration and hosts, this life force igniting and your bottom of your feet. You returned the favor. So this time we're going to send a text message from the bottom of the feet. Say, I got you. I support you. I nourish you. And now holing the feminine essence from mother earth.
This message. I got you. I support you. I Norris you. It's going back up the ankle. The calves, the knees, the size, the hips, the lower abdomen. No, all the way up to the heart. In fact, it passes the heart. It goes through the neck so that you can be supported when you speak the truth. And it goes up even into the third eye so that we're supported in our stem Ana.
And now imagine that from the third eye, we're sending a message. I see you. I see all the light and all the dark. And now imagine that your whole central channel, all seven chakras. Our integrated light and dark love and support all blended together in truth and oneness.
[00:35:46] Dana Frost: That was really lovely. Winnie, thank you so much for sharing that.
That was just really beautiful. I could feel, I still feel the energy flowing very connected. So thank you.
[00:35:59] Winnie Chan Wang: What's really funny is I channeled that meditation just now on the fly. I had planned to teach a traditional Dow with sound healing method to bless the kidneys and the bones, but I was like, oh, well, let's do it the feminine way.
[00:36:14] Dana Frost: That's great. Well, thank you so much. Winnie in closing, I have a question. I ask all the guests, what does feeling younger while growing older mean to you?
[00:36:23] Winnie Chan Wang: I love that question. What I, it means to me is becoming a baby, having this beginner's mind. Right. Um, when I go out into my yard, I look at the tree, like I'm looking at it for the first time I'm coming at the tree with no expectations, no projections, no nothing in the past.
And just looking and experiencing the totality of the tree. Like I'm meeting it for the first time. You know, babies, we don't know gender, we don't know race. We don't know justice duality right or wrong. We just want to open our eyes and smile and Florida with every single person we want to open our arms and be like, give me a hug.
Feed me love me. And so every day I wake up and my goal is to become a baby.
[00:37:20] Dana Frost: I love that. That is the most original response I've received. So thank you so much. Our listeners are going to really enjoy that. Thank you so much, Winnie for being a guest on the vitally you podcast.
[00:37:31] Winnie Chan Wang: You're welcome.
[00:37:33] Dana Frost: Thank you for joining me on the vitally you podcast.
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