Today we’d like to introduce you to Mona Luna.
Hi Mona, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
From childhood, there was an expectation placed upon me to be the perfect Chinese daughter who would make her family proud by growing up to become a doctor, lawyer, or accountant. But for as long as I can remember, I was headstrong in doing things differently. I wanted to have crazy-colored hair and dance with my eyes closed. I had no desire to wear frilly dresses and sit at the piano. I wanted to jump off cliffs and run through the jungle.
“Mona, you’re too wild!” I heard this constantly while growing up, and it was meant as a criticism right before being guided back to my seat at the piano. I dimmed myself down again and again, and it’s taken years and years to rediscover and reclaim my wildness.
In January 2015, I felt an unshakable knowing that I had never experienced before. Coming from a lifetime of indecision, distrust in my own abilities, and lack of self-esteem and confidence, this was something different. It felt big. I had never been so sure of anything else in my life up to that point. This knowing inside me pointed me to become a yoga teacher.
Yoga opened the doorway to the spiritual path that I’m now walking. It was a spiritual awakening. It was simultaneously the picturesque scene where the clouds parted to reveal the sun with an otherworldly chorus and also being dragged into the depths of myself, unearthing everything I had squashed down, denied, and swept under the rug throughout my life. All of my pain rose up to the surface, demanding to be acknowledged, felt all over again, and healed. It was like ripping open every wound that never fully healed properly so that I could look it in the face with a chance to create new thought patterns, habits, and a completely new way of being.
Along this journey of personal transformation and creating a life I’m wildly in love with, I worked with teachers from all walks of life and programs ranging from business to psychic development. I became certified to teach yoga in 2016, and over the years, I’ve continued to train in various formats, including Ashtanga, Yin, Anusara, and trauma-informed yoga. I worked with a life coach and one of the first questions she asked me was, “who are you?” I realized I didn’t know how to identify beyond my job title. I learned who I really was, I learned about values, boundaries, and how to trust myself.
I started going to therapy and realized the magnitude of adversities and complex trauma I’ve faced in my life. I thought trauma was reserved for people who had been to war, faced natural disasters, and sexual assault. I thought that just because I hadn’t experienced any of those things, I hadn’t experienced trauma. I learned about complex trauma, which isn’t isolated to a single event but is across the span of years. Through this discovery, I was able to see the roadmap in front of me and be able to heal.
In 2017, I realized I had been in an abusive relationship for over a decade. This was another instance where it had been my normal for so long that I didn’t know any other way. I didn’t know what it was like to be treated with basic respect. I didn’t know that manipulation and knock-out fights weren’t healthy since it was just my normal. With the help of a friend, I found the courage to leave that abusive relationship and did everything I could to heal.
That same year, when I saw my credit card debt reach $10,000 from shopping and dining out at restaurants, it was my wake-up call that I had a shopping addiction. I began to re-evaluate my mindset around money and got out of debt. My money mindset is something I am continuing to learn about and heal.
I explored countless alternative healing modalities, including Reiki, past life regression, akashic records, and hypnosis, to name a few. I read countless books about spirituality, business, and psychology. I followed my heart to Costa Rica on a life-changing retreat that led us through dance meditations, yoga classes, and women’s circles. I practiced opening my heart to share with vulnerability. I pulled countless tarot and oracle cards for myself and for others and learned how to recognize when Spirit is speaking to us (all the time) and how to get quiet enough to listen and see the signs and to trust the signs.
I trained to become a women’s circle facilitator, certified life coach, and in modalities including Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), Hypnosis, T.I.M.E. Techniques, and Emotional Freedom Technique. I stopped playing small, thinking I didn’t deserve to live in paradise or make money doing what I love. I quit my 9-5 corporate job, left Chicago and followed my dream of living in San Diego. Every day, I continue to learn and grow, to come back to the heart of who I am, to live in integrity and lead with love.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Absolutely not, and I don’t think anyone’s road ever pans out the way it’s planned or expected. I always knew that I wanted to help people. Yoga was the catalyst that opened the path to healing for me, and I wanted to do the same for others. When I finished my 200 Hour training in 2016, I was fresh and ready to take the leap from my corporate job into teaching full time. But boy oh boy did the universe have different plans for me. I had no idea how much I still had yet to heal and overcome. I had to help myself first before I could help others.
One of the core wounds I had to overcome in order to do the work I was doing was the belief that I wasn’t enough. I had been raised with unrealistically high expectations, and when anything fell short of perfection, it was met with disappointment. This led me to believe I had to always get it perfect or it wasn’t even worth trying. It led me to fear getting things wrong, an instinctual, primal fear where if I got it wrong, I felt like I would be rejected and unloved. It didn’t matter if I consciously knew. Otherwise, my body went on high alert.
Another result of this belief was Imposter syndrome. It didn’t matter how much external validation I received. It didn’t matter that I was a designer for Fortune 100 companies. It didn’t matter how many people told me they loved my yoga classes. The core belief that lingered was that I wasn’t good enough. I had to shift this identity in order to begin seeing the ways in which I was already inherently worthy, the ways in which I was doing things right, the ways in which I was already loved, just for being me- that I didn’t have to constantly prove myself in order to receive love, appreciation, and respect.
As everything is intrinsically connected, another struggle I’ve had is the fear of using my voice- of being seen and heard. This is three-fold. The first is events and people throughout my own life that led me to believe my voice and my opinions didn’t matter, or if I did speak up, I would be met with anger and violence. The second is generational- my mother grew up in communist China, where books were burned and people were executed for speaking up. It’s instilled into generations and into the culture that speaking up will lead to persecution. As our bodies store trauma, this generational trauma was passed down to me. The third is collective- across cultures, across generations, across millennia. It’s what’s called The Witch Wound. For thousands of years, people who were deemed different, witches, mystics, healers, and people with intuitive abilities beyond the accepted norm, were persecuted. It’s led us to staying small and quiet so we can stay safe. The beautiful thing is that with the privilege we have today, we no longer have to stay small and quiet. We may consciously know that, but it takes time and intentional rewiring for our bodies and subconscious mind to catch up to this new belief.
I’m healing this through mindset work, EMDR, T.I.M.E. Techniques, NLP, affirmations, and with radical courage by doing things beyond my comfort zone and reminding myself that I’m safe and I’m okay. I recently published a book of poems, and this was a growth edge for me because the alarm bells were going off in my nervous system and I was launched into fight or flight mode every time I thought about someone reading my book. I had to utilize the tools I’ve learned and cultivated throughout the years to remember that I’m safe and I’m okay, that it’s okay to speak up, it’s okay to use my voice.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’m a spiritual mentor and coach, yoga teacher, and writer. I help heart-centered and rebellious souls cultivate the courage to bring their vision into the light so they may help the world. I work with healers, artists, dancers, teachers, writers, and mystics who all have a vision of helping others but are stuck in the overwhelm of how and where to start.
The work always starts from within. I guide my clients to the depths of their being to cultivate a foundation of self-love, self-worth, and self-trust. From this rooted foundation, they find inner safety, confidence, courage, and freedom to rise into the world and express their true selves. Once we’ve created a stable inner foundation, we spiral outward into the real-world application such as how to start their business and how to put their art into the world.
Through yoga, coaching, group programs, retreats, women’s circles, tarot, and meditation, I create sacred spaces for women to reconnect with their bodies, intuition, and a loving community. Woven into my work is the embodiment, nervous system regulation, mindset work, mindfulness, deep subconscious work, and emotional regulation.
What sets me apart from others is that I bring the spiritual and the earthly together. I am a weaver and bridge. I help people connect to the present moment, what is physically here and now: our bodies, our breath, and our senses. It’s in presence and quiet that we can truly hear ourselves. It’s in safe spaces in presence that we can heal. I help people connect to the intangible: our minds, our emotions, and our intuition so we may understand ourselves on a deeper level and act from a place of grounded confidence. I help people connect to spirit, source, the Universe, God, whatever name you have for it, and to cultivate trust in themselves, the world, and the divine, and to see that the Divine is always acting through us and around us.
What I’m currently most proud of is finally doin’ the damn thing! For years, I have been wanting to write a book, and it was always a “someday” thing. I was paralyzed by perfectionism and stuck in inaction. I recently took an Anusara Yoga Training with Robin Christ, and our final project was to present our interpretation of “The View”– that we are one consciousness that’s come into the limited human form and we all express our divinity in our own way. My expression is through words. I knew it was time to get the first book together. I received the call. I knew what I had to do. And it was time to take action.
I gathered 26 poems that poured out of me over the past three years, that waterfall of divinity pouring through the earth vessel that is my body. I dusted off my art school education and book design background and put it to use, and the muscle memory returned. My friends Amanda, Melissa, and Lelia contributed to the editing and cover artwork. And I self-published it!
It was a matter of 25 days from the moment I gathered all the poems to the day it was published online. After years and years of thinking and talking about it, it came together in a flash. The book is practice invulnerability, of taking inspired action and putting myself out into the world. A practice in expanding into my infinite potential. A practice in holding myself through the fear of putting myself out there. A practice in releasing perfectionism.
Contact Info:
- Email: mona@monalunalove.com
- Website: https://www.monalunalove.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/monalunalove/
- Other: https://www.amazon.com/Remember-Your-Wild-Soul-Mona/dp/1006743367
Image Credits:
Matthew Fabiano, Lauren Oberlin
