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Key Quote
“Life will always be hard, but, don’t wish for life to be easier, wish for yourselves to be stronger.” – Kate Nguyen
Episode Summary
In this riveting episode, we delve into the journey of Kate Nguyen, energy healer and host of the YouTube channel, Best of You. We’ll hear her story about how she beat depression by changing her negative thoughts into positive ones.
We’ll also learn about an ancient Hawaiian method that can help get rid of bad thoughts, make you believe in yourself more, and stop you from putting things off. But can this old trick really help with big problems in today’s world?
Next, we’ll talk about how you can connect with your “higher self.” How can you do this? Maybe through quiet thinking, talking to yourself, or being open to learn new things.
The main point of our story? Believe in yourself and don’t worry about what others think. Doing something good gives you the power to do even more good in the world.
So, come join us in this episode to uncover these secrets and more. In energy healing, just like in life, the journey is just as important as the end goal.
Full Transcript
[00:00:00] Wesley Jackson: Can you relate to this? Picture yourself living abroad in a foreign country. While things may be fine for you financially, you’ve been experiencing the worst depression of your life, suicidal thoughts and all. Every day you feel the negative thinking overwhelming your entire being, especially once the sun goes down and you’re alone.
But, how do you know what to do to overcome this? How do you differentiate the thoughts in your head from the person that you are? How do you regain that inner peace that you once had? You’ll find this out today through a story from Kate Nguyen, energy healer and host of the Best Of You YouTube channel.
In today’s self-help podcast episode, you’ll learn about reframing negative thoughts, how it relates to mindshifts, and how these two powerful forces influence our lives.
Welcome to Surviving Humanity: A Self-Help Podcast, where we shift your perspective to help you overcome the obstacles in your life. We are Wesley Jackson and Andrew Gilley, and and we hope to foster a sense of connection and community over our common struggles while providing you with the tools to overcome them.
As always, our Facebook, Subreddit, and Twitter are the best places to go for community, connection, and support. Links to these are in the show notes.
Let’s get started.
So, Kate, do you have any stories that you’d like to share that are related to reframing negative thoughts?
[00:01:06] Kate Nguyen: Yes, I do. Four years ago, back in 2019 when I was back in Los Angeles, I got a very bad depression with suicidal thoughts. So, every day, I can feel the negative thinking all over – in my body, in my thinking, and even in my energy body, and I don’t know how to overcome it, especially in the evening, when the sun goes out and then everything just hit me hard. I can hardly reconnect to myself.
There’s a voice in me telling me that, “You should just die. Just kill yourself. You do not deserve to live.“
And actually back then, everything in my life’s pretty good; in a financial area, but not in emotional. Years of working, I lost connection with my inner self.
So, I achieve my financial goals, but then I lost the real inner peace with myself. That is why depression happened. But, I was lucky enough that I found reiki that can help me to heal myself, to reconnect with my inner self, and open a new journey of spiritual awakening, to really look from within.
And during that four years, it’s not an easy journey, because the more you look from within, the more you can see the dark side in you.
So, in that four years, up and down, but until this year, I can feel that I have much more inner strength and inner peace to deal with life and to overcome procrastination so that I can start and launch my YouTube channel. I wanted to do this YouTube channel for like over three years already, but it’s just, there’s something in me every time I try to do it, there’s a voice in me judging myself: “What if people don’t like what I wanna share? What if people who are my friends and families would be judging me if I say something that they don’t like? Or what if I just cannot do it?“
It’s a force in me that every time I try to overcome, it pulls me back. So, self-doubt is the first obstacle I have to deal with myself.
The second obstacle is going to be procrastination. “I’ll just wait for another day. Hold on, just wait for Monday. Maybe Monday is not better, how about wait for next year when everything is better, I can start to do it. Or let’s wait for when I can lose weight. When my body looks better, when I’ll look better with the filming, then we can start doing it.”
So, I keep procrastinating day over day, and each passing day, I feel so bad. I feel so bad about myself, because my soul knows that I must do YouTube, because through YouTube I can do more of my teaching in there through YouTube, I can, help many people who were like me when I was younger. People who are lost or don’t know where to go in the future, or people who have a lot of emotional problems, I can help them. It’s like I help my younger self.
So, my soul knows that I must take action. But I don’t, so I regret every single day passing by. And I just started my YouTube channel, and you know what? I feel so good, because finally I can take action. Although, of course, the first few videos not gonna be so professional like I want, but just like the slogan of Nike, just do it. Just take action and you will get better after you’re taking action.
Because so many people just want everything to be so perfect before they show it to the world. And that is a problem for procrastination, so just do it. The more you do it, the more confident you will get.
But, the three obstacles, the third one is my health issues. Just like I shared with you before, I got COVID and then my health just goes down and down.
And physical health is very important, because in order for you to have strong mental health, you need to have physical health too. So, health issue is my biggest obstacle in the past four months. And because of low vibration from health issue, I frequently hear self-judgment.
So, every night, I talk to the universe, because I build a very strong relationship with the universe every day. And I ask the universe, “If this is the right thing to do, please guide me, please give me strength, so that I can overcome every obstacle holding me back.”
So, the more I pray, I think the more the universe listened to me, and the universe finally sent me something that is the ancient Hawaiian technique, it’s called hoʻoponopono; I share with many people, I think I share with you the other day too. So, this is the four mantra. I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I thank you.
So these four mantras have the power of clearing the negative thoughts in the head, because every day we think thousands, thousands of thoughts. And if we really pay attention to our thoughts, we can see it’s mostly negative thoughts.
So, when I practice, I chant it day and night and whenever I have free time; I do it so that I can change my thinking and I can clear the negative thinking so that I have space to put more positive thinking into my head.
And the more we do hoʻoponopono, the more we connect to the universe. We connect to the divine so that we can receive a lot of inspiration, a lot of guidance, to move forward in life.
[00:06:01] Wesley Jackson: So, how would you say then this whole experience changed your perspective at the end of the day?
[00:06:07] Kate Nguyen: I think every single one of us, we have that unlimited potential insight. It’s like the white light of potential in there. But, because many hardships we’ve been facing in life – trauma, disappointment or whatever – it covers our light more and more that sometimes we even forget who we used to be, how happy we used to be when we were younger.
So, the more we do meditation, the more we connect to our inner self so that we can hear the higher-self voice guide us into a better place. And then we must have methods and tools to deal with the problem.
So, imagine you have that toolbox. When we open the toolbox, there’s no tool in there for us to fix the problems, right? So, go out there, open your heart, open your mind to learn new things. So, whenever the problem comes up, you open your toolbox and look at the box to see what tool you have in there.
So, again, meditation and practicing hoʻoponopono for me are the best tools ever that can help me to overcome hardship.
So, when I wake up in the morning, the first things I think of is “I love you. Thank you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.” So, I try to not let my head to think of any other negative things. Because I control it. I’m the master of my thinking. I don’t let my thoughts master me, but I need to master my thinking, I need to master my emotions in order for me to move forward.
But if we do certain meditation, certain spiritual practices, we can build that inner strength to control many things in life with love and harmony.
[00:07:40] Wesley Jackson: This is very eloquent. I’m curious, so, when you practice hoʻoponopono, who” would you say you are speaking to in this case?
[00:07:47] Kate Nguyen: We were born with light, love, and healing; but during our lifetime, we somehow got covered by trauma, so we forgot who we are. So when we say those four phrases, we talk it straight to God, to the divine, to the universe, and we say that four mantra is a code for you to connect to the divine.
So, imagine this is you and this is your goal. So, between you and your goal are the obstacles. In ancient Hawaiian, these obstacles, they call it trash. So, the trash is your obstacle. So, the more you do the clearing technique, the more trash you can clear out. So you and your goal should become closer and closer. It’s helped a lot, because sometime we don’t have enough motivation to move forward, because life is not easy every day.
So, when we don’t have enough motivation, what can help us to come to our goals is how we clear the trash. The more we clear the trash, the more power we have to keep moving forward to the goal.
[00:08:42] Wesley Jackson: Sounds really similar to Vedic meditation, for example, which is a Hindu tradition.
I use the mantra “let go” in my case, personally, for reframing my negative thought patterns.
So, let’s change gears here a little bit. How would you say reframing negative thoughts is related to mindshifts?
[00:09:00] Kate Nguyen: Our mind controls us and we control our mind. It’s a two-way street. So, in order for us to reframe the negative thoughts, we need to, of course, reframe our mind. But another very important detail in there: our mind controls with our heart. It’s like mind and heart coherence, and here it actually is controlling much more emotion. So, in order for the mind to shift, we should help the inner self shift too. But how do we do it?
We need to first open. We need to want to do it, first. It’s a free choice. We must want to do it. Because throughout my coaching, many people, they want to complain, but they don’t want to change. They love to be at the victim stage, they don’t want to have the power in their life.
So, the first question I want to ask, “Do you really want to change?”
And if they say yes, oh, in that moment, they agree with me that they want to change.
The second, in order to change, we must have some certain knowledge or wisdom and some practices that help with the changing process. And of course I think we should have a teacher who can guide us, who has experience, who has knowledge, who has a good heart and an intelligent mind that can guide us into a better journey in life.
[00:10:12] Wesley Jackson: Yeah, teachers are really important, how would you say this story of reframing negative thought patterns is related to larger problems throughout society, and why do you think this is important?
[00:10:22] Kate Nguyen: I think 99.9% of the population, they have to deal with the same thing. Because we have that physical body, which has to deal with physical health problems and we have that emotional body, or spiritual body, that has to deal with emotional problems.
So, actually the last four years, I have to deal with both. But, most importantly, we have to know why problems come into our life. The universe loves us. The universe send out the problem not to punish us. The problem come to our life so that we can have time to first look at the problem, then look at ourself, and then when we overcome the problem, we upgrade our power into a new power.
So, the problem comes to us so that we can fix and we can strengthen our power. Just like in video games, we don’t just have one level and we play forever. Each level, the character in the games can be stronger with more skill and more confidence.
It is the same in life, problems come for us to learn and to grow. So, if we know that and we change our perspective with problems instead of being a victim, complaining, being weak, we be grateful for the problem so that we can become stronger.
And after solving the problem, we can help other people who have the same problem to solve those problems.
[00:11:40] Wesley Jackson: I love the video game metaphor. That one speaks directly to me, and it’s related to what you said before too, right? You need new tools in your toolbox, or in this case, you need new equipment in order to get to the next level, right?
[00:11:53] Kate Nguyen: Most importantly, it’s all about inner strength. It’s very important, because everything has to come from within and whatever from within can show from outside. Life will always be hard, but, don’t wish for life to be easier, wish for yourselves to be stronger.
When you have that inner strength and inner peace, when problems come, you have that power in you and you have that intelligence in you to know what to do for the best outcome.
So, each person will have different purpose in life. And I cannot tell you what is best for you. Only you know what is best for you, but how do you know it? You have to connect with your higher self. Because your higher self knows what is the best for you.
[00:12:31] Wesley Jackson: How would you say that we can best connect with our higher selves?
[00:12:35] Kate Nguyen: To connect with our higher selves, first, you need to want to do it. The higher self always there and waiting for you to connect, but first you should know about your inner self through meditation, through talking to yourself every day, “Hello my higher self, can you please guide me into a better position, better way in life?
And just be quiet. You will receive the answer. But, the best tool is through meditation. Meditation is when you close your eyes. When you close your eyes, your body know that you want to connect from within. And once you connect from within, you can connect with your higher self. You can connect with the universe, the divine, so that you can hear a lot of positive voice, a better guidance that can guide you through life.
[00:13:19] Wesley Jackson: I love it. So, what would you say then, at the end of this day, what is the moral of this story of yours and what can we all do that are listening to become better humans in response to all of this?
[00:13:30] Kate Nguyen: So, one thing I wanna say is if I can do it, you can do that too. Through my story, I hope that you can find some tips, some experience, and inspiration there, so each of us can really be the best version of ourself. Because I believe we are a spiritual lifeforce being, having this human body to experience human life.
So, there’s a meaning of each of us in our life. You matter and your story, your experience, your hardships. This matters to the world. Through my story, I hope that you can find that fire in you so that you can move forward in life and you can find that gift in you, so that you can show your gifts to the world.
The more we can encourage other people, the more the world can be a better place through love, healing, harmony.
[00:14:17] Wesley Jackson: Love, healing, and harmony. Those are very powerful forces. So, before we go then, Kate, if you had to choose what is your number one tip for surviving humanity?
[00:14:28] Kate Nguyen: My number one tip is focus on yourself, believe in yourself. But, mostly focus on yourself. Do not care what other people think about you. What’s most important is what you think about yourself, because when we think about other people too much, we’re projecting our energy outside already. Pull back your energy, focus back on you, and do not care about other people judging you as long as you’re doing good things.
At some age, the work you do can help many other people. Then just keep doing, just do it. The more you take action, the more you feel good about yourself, the more you feel confident. Giving you that strength to do more good into the world, to focus back on you. Do not focus your energy to the outside world.
[00:15:12] Wesley Jackson: Thank you to our guest, Kate Nguyen. Kate is an energy healer and host of the Best Of You YouTube channel. She focuses on life coaching, reiki healing, and repairing people’s relationships with themselves and with money. You can find her latest work at masterkatenguyen.com.
I found Kate to be very unique, as her experience living abroad – similar to my own – has really helped broaden her horizons, and this really shines through in her integrative approach to her work. We highly encourage you to check her out if you’re interested in learning more about how to reframe negative thoughts.
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