Conversation
“The Beauty of Being Me”
IDA
IDA
“The part of me I had been hiding was now visible to the world. I didn’t look at myself for a while. But after I got over the initial discomfort, it felt, this is me, this is who I am. I was coming into my self, my skin, shedding the one that the world had put on me… I think it was also like an experiment for me—to see how people reacted to me looking different. Would they love me less without my hair? I mean, yesterday I had hair, and I’m literally the same person today without.”
Prologue :
October 24, 2024. I had made an appointment at Sol House for a 75-minute Soma Healing session. It was an Ayurvedic bodywork / massage treatment I had hoped would free me from my chronic back pains and migraines. It was an intense season. I was carrying so much. Too much. My body needed help. On the surface, and deep, deep within.
Because I am quite sensitive to the energies of my environment and people around me, I did a little research to try and get a sense of the therapist’s energy through her Instagram. Although it wasn’t my first visit to Sol House, it was my first session with her. One square after the next (it was still squares at the time), I read her words, her poetry, I watched this beautiful stranger deep-dive into her heart—through song and soliloquy—to make sense of her emotions and her journey in so raw and open a manner that it conjured a curious sense of familiarity. A connection. Who is this woman? What’s her story? Questions floated across my mind. I didn’t know why at the time, but I just knew that she would be able to help me. It felt right.
And, I was. That day, for the first time in a very long time, on the massage bed, I finally let down my defences, unclenched my jaw, relaxed my stomach and exhaled something I had been holding on to. Beneath the healing hands of this woman, I felt safe—it’s okay to rest now.
That night, I slept. I finally slept.
P.S. March 7, 2022. I had hosted a Heart-To-Heart Conversation in collaboration with Pyar. As it turned out, she was one of the guests in attendance. Neither of our 2024 selves realised that our paths had already crossed two-and-a-half years earlier. It was when we delved a little deeper in conversation after one of our first two healing sessions that she had connected the dots, and I retrieved this photo from my phone album as evidence—of a little cosmic humour. And magic. There we were. Next to each other, behind masks, not a clue. The universe works in mysterious ways.
Love, Karman x
A big turning point.
I was 22 when I quit my job and went to Bali for two months to do a yoga teacher training. For the first time in my (young) life, I had no plan. I used all the money I had, and came back without a job. At the time, I felt very silly, impractical and stupid. But when I look back on it now, I see how wise that 22-year-old was, that she had always known what was right for her.
I believe that experience shaped who I am now. Even though I was only 22, it was a very big turning point because until then, I had lived in a very linear way—on the surface becoming more and more accomplished, but deep down I was feeling more and more stuck and dead inside.
The internal discomfort was the “a-ha moment”.
There might have been many a-ha moments leading up to Bali, but each one didn’t feel like an a-ha in itself. It was accumulative, until one day I just knew, I cannot continue living this life anymore.
In the past, I needed my body to scream, to really, really scream at me: You have to leave! This is not right! I was not sleeping. I got maybe two hours’ sleep every night. I couldn’t even say how I felt—I couldn’t feel. There was only this numbness. In yoga practice, I had learned what it’s like to feel anchored and connected to myself, so I felt the contrast, the misalignment. I think that internal discomfort was the “a-ha moment”.
From a young age, I had always been very aware of my mortality—the fact that I will die one day. Thinking to myself:
“Am I going to die just living this life of earning enough money and being accomplished’ in the eyes of other people? Is that all I want? It was not an intellectual knowing. I knew it deep in my bones. I have to go, I have to do this.”
I, too, have something to share with the world.
The most important thing I learned in Bali was that I am much more powerful than I think. I’ve always felt that I was very small, that I have no impact on the world, no influence on people around me. But in my yoga training there, for the first time, I felt I was being seen for who I truly was. The teachers I had saw me beyond my mistakes and my flaws. There, I had a space to share my voice, to teach yoga, to have a community who honoured me. That positive reinforcement showed me that I, too, have something to share with the world. It helped me understand my self-worth, and it was so different from external validation. External validation is something that we chase, but what I received, I received just by being myself.
How to be my own teacher.
To feel seen feels like a lot of spaciousness for me to be all parts of me, and to unfold into who I am without rules or expectations of how I, or other people, want me to show up. In that space, my teachers gave me so much freedom to explore who I was. They taught me how to be my own teacher, rather than giving me a “script”, which was what the world before Bali was for me. For the first time in my life, I was encouraged to have a voice, which was scary at first, but I learned to find that anchor within myself, to trust myself.
“You came here to sing.”
That was a big moment. We were singing a lot of mantras in yoga training, but it was in a session with a healer that I felt I was singing from very deep inside my body instead of up in my head for the first time in my life. I felt a tangible power.
“You came here to sing,” the healer told me.
That was a significant realisation for me even though I wasn’t super sure then how to use that power. I look back and I see there was a lot of confusion, but also a lot of new beginnings and new openings. Remembering my past self, I’m reminded:
“Well, actually I don’t need to know everything (to figure out my path). I got here because I allowed myself to be confused, to be scared, and I just went and did it anyway.”
On Beauty.
“It’ll keep changing, so why not I just be myself?“
01.
I used to hate my muscles when I was growing up. I was born with muscles, a muscular baby. Growing up, I always felt unfeminine because my sisters were very slender (heavy social constructs). And then suddenly, at some point, everybody wanted to not be skinny anymore and have a butt, and have a toned body.
Sometimes, these “standards” can become another unhealthy extreme. But these standards of beauty also depends on which part of the world, which culture one belongs to. Seeing that shift made me realise, oh, this is all conditioning.
“Next year, they’ll say that they like people without eyebrows. It’ll keep changing, so why not I just be myself? It’s all about perception and perspective, so why don’t I be the one to choose my own kind of beauty?”
02.
Beauty is our inherent way of being. No matter how our physical body changes, it is that deep core of who we are. There’s so much de-conditioning to do because we are taught that certain things are beautiful and certain things are not. But actually, everything is beautiful. Even the things that society decides are ugly. Even a mess is beautiful.
03.
Beauty is much deeper than something that we see. What we see might appear to be beautiful, but it comes from something deeper which manifests as something visible that we then perceive as beautiful.
04.
Beauty is the essence that is inherent in everything. It is in all of us, whether we know it or not. Beauty is the divine, and when we are connected to that place, then beauty can express itself more in the physical realm through us.
05.
Instead of creating beauty, maybe it’s more about removing the layers with which we block ourselves from feeling our true essence inside. I see beauty in people that is not conventional, that they don’t see for themselves, and I wish they could see what I see.
On Feeling Beautiful.
“It’s about being all of who I am even when it’s difficult to be all of who I am.”
01.
I feel very beautiful when I’m singing, especially when I get to sing for other people and bring them comfort in it.
02.
I feel beautiful when I am connected to myself, when I’m connected to another human being, to nature. When I’m feeling seen and seeing another person in a deeper way. When I get to be my natural and comfortable self. In these spaces, there’s a radiance that radiates from the inside. My eyes feel clear, and I’m looking at everything in awe.
03.
Within my physical self, I feel beauty in my skin—all the time spent in the sun has given me a very nice brown. I love my tattoos. I love my strong body.
04.
Beauty is about being all of who I am even when it’s difficult to be all of who I am.
05.
Today I felt very heartbroken. I was longing for a person whom I’ve let go of, and I was grieving that loss. As I felt deeper into my heart, I realised that what I truly wanted that was reflected in this person was to feel connected to myself, to feel like I see me. So I went to the bathroom and I just stared in the mirror. I looked at my face, and I just cried staring at myself.
“Usually I don’t feel beautiful when I am not happy, not joyful, not feeling alive. But when I was looking at myself in the mirror crying, I felt so beautiful because I felt so human. I felt so real—
I met myself in that moment, and I helped myself in that moment, and I allowed myself to break down. These days, I am learning to find beauty in the moments when I don’t feel beautiful. They are starting to feel different.”
On shaving her head:
“The part of me I had been hiding was now visible to the world.“
I think was 18. It felt so right, but it was a big shift from having long hair to this. The part of me I had been hiding was now visible to the world. I didn’t look at myself for a while. But after I got over the initial discomfort, it felt, this is me, this is who I am.
“I was coming into my self, my skin, shedding the one that the world had put on me.”
I had short hair when I was in secondary school. Going through puberty made me wonder if the boys liked me. Do they find me attractive? My peers were all so pretty and girly—it’s the same story from childhood. My sisters are so feminine, but I never was, not in the conventional way.
I grew my hair long even though short hair felt right to me. I thought that was how I would receive love. I thought it was how I would fit in. It was also a way of hiding my face.
By junior college I had a whole existential crisis. I was questioning everything, going from being a straight-A student to Why are we doing all this? Yes, I could go to the university and then get a job, and get married and have kids. But why, if I don’t like or want that life?
At first, I just trimmed my hair myself, for fun. Just one inch. But every inch gave me such a lightness. So I kept cutting until it was a bob, and that difference was energetic weight being lifted. That was when I thought: Why don’t I shave my head? Hair can grow back. I think it was also like an experiment for me—to see how people reacted to me looking different. Would they love me less without my hair? I mean, yesterday I had hair, and I’m literally the same person today without.
What it taught me is this: What you lose is not always a loss.
I asked my parents before I went and did it. Both said no.
My mum: “You won’t look good.”
My dad: “They’ll think you’re in a gang, and then they’ll kick you out of school.”
But I knew I had to do it. I sat with it for a few weeks. I thought the desire to shave would go away. It didn’t. Deep in my heart, I knew. So I went to a barber near my house, and told them to shave my head.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
I stepped out of the barber shop feeling so light. A breeze on my scalp. I didn’t dare to go home. I hung around, preparing myself. Finally, at 10pm, I messaged my parents:
“Sorry, I shaved my head.” And then I went home.
My mum: “It’s nicer than I thought.” My dad just brushed my head. He didn’t speak to me for a while, but it was his own journey. His time to process.
“I had to go through what I went through, and I’ve found my own expression of what being beautiful feels to me: A congruence of my inside and my outside.”
On feeling unbeautiful.
Me:
What makes you feel unbeautiful? How have you learned to shift out of this state of heart/mind, and change the narrative when this feeling arises?
Ida:
Last November, when I realised I had hurt someone, I felt unbeautiful. There was this sense of shame of how can I be a bad person?
When this feeling arises, it calls for more compassion towards myself. I had hurt another in a moment of self-preservation because I was very focused on my own hurt. So, how can I be a better person from a place of “I want to stop perpetuating this pattern of harm”? Where’s the line between honouring our survival mechanisms—our patterns of coping—and the will to lift out into a space of love and connection?
“I think, so often, we have to experience separation to come back into connection. It’s also important to not bypass the stories which we have been through—our history, our trauma—while carrying them with love and remembering that we are not our trauma.”
I’m learning to have the compassion to allow myself to make mistakes. It’s only a mistake if we don’t learn from it. We cannot avoid being hurt, but it’s what we do with the hurt, how we show up after, and to create more space for each others’ triggers. I used to always feel like if I’m triggered, I need to deal with it myself and then come back after I’ve processed it. But to be able to heal through relating with someone is a whole different level of healing.
Being connected to nature also helps. It makes me realise I don’t have to carry so much, that I can let it go down into the earth. Otherwise, I write or I meditate or I sing. Space to be alone. It brings me back to having a sense of self so that when I go back out into the world, I can continue.
Epilogue:
“I’m a rainbow sheep.“
Of course it felt vulnerable. It felt like something I had been holding inside of me for a very long time was now on my skin, my face. People can see it. I can see it.
My dad didn’t speak to me for a few weeks after I got this (tattoo) done. I told him I was going to get a tattoo, but I didn’t say it was going to be on my face. My parents are open-minded people, but I think they were probably worried that other people would judge me.
Looking back, I feel my decisions about the way I live my life played a role in making my parents realise that there’s a new way to look at me.
“I haven’t been doing the conventional things all my life. I made decisions that they wouldn’t have wanted for me—I didn’t go to the university, I shaved my head, I got tattoos, I quit my job, spent all my savings in Bali. Yet, I’m thriving.”
I believe this is the only way I can live my life. I feel like I’m doing things that my ancestors could never imagine. You could say I’m a bit of a black sheep.
No, a rainbow sheep.
Name: Ida Liana
Age: 27
Current home: Singapore
"Who are you?"
"I am a seeker of truth beyond the intellect,
a soul in search of what lies deep
in the heart of hearts.
I am a mystic and a lover of God,
seeing truth and wisdom in all paths,
beyond dogma and rigidity.
I am a healing poet, singer, and teacher,
weaving words and melodies,
creating safe, brave spaces to mend
the part of this world I can reach.
I am the pulse of life in my body,
rooted deeply in the earth,
as much as I reach upwards
toward spirit and the eternal.
I am a humble, flawed human being,
simply here to understand this existence,
through experiencing it all.
Here to heal,
here to love without withholding,
here to be as alive as I can be."
❥
Ida is a “singer, writer, mover, human”. She does healing work at Our Sacred Body.
Photography: Karman
Ida (Part II)
Coming soon.
In Part Two of my conversation with Ida, she shares her beauty rituals and essentials (“I’ve never known that skincare could feel so alive.”), what self-care means to her (“It’s also about allowing others to take care of me.”), her go-to healing and restorative treatments, and her approach to exercising these days (“I decide how I’ll move based on what is best for my nervous system.”).
I also invited her to capture the essence of who she is with a self portrait, and write a love letter to her self, which you can read over here.