May 19th, 2025. An ordinary workday. I got an email. My position had been eliminated.
I sat in the sunroom for hours. Empty.
I looked back. My first job out of college. The first software business I owned. The contract work I took to keep that business going, a temporary job that turned into a decade-long career. And now it was gone.
I didn’t know what I was anymore. Or who I’d be next.
Then everything got heavy. I was angry. My asthma got worse. I kept thinking I wouldn’t find the next job fast enough. And underneath that, a bigger doubt: what did I actually want from my life?
I felt all of it at once. I couldn’t put any of it into words.
Ming sat with me through all of it. She’s a meditation teacher, so she helped me settle the mind and the body, and that did help.
But she saw something I couldn’t. She knew the job wasn’t the real problem. Underneath it was an older question, what I was actually meant to do. So she told me to reflect. To figure out what had always been true about me.
I went home to see family. On Lake Superior, it came back. The old spark. The one that had built things to help people before.
And I thought: how many people are standing right where I stood, hit by a change they didn’t choose, with nothing built for the inner side of it?
We could build that.
That was the beginning of SEE Within.
April 30, 2025. I came down from a month-long Tai Chi retreat in the Wudang Mountains. The retreat reminded me how connected, intelligent, and abundant life can be when we remember that we belong to nature, and that it lives in us.
But much of what had shaped my life was not nature. It was social identity.
My whole life had been entangled with it. I was raised to be a girl, a daughter, a wife. Named by what I was to others before I knew my own feelings or gifts. I left one country for another and became an Asian woman, learning how it feels to belong nowhere, or somewhere in between. I turned from a college teacher into an author, and could no longer say simply what I did for a living. I moved through menopause, through aging, through the body’s slow reminders that nothing stays.
Somewhere in all of it, I began to see the gap. The space between who we truly are and what we are called. Between our nature and our names. Between the way we were born to live and the path we are taught to finish.
Weeks later, that gap walked into my house.
I was crossing the sunroom toward the garden. Michael sat in the wicker chair, his eyes empty. He had lost his job. But I could see it was not only about the job. It was the gap. The space between what he had done and who he was.
So I kept him company through it. Step by step, I shared what I knew: meditation, nature, identity, and the tender place where change makes us feel most shaken and unsure of ourselves.
Change is not an interruption of life. It is the shape of life. But it can open a gap between what remains true within us and what the world outside now makes of us.
When Michael came back from his trip, he had words for it. He said this kind of disruption can happen to anyone. But not everyone has someone to walk the inner journey beside them.
That is what we built SEE Within to be.
A place to come back to yourself when the outer world shifts. Something to walk beside you, the way I walked beside Michael, until your nature and your path are one again.