Episode 45: We are Stardust
Maggie Dong
Maggie Dong is a podcaster, healer, fitness and life coach and universal channeller who helps people master their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual fitness so they can raise their consciousness and live with fulfillment.
Maggie started her personal development journey when she had an eating disorder after losing her mom. Her father had already been incarcerated for perpetrating abuse on her. It became apparent to her that she still had more personal growth to do and eventually had a spiritual awakening . She realized that in order to be truly fulfilled one must focus on these four areas: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Miss any one of these areas and you could find yourself constantly looking for external things to fill an internal void that is impossible to fill on your own.
Social Media Contact Information:
Instagram: @maggiedong_
Email: maggiedongfitness@gmail.com
Podcast transcript:
Damaged Parents: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Relatively Damaged Podcast by Damaged Parents were abused, confused, lost people come to learn maybe just maybe we're all a little bit damaged. Someone once told me it's safe to assume 50% of the people I meet are struggling and feel wounded in some way. I would venture to say it's closer to 100%.
Every one of us is either currently struggling or has struggled with something that made us feel less than like we aren't good enough. We aren't capable. We are relatively damaged. And that's what we're here to talk about. In my ongoing investigation of the damaged self. I want to better understand how others view their own challenges.
Maybe it's not so much about the damage. Maybe it's about our perception and how we deal with it. There is a deep commitment to becoming who we are meant to be. How do you do that? How do you find balance after a damaging experience? My hero is the damaged person. The one who faces seemingly insurmountable odds to come out on the other side hole. Those who stare directly into the face of adversity with unyielding persistence to discover their purpose. These are the people who inspire me to be more fully me. Not in spite of my trials, but because of them. Let's hear from another hero.
Today's topic includes sensitive material, which may not be appropriate for children. This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as advice. The opinions expressed here are strictly those of the person who gave them.
Today, we're going to talk with Maggie dong. She has many roles in her life. Daughter, podcaster, healer, fitness, and life coach channeler and more. We'll talk about how long-term abuse by her father and the loss of her mother led her down a scary path in relationships and how she was able to find health and healing let's talk
Welcome Maggie to Relatively Damaged by Damaged Parents. We're so glad you're here today.
Maggie Dong: [00:02:06] Thank you so much for having me.
Damaged Parents: [00:02:09] Yeah. I'm so lucky to get, to hear your story. And I know it's not exactly a fun story, and yet I'm still looking forward to the journey and the adventure of what you're going to tell us today.
Maggie Dong: [00:02:21] Yeah, absolutely. It's been a wild journey. And I think all of these events happened to get us to where we are today.
Damaged Parents: [00:02:30] Definitely. So why don't you go ahead and start where you want to start in your journey, and then I'll ask you some questions along the way for clarification and understanding.
Maggie Dong: [00:02:41] Absolutely. So I would say my fitness and personal development journey really started when I was 16, because I was forced into that position. So when I was 16, I lost my mom to breast cancer and my dad had already been incarcerated at that point for about two years. So all of a sudden I needed to step into this space of taking responsibility for myself and for my little brother who is five years younger than me.
So he was 11 back then. And all of these events pushed me into depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and I was still trying to deal with the grief from losing my mom. And that was pretty much like the rock bottom. Point in my life that also forced me into who I am today because I needed to step out of that and start taking responsibility for my healing for my life and where I want to go.
So that's when I took on the personal development journey, got into this healthy lifestyle, got out of the eating disorders. And went off to college for two years before I decided to stop going and start doing my own thing, which is what I do right now.
Damaged Parents: [00:04:09] So let's just go back and talk a little bit about what the feelings were like and what was going on for you. Mom dies. Dad's already incarcerated. You're 16. I think you said, and your brother was 11. So were you feeling abandoned? What was going on? You said that was like your rock bottom. So what does that mean for you?
Maggie Dong: [00:04:31] Yeah, I was feeling abandoned because I had some abandonment issues from even growing up from being abused by. My dad and him just not really being there. So I had already felt pretty abandoned and then my mom passed away. And at that point I was just blaming life for being so unfair to me and asking, why did this happen?
Why can't I just live a normal life? Like the other kids in school? And that was the rock bottom point because I didn't feel. Like I would go anywhere in my life. I thought that this was it. And why was I even here? So that rock bottom point was when I felt the most loss because everything fell apart all at once.
And I had no idea where I was going.
Damaged Parents: [00:05:27] well, yeah, because you're 16. I mean, two years is not very long to have what it sounds like. What happened with dad was not good for you at all. And then your mom sounds like, was probably supportive or of you in, and there you were traveling for two years, this horrible, I don't know, to, to be abused as a child by a parent.
I can't imagine what that would be like. , and then to lose the other parent, I think would be devastating. And I think I might feel really alone. And it sounds like that's where you were like, why am I here?
Maggie Dong: [00:06:02] Yeah. Yeah. It, it was not that much of a shock for me to be honest, that I lost my mom because she had cancer for six years. And I think about two or three months before she actually passed away, I was in the car with her this one day. Once she got a voice mail from her doctor that told her that she had six months to live.
And I knew that that was coming in about six months, but it did happen sooner than I was expecting, but I did see it happening soon in the future.
Damaged Parents: [00:06:37] So, yeah. You were able to, were you able to process a little bit because you had that time or
Maggie Dong: [00:06:45] Uh,
Damaged Parents: [00:06:46] I don't know.
Maggie Dong: [00:06:47] Not really. I didn't want to believe that it was true. So I was in denial for the two, three months that she was actually here until the day that she passed away. So what happened was I came back from. One of my summer jobs. This was in June and came back, found her, laying on the bed, just almost unconscious.
And I had to call the ambulance. And then before they got here, she started just bleeding out everywhere and they took her to the hospital and in the emergency room. And I was just sitting there by myself because I was the only one there at the time. And that night she passed away.
Damaged Parents: [00:07:32] Wow, that must've been scary.
Maggie Dong: [00:07:35] Yeah, it was a pretty traumatic experience and took a lot of healing to get out of that. I, I had to relive that experience over and over again for me to actually heal from it.
Damaged Parents: [00:07:50] Okay. So that's really interesting. What do you mean by when you say relive that experience?
Maggie Dong: [00:07:57] Yeah, because for a while I was just suppressing the whole thing. I didn't even want to think about it, but in the back of my head, it was there. It was that painful memory that was sitting there that I didn't want to process, but in order for me to actually come to terms with her death, I had to. Actually go back in my memory and relive that scene over and over again, until I could process my emotions when it comes to that.
Cause I remember after she passed away at her funeral, I didn't even cry because I couldn't, I just couldn't even believe it. I, I couldn't take it. So I went in with a blank face didn't cry. Didn't show any emotions. And it was through those reliving of those memories that I got the chance to purge, to cry and actually release a lot of that.
Damaged Parents: [00:08:54] Yeah, I thought it would also be hard, like making myself go back to something so difficult. Did you have to force yourself to do it because you knew it, you needed to do it or did you just say, okay, I need to do this. I love myself. And in order to get over this, I need to do this do you understand my question?
Maggie Dong: [00:09:13] Yeah. So I ended up going to therapy about a year after that and, and in therapy. That's when I started really processing these things because my therapist is asking me questions about my childhood and all the traumas that I've been through. And obviously my mom's staff came up and that was. I would say really the first time that I had talked about it since she passed away.
But after that point, I realized that by talking about it, by going back and reprocessing that event, it actually helps me heal from it. If I allow myself to feel.
Damaged Parents: [00:09:54] Okay, so was it foreign to you? You to have to feel your feelings.
Maggie Dong: [00:09:59] Yeah, it was foreign to me, for sure. Because growing up, I was taught to not cry, to never cry. And that's why. I had a lot of trouble showing my emotions when I comes to, especially the ones we label as negative, the crying, the anger. I had trouble showing out of all of that. It was a process of being okay with myself, even crying and being okay with feeling sad and being in that space of dealing with grief.
And I had to learn to stop judging myself for feeling
Damaged Parents: [00:10:36] Yeah. So how do you get to that point?
Maggie Dong: [00:10:39] Yeah. So it's really interesting because every time before all of this, I would have the urge to cry, but then I would try really hard to hold it back. And it ended up building up in my system because these emotions are just energy that we store in our bodies. And what had happened was. I had built up so much anger and sadness in my entire body that I started having weird physical symptoms because of the stored emotions I started having random pains and, I, at one point I had to unleash everything that I was holding on to.
So. For me, what happened was something else triggered me that had nothing to do with this entire thing. But then, because I was holding onto so much, I just unleash all my emotions onto this other person, which was very unfair. And at that point I realized that's the consequences of me holding on to these emotions.
So I had to learn to start feeling it in the moment and letting it just pass through.
Damaged Parents: [00:11:55] So it took you kind of losing it with someone, if you will, to realize. That hanging on to all this other, I'm going to call it baggage, hanging onto the old, the baggage. Wasn't helpful.
Maggie Dong: [00:12:09] Yeah, I think I had to see the consequences of that before I had that wake-up call moment. When I said, I really need to stop doing this, and I need to allow myself to feel this pain in order to heal it.
Damaged Parents: [00:12:23] Yeah. And I thought I did catch that. You said what we call negative emotions. I think that's what you said. Because well, I've decided they're just unfun emotions. So if you were to switch your thinking from negative to they're just unfun. I mean, are they still useful to you? I'm thinking they're still useful to you, whether they're negative or positive or fun or un-fun
Maggie Dong: [00:12:49] Yeah, I mean, these are all just labels, so we put on. Emotions when at the end of the day, these emotions are just different types of energy. That's flowing through our bodies, but human beings would like to put labels on everything. We think that certain things are positive and certain things are negative.
And we want to avoid the negative things. But if we have that type of mentality, that's when we start judging ourselves for feeling these quote unquote negative emotions, but they're just label. So we put on certain energies.
Damaged Parents: [00:13:23] So, how did you get to a point where you could recognize them as different energies and accept them and be okay in the un-fun? Feelings, if you will. And I'm going to focus on that because I don't know anyone who tries to avoid happiness or joy.
Maggie Dong: [00:13:41] Yeah. Yeah. It's easy to. We love ourselves when things are going well. It's, it's so easy when we're feeling happy and positive. It's easy to say my life is going so well. But when we are sitting in our rock bottoms, when we are crying and feeling sad and things are not going so well. We don't like to take a responsibility for that.
And we start blaming someone else or something else for ruining our lives. Because our natural instincts, our egos like to do that, we like to blame things on other people. But when we truly come back to ourselves and start taking responsibility for all of it, not just the. Happy and positive days, but also the negative and sad days, we started taking responsibility for everything that happens in our lives.
That's when we stopped blaming other people, we stopped judging all of these things because we see it as her own. When we take responsibility.
Damaged Parents: [00:14:51] Okay. Now explain that because you had been abused as a child, lost your mom early. How can you be responsible for that? Or how are you just talking about responsibility in a different way?
Maggie Dong: [00:15:04] so I decided that I am taking responsibility for the things that are happening in my life, because the sort of things that. In a way, my, my higher self chose these events for me to learn lessons. So these events are not happening at random need, you know, someone else didn't just throw all of these things at me.
I participated in this in a way, and it was a subconscious choice that maybe in the moment, I had no idea that I chose this, but when I look back at these events, subconsciously, I chose them. Because without these events, I wouldn't be learning the lessons that I did learn. So in a way I did choose to go through all of these things.
And that's what I mean by taking responsibility is realizing that no one did this to us. No one created unfair situations for us because we, chose to go through all of this.
Damaged Parents: [00:16:11] So are you saying, like, in some ways we existed before we were here on earth and now that we're here and we knew that we were going to have these challenges, so, and we wanted to have that, chance to experience the human experience.
Maggie Dong: [00:16:29] Yeah. So I don't know if you've heard of like the Akashic records and soul contracts and all that.
Damaged Parents: [00:16:37] I have not.
Maggie Dong: [00:16:38] But yeah, we sign a soul contract from what I know before we incarnate here on earth and the contract kind of includes the lessons that we're here to learn and certain events that are going to happen.
So when I look at my Akashic records, I think about it, like files of all of the events past present, future, all that's in it. I can tap into that and look at the decisions that I made before I decided to come here. And from looking at that, I know that I signed up for everything that I have in my life right now.
Damaged Parents: [00:17:20] Okay, so does that make it, so it sounds like that almost makes it easier to look back at the abuse and the loss and all of that as a lesson to make you stronger. Is that kind of what that belief is to look at it as a lesson that makes you stronger.
Maggie Dong: [00:17:37] Yeah. I mean, everything happens for a reason. These things are not happening at random and everything is here to teach us something. So these are lessons that I needed to learn and I don't regret any of it. I don't blame anybody for any of this. Now on the other side, In the moment, you know, I was blaming everyone.
I was blaming life for being unfair, but on the other side, when I've truly healed, when I'm truly forgiven everyone who was involved, I realized that I am so grateful for all of it, because I wouldn't be who I am without all of these things.
Damaged Parents: [00:18:18] So that devastation took you on this journey. That was extremely hard. And I just heard you say you are grateful for it.
Maggie Dong: [00:18:27] Yeah, I'm so grateful for all of it. And it's because. So for example, my dad had abused me when I was a child and that one was really difficult for me to get past and heal from because I had trust issues with men. I had abandonment issues from that. Then a lot of sexual trauma with that as well. So for the longest time I was blaming him for the things that he did to me and, and how unfair it is that I was born into this family and all that.
But when I've healed from all of this, and on the other side, when I look back, I realize that without the things that he did to me, I would have never learned. To take responsibility for my life and to forgive, no one taught me forgiveness more than he did. And I'm so grateful for the way that he participated in these lessons that I was learning because without him quote unquote, playing the bad guy, I would have never learned.
Damaged Parents: [00:19:34] Can you explain forgiveness or what you believe forgiveness to be to the audience.
Maggie Dong: [00:19:40] Yeah, forgiveness. I think forgiveness is difficult at first, for sure. Because when I first heard about the concept of forgiveness and I needed to forgive all of these people, it was so hard for me. I was telling myself that there was no way that I can forgive all of these things that have happened. But then I started realizing that forgiveness is only difficult when I'm unwilling to learn a lesson when I'm still playing the victim.
That's when forgiveness is hard, it's when I'm playing the victim. And I am blaming people and unable to let go of the things that have happened. So when I start taking responsibility, when I start. Realizing that these things are here to teach me. And I turned that all into gratitude. That's when forgiveness becomes so easy because nowadays whatever people were doing to me that maybe I don't like, I instantly realized that it's just an opportunity for me to forgive for me to learn for me to turn that all into gratitude.
These are all opportunities.
Damaged Parents: [00:20:49] How do you stop blaming? What do you mean by that? Like in your regular daily life, you were blaming people. No matter what or what? I guess maybe the better question is what does playing a victim look like and at what does that have to do with blame?
Maggie Dong: [00:21:05] When something happens to us. So for example, let's say we get into an argument with somebody, our egos will play the victim, and we will say that that person hurt me. That person should have not said that that person should have not gotten angry. So is always looking at somebody else and trying to control somebody else's actions.
But when we let go for our egos, When we come back to our hearts, to our higher selves, we realize that we don't have control over what other people's actions are. We only have control over our part of this whole thing. So instead of sitting here and almost like dwelling on the past and, and saying, why did my dad do this to me?
Why did my mom do this to me? Why is it so unfair? I can turn around and realize that I didn't have any control over their actions, but I do have control over how I respond now I can choose to respond differently. And that's what I mean by taking responsibility is we take responsibility for our, our reactions to these events instead of trying to.
Change the external world.
Damaged Parents: [00:22:27] So you can't go back and change that. Right? So now you're changing your reaction to what happened to what you can't change. And it sounds like you're also changing your reaction in the moment things are happening that you're not liking. What if somebody is, uh, I don't know, they're being mean and rude all the time.
What would be an example of you taking responsibility in that moment? Does that, do you understand where I'm going with that question?
Maggie Dong: [00:23:00] Yeah. So if somebody is being rude to me, I would. Turn around because my, my ego right off the bat, I will want to react. I would want to fight back and attack and be rude back. I mean, that's what we like to do. But when we get back to our higher selves, we take a step back from. The thing that's happening.
And we asked ourselves, can we make a different choice here? Do we just react right away? And attack back, or can we make a choice that is for our highest good. And, you know, when you truly take a step back and make that choice, It's impossible to certify or an argument when one person decides to take a step back because it always takes two people to start a fights, to start an argument.
And one person, if we make a different choice, it changes the entire scenario.
Damaged Parents: [00:23:58] Right. So if somebody is coming at you and they're mad at you, how do you remain calm? How do you remember to not engage? How do you not react, but respond differently? Do you take a breath first? What do you do?
Maggie Dong: [00:24:13] A lot of practice you got, I reacted so much at the beginning and that's our natural response. We just want to react right away. But when we have this awareness and it. It takes so much practice when people start approaching me and they say something that I don't like, my initial reaction is probably like, why is this person attacking me?
Why is this person saying this and this? But in that moment now I've kind of trained myself to, instead of saying right away, the first thing that's on my mind, I trained myself to. Take a step back in that moment and ask myself, first of all, how did I attract the situation? Because I must have done something right.
If I get somebody just randomly coming to me and, and yelling and being rude, like how did I attract this situation? And the other thing is. How can I respond differently? How can I observe the situation instead of reacting? And when we come from that place of observing and just allowing it to play out to happen instead of throwing a reaction and it changes the entire thing.
Damaged Parents: [00:25:29] does that mean taking a deep breath in the moment? Does it mean. Being quiet for a few minutes. What does that mean? How do you, I'm just really trying to dial into what are the behavior, maybe the behaviors that you have that help you so that you're not reacting.
Maggie Dong: [00:25:49] Yeah. So what I do is it kind of goes on in my mind where I catch myself wanting to react and I decided to make a different choice. So it does.
Damaged Parents: [00:26:02] thing that, sorry. So the first thing that happens is you've recognized that you want to react. And as soon as you recognize that you kind of stop,
Maggie Dong: [00:26:11] Yeah, I have to have that awareness first that I want to react because if we don't have any awareness, we just run on this autopilot programming where we just get something and we react with that autopilot. But. When we have that awareness of that's what we're doing, that's when we can make a different choice is within that awareness, we get to make a different choice.
Damaged Parents: [00:26:35] Easier. I'm assuming I heard you say it took a lot of practice. So I'm thinking at the beginning of your journey, maybe the only thing you could do is recognize after the fact.
Maggie Dong: [00:26:45] Yeah. At the beginning, I would react to something and then come back and regrets my reaction. And over time, it. It became more natural to me to have that recognition in the moment and then make a different choice. And nowadays I've completely changed my autopilot programming. So my first reaction or my first response to any situation is not to react anymore.
My first response is to take a step back.
Damaged Parents: [00:27:19] Okay at the beginning, when you were trying to make those new behaviors, or you were trying to make that change to new behaviors, when you miserably failed, if you will, you reacted and something happened and you came back and you regretted it, what was your internal dialogue like?
Maggie Dong: [00:27:36] Yeah. At the beginning, I had a lot of negative. Self-talk just beating myself up for doing this again. And why can't I just get this right. But that doesn't help, you know, wanting to beat ourselves up for the things that have already happened. It doesn't change the fact that it happens and it. comes back to how do we let go of the past and stop looking at the things that happened in the past and choose differently in this moment, because in this moment, this is when we get to create our next step.
That's when we get to create a new life. If we didn't like her old one, but when we dwell on the past, when we relived that over and over again and blame ourselves, it doesn't change anything.
Damaged Parents: [00:28:21] So, how did you step out of that? Let's say it was back then the incident just happened. You had your reaction, you come home you have your negative self-talk did you slowly learn to like, give yourself a hug and be like, okay, you're doing your best?
I'm trying to really understand how you got from reacting to not reacting and what that meant. As far as the internal journey, cause I'm thinking you probably didn't change much until after.
You started having more positive dialogue with yourself and saying it's okay. I love you. You did the best you could. I'm not sure, but I'm wondering like what those steps were, if you will. And I know it's hard to explain.
Maggie Dong: [00:29:03] Yeah, I would say it's a lot of self-love for sure. A lot of forgiveness. Forgiving ourselves in every moment and letting go of the past continuously letting go of what's been done because we can't change it. We just can't go back and, you know, make a different scenario happen. But the next time it happens.
I can make a different choice. So I know that it's going to happen again. And, and that's when I know that I have a new opportunity this next time to make a different choice. And it's okay if this last time didn't play out the way that I wanted to, because we're always learning, we're always evolving. We're in this process of becoming and it's so beautiful that everything in the universe, this, in this process of becoming and who knows where the end destination is, we're not really there yet, but it doesn't matter. We don't have to be perfect all the time because where we are in this moment is perfect.
Maybe not our egos definition of perfection, but on that. Soul level where we are in this moment. It is perfect.
Damaged Parents: [00:30:18] That reminded me of a conversation I had with one of my sisters awhile ago, about hindsight being 2020. And I said, well, is it really? Because if I could have made a different choice in that moment than I think I would've, but I didn't. So is it really 2020, or is it that. Maybe now I can make it a new choice next time, because what if I make that same choice again?
And it doesn't work out or I make a different choice, the choice I think I should have made. And it doesn't work out. Do you understand where I'm going? Like, I know it's a little philosophical. You're saying we are where we're supposed to be and we're learning the lessons we're supposed to learn. So I don't think I can look back at hindsight and say that I did something wrong. If I'm where I'm supposed to be. Does that make sense?
Maggie Dong: [00:31:05] Yeah. Yeah. So what you're saying is we couldn't have done anything wrong I don't think we can truly make a wrong choice or wrong. And the definition that we, we define it us. We can only. We can make different choices, but I don't think one would be the right one and one would be the wrong one.
If that makes sense. They're just different choices that we choose to take. But at the end of the day, it leads us to where we need to be.
Damaged Parents: [00:31:34] Right. I heard you say they're just different choices. So one might lead me to where I think I want to go. And the other one might not. And at the same time, it might be exactly to where I need to be, but I don't know and so therefore the choice can't be right or wrong. It just is.
Maggie Dong: [00:31:54] Everything just is. And we put a lot of labels on different things. we think there's right and wrong. There's positive, negative, good and bad. I mean, these are just all labels that we put on different things. But when we get out of those labels that we put on ourselves and on, on the world, as we realize that it just is, and there is no right or wrong, it just happens.
Things happen exactly how they're supposed to happen. And we just live through it.
Damaged Parents: [00:32:27] Yeah, and it's not like we don't do our best to, to be our best selves. And yet we have to make mistakes because we've got to learn. I mean, you've really got me thinking philosophically here.
Maggie Dong: [00:32:41] Yeah, I love it. I love it. And yeah, we have to learn if everything was just going so smoothly all the time, we would never learn and looking back, I think the most growth that I've I've gotten out of my life was through those moments of adversities and difficulties, the moments that were uncomfortable, if I was being so comfortable all the time, I would have never learned anything.
Damaged Parents: [00:33:06] Yeah. So part of what you're saying is in order to learn, I have to be uncomfortable.
Maggie Dong: [00:33:11] Yeah, it's choosing to sit with that discomfort over being stagnant because when we are comfortable all the time, I mean, life is going so well on that. Personal development level. We're kind of stagnant when, when things are going so well and we're, we're so happy and positive and so comfortable.
And maybe we like that, you know, for a while. But then after a while, I don't know about the people who are listening, but I get bored if things are going so well all the time. And I'm so comfortable, nothing is happening in my life. Then I'd get really, really bored. So it's through those moments of discomfort. That's when we get to grow.
Damaged Parents: [00:33:55] Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Sometimes I think, there's those times in life where it's like one thing after another, after another, and it's like, Oh my goodness, what is going on? How come everybody's coming after me? What do you do with those moments?
Maggie Dong: [00:34:12] Yeah, I did go through that because one thing after another, and it seems like it was never ending, but I, I had to come back to myself and remind myself that I will only be given the situations that I'm able to handle. There is never a time where I was given more or less. Then the exact right amount.
So even if this seems like it's a lot, I know that I can handle it because I've made it every single time to the other side and I can look back and say that happened exactly how it was supposed to happen. And I'm so grateful for the way that it happened and is having that trust in that it's never more than we can take on.
Damaged Parents: [00:35:01] Yeah, I think that's a hard place to get to though. Right?
Maggie Dong: [00:35:04] Yeah.
Damaged Parents: [00:35:05] I love that. You love that, that comment, I guess, for me, it's hard. Even when I'm in those moments, just, it's just really hard. So now you're you do it, your podcast, you're a healer and a fitness and life coach. I mean, And what's a channeler. Explain that.
Maggie Dong: [00:35:24] Yeah. So channeler, I channel universal messages I channel and pretty much anything. And pretty much I can, like, let's say, you know, the example that I gave earlier. I can tap into people's like past lives. Uh, I can tap into like anything, any questions that people have that I have, I can tap in and get the answer because we do have access to all knowledge in the universe.
It's just, we need to be able to let go of our limited minds and tap into that infinite source.
Damaged Parents: [00:36:02] How does somebody do that?
Maggie Dong: [00:36:04] by practicing. I would say a good place to start would be in meditation when you're in that place of stillness and quiet. And your, your mind is no longer chattering that in that space, when you ask. A question, just wait for an answer to come and you have to quiet the mind because your mind is going to want to fill in an answer for you at the beginning.
It's going to want to do that. But if you stop listening to your mind and you just allow that answer to really come to you, that's how you get the answer to all the questions that you have.
Damaged Parents: [00:36:46] Is it kind of like praying then?
Maggie Dong: [00:36:48] It's not necessarily like praying is more listening to our higher selves because our higher solves are connected to all that there is. And we do have all of that knowledge within us. So it's just me asking my higher self a question instead of asking my limited mind.
Damaged Parents: [00:37:07] That sounds really interesting.
Maggie Dong: [00:37:09] Yeah, it's, it's pretty interesting and things get pretty wild around here.
Damaged Parents: [00:37:14] What does wild mean?
Maggie Dong: [00:37:16] I mean, I've done some like energy work that. Or are pretty intense. I mean, two days ago I did this energy session on someone that I know, and it was maybe like a two minute thing. It was very short and the energy was so intense in my, my entire body was shaking. His body was shaking from all the energy that was there and.
My AirPods. So like I was listening to music in my AirPods on my phone, and the sound started cutting out because the energy was so intense that it disrupted the sound, but there are a lot of wild things happening
Damaged Parents: [00:38:00] So it's almost, so it sounds like the getting in touch with yourself is also there's energy associated with that. And that. I guess if we're, if maybe what I'm hearing is like, if we're part of the universe, then we just happened to have this physical body right now. So in order to tap into the rest of the universe, we have to really be quiet and listen from a spiritual perspective.
Maggie Dong: [00:38:27] Yeah. So we have to understand that we're not this body. We are, we're living in this body, but. That's not who we are. And we tend to identify ourselves with things in the physical. We identify ourselves with our body, with what we do, you know, our jobs and so many different things. But at the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves, who are we really when we let go of all of this, because there is that consciousness behind all of this, that.
It's not any of this. This is just all the things that we create in our minds, but consciousness behind this is just that observe observer of all that there is. And your consciousness is what's connected to all things in the universe because we're literally Stardust. We are.
Damaged Parents: [00:39:21] That's really an interesting thought. Okay. So if you could speak to the listeners that might be struggling with similar things that you were, that you struggled through and you made it, what are three tools or tips that you would want them to have access to.
Maggie Dong: [00:39:38] Yeah, I would say the first one is allowing yourself to feel. You have to feel it to heal it. If you don't sit for it, if you keep on avoiding it, it's going to keep on coming back. And we are going to have these built up, emotions, and energy stored in our bodies. And eventually it's going to explode when we can't hold it anymore.
So definitely feeling and sitting with that discomfort. Uh, number two is to really get present, because like we talked about when we live in the past, we keep on dwelling on the things that should have been or should have happened. The things that. We label as wrong. But when we truly get here in the present moment, we realized that none of that stuff mattered the past has already happened.
We can't change it. And what we do have control over is here in this present moment. And number three, I would say. Get in a habit of meditation, meditation really made a big difference for me at the beginning. I thought it was stupid to meditate and sit there and waste my time. But. I started realizing that meditation is so much more than just sitting there for 10, 20 minutes is really getting into tune with ourselves.
Instead of having our minds chattering and being busy all the time, we just sit and be still and be quiet for that moment. And it actually ends up being. Way more productive for our days. Then if we were just to just jump right in and keep on being busy.
Damaged Parents: [00:41:25] Thank you so much Maggie for coming on today, I've really gotten to enjoy our conversation.
Maggie Dong: [00:41:31] Thank you so much for having me.
Damaged Parents: [00:41:33] You're welcome.
Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Relatively Damaged by Damaged Parents. We really enjoyed talking to Maggie about how she learned to find who she is. We especially liked when she said we are all Stardust. To unite with other damaged people, connect with us on Instagram. Look for damaged parents. We'll be here next week still relatively damaged see you then.
