MBA reflections #2: on Indonesia, hypnosis therapy, and energy management
Reaping the rewards of being more selective with my energy; also a cleansing and healing in Indonesia
After publishing my first MBA reflection last month, which resonated resoundingly with my MBA peers, I’ve become more aware of my own social energies, and accordingly, become more selective with who I spend time with.
I initially approached MBA with an open mind. I strived to see the positive in and opened myself to potential friendship with everyone. However, as our class’s social dynamics stabilize, I’m learning that it’s okay not to be friends with or even like everyone, and in fact I’ve become a lot happier this way.
My study group gave me feedback that I come across judgmental of others. I spent some time reflecting on this. My conclusion is yes, I probably am judgmental of others, and that’s… okay. “Judging” is simply a negatively-connotated synonym for “pattern-matching”, a lauded skill in prestigious industries like venture capital. More fundamentally, it’s a biological survival mechanism. That frog with bright colors? Better not touch it, not after what happened last time.
Indonesia: a healing homecoming
A couple of weeks ago, I returned to Indonesia - to Jakarta and Bali - for the first time since leaving three years ago. The re-immersion resonated in my body, from the sights of the warungs with which I’d become intimately familiar with over a year, to the tastes of ayam bakar and nasi babi that can’t be found in any other country, to the feeling of winding through Seminyak’s roads, many of which had been burned into my memory from so many traumatic visits prior.
Trauma. It wasn’t until this most recent visit to Bali that I became aware of how traumatic my previous visits had been. The universe led me this time to see a hypnotherapist who helped me connect the dots between Bali and my anxiety. Two and a half years ago, something happened to me in Bali, and I literally stopped posting on Instagram afterwards. Even until now.
That afternoon, my hypnotherapist helped me dig into my subconscious and verbalize the truth about that experience.
“Do you want to keep carrying this energy with you?” she asked me, firmly.
“No,” I replied somewhat meekly, my lips making the minimum movements required to form the word as my body lay depressed into the enormous armchair, hypnotized into a state of intense relaxation bordering paralysis.
“When you breathe out, I want you to release those energies!”
And so I did. I breathed in and out forcibly, repeatedly, feeling the energies get purged somewhat with each exhale. It was like a weaker but self-led version of the energy cleansing Jose gave me while smoking 5-Meo DMT in the Amazon last year. My trapped emotions were released into the room and my hypnotherapist burned incense to cleanse the space.
I felt much better about Bali after the weekend. I felt like I could more clearly see Bali for what it is, and why people are drawn to it. Things which previously bothered me, primarily its infestation of ignorant tourists, could now be safely managed through selective social interactions.
“Healing is unlearning.”
For the first time, I saw how intensely spiritual the Balinese state is, and how much this energy is concentrated in Ubud’s sacred monkey forest sanctuary. Entrance to the sanctuary requires passage through an extremely dark and symbolic tunnel. The Balinese traditional dance we watched in the sanctuary was demonic on many levels: the musicians’ fixation on the harmonically dissonant tritone, “the Devil’s Interval”; the hypnotic, droning repetition of the dancing chimeras; the innocent girls kneeling in a circle praising the devilish creature, black hair covering their faces, white dresses symbolizing their purity in stark contrast.
I can finally reconcile Bali’s parties and sin as a foil to the island’s overwhelming spirituality. Now it makes sense!
Spending a day in Jakarta felt like coming home. If Bali felt familiar, Jakarta felt even more so, with my homecoming journey beginning from when I entered Bali airport’s familiar domestic terminal. I remembered why I like Jakarta and how my year living there shaped my worldview irrevocably. It occurred to me that I feel drawn to classmates A, D, and R, partly because they spent formative years in Indonesia and serve as a reminder that my chapter there was a very real one, one that exists outside of my solipsistic imagination.
Miscellaneous notable memories
Some weeks ago, I was at a bar speaking to a classmate when our conversation topic inexplicably turned towards unhappiness, loneliness, habitual self-harm, and suicide. Our conversation got absurdly dark, almost inappropriately so given the context of our relationship and the night’s setting. Dark energies surfaced. She went to the bathroom and puked. I almost followed soon after. We grew fatigued and sleepy. The toxicity became overwhelming for the two of us, alone. I felt trapped.
Finally, she pulled us out. We returned to our group of friends on the other side of the bar and immediately felt better.
In my Microeconomics class, the professor showed an advertisement for a nightclub in Brazil. “Who can help translate this flyer for the class?” she asked.
Why does this need translation? I thought to myself. When I saw the advertisement, I understood immediately that it was an example of price discrimination.
And then it occurred to me: the ad is written in Portuguese, and not everyone understands Portuguese. Apparently, my brain read the Portuguese content so fluently that I didn’t realize it was not written in English.
In Bali, I went to a beach club to watch What So Not perform. What So Not is an Australian DJ from a genre I call trap EDM. It’s the genre that helped me mature musically in my early 20s, and the social dynamics of attending trap EDM shows played a key role in my personal development.
I associate this genre strongly with Asian-American, and more broadly Western-Asian Gen-Y culture. So, imagine my validation in Bali when I came across the only two Asians in an otherwise completely white audience, full-body headbanging like me to Get Free (What So Not remix) while everyone else struggled for variety in their dance moves. Although I chose to stand and dance next to those two Asians, I never once spoke to them, as our inherent energetic alignment brought me sufficient emotional fulfillment for the evening.
They eventually noticed me dancing next to them, and at one point, we glanced at each other right before a big bass drop. That moment of eye contact conveyed a thousand pieces of intuitive wisdom, including the recognition, conscious or not, of our shared experience as Western-Asians finding emotional release in music-driven bodily expression amidst a society and ethnic history that suppresses it.
In that moment, I felt seen, and proud to pioneer the complex, under-explored identity that is being Chinese-American. And in the next moment, the bass dropped, and we lost our minds.