I’ve changed a lot over the past three years.
This year I turn 32, 33 by the Chinese lunar reckoning.
33 is an interesting age.
In yoga and the Indian Vedic tradition, there is a belief that 33 is the moment of true human maturity — the end of the first complete life cycle. The body and energetic system, it is said, need approximately 33 years to fully develop and “ripen.” Before that point, you are still in the process of becoming yourself. At 33, the three dimensions of a person — body, mind, and spirit — are said to align for the first time. From this age onward, it becomes possible to live with full conscious awareness, no longer driven by habit, old conditioning, or unfinished growing up.
As someone on a path of inner practice, I feel genuinely at that threshold. These three years between 30 and 33 have felt like life accelerating wildly — the speed and scale of upheaval growing at an exponential rate. If you met my 30-year-old self and my 33-year-old self side by side, you would think you were looking at two completely different people.
These three years also happened to have been the years of slowly building something after losing my job (for your curiosity, livewithhu.com is where it lives currently). It started with wanting to build a scented candle brand, shifted to a reflective content brand, and has arrived at what it is now: a wellness brand guiding people toward inner practice. The methods and forms have kept changing — candles, social media content, online and in-person workshops, journaling practice, guided meditation, and many things that haven’t had the chance to take shape yet, like a film club, creative brunch, ecstatic dance, yoga… Emotionally I feel like I’ve been flowing back and forth between different mediums and possibilities, physically I have been rewriting my website and the business plan again and again.
The pace and frequency of this seemingly never-ending change breed anxiety. I find myself interrogating myself constantly: “Do you even know what you want to do? Can’t you just pick one path and commit to it? Are you changing direction over and over just to avoid the hard parts? What will ever give you inexhaustible passion?” These questions circle endlessly in my mind. Every time I sense my direction has shifted even slightly, they come flooding out, clogging my veins, make me worry about the future.
Sometimes I think — in the eyes of my 693 resilient Instagram followers (I still ask myself what makes them follow me?), my business coaches, the friends who know I’m building something — I probably do look like someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Because that’s exactly the vocabulary I use in front of them. Every so often I’d tell them: “I’ve realized what I’m working on right now doesn’t fully express what I’m trying to say — I think this new thing will get there better.” No wonder the first thing people I’m not very close to ask when they see me is: “So… How are the candles going?” I’d always freeze for a moment before answering, because my focus had long since shifted away from simply making and selling candles, but I never know how to compress all the thoughts and tweaks along the way into a sentence or two. So I just smile and say, “Not bad, not bad.”
It’s not the change itself that troubles me — it’s that after all this change, making a sustainable living still hasn’t come together. I don’t want to get rich from this. I just want to be able to support myself and my family. Not being there yet weighs on me.
I haven’t made a single move on the business front for the past month. I told myself I was taking a break — but honestly, there’s been a restlessness underneath. When I came back from traveling, I sat down at my desk and began looking at things again.
Through all the twists and pivots of these three years, it’s also important to point out that my original intention has never changed: I want to help people step back from the mental loops they’re trapped inside, see themselves clearly, and only then become capable of real change — real freedom.
Candles. Journaling guides. Online meditation practice. Everything I offer is a doorway, all serving the same core mechanism: an external structure you can see, feel, and actually have access to — a question, a flame, a facilitator — that gives people a perspective on themselves from the outside in. The perspective they simply cannot see on their own.
Another question that troubled me for a long time while building this was: who am I trying to serve? Every course I took, every coaching session I attended kept asking me the same thing: what’s your niche? Every time, I wanted to say: everyone. Because inner observation is the only thing that can truly free us from suffering, and everyone wants to be free from suffering. But that answer is obviously not one that satisfies the business-minded. So I racked my brain constructing and dismantling all kinds of personas.
But recently, something has become clearer. The people I want to help and the people who are ready for accepting my help are two different groups. I do want to help everyone — but not everyone is ready. The person in acute crisis, for instance, is spending every ounce of energy just surviving the day. There’s no room to turn inward. And the person who hasn’t yet sensed that anything is off — they’re caught in the same illusion, but they’re Trumans before the doubt sets in. The disruption that wakes them up will come eventually. Until then, there’s no point in forcing it. So the person who truly needs what I offer is the one who can articulate their pain clearly — but just can’t seem to stop. What they’re suffering from isn’t confusion. It’s being stuck. They are 当局者迷 — trapped inside a narrative they built from childhood, one that feels completely reasonable, completely true. And I can work alongside them to break free of it.
What I want to build is a genuine point of view — about why people suffer, and what actually helps. In one sentence: a practice brand that helps people become the observer of their own inner life, rather than simply its inhabitant.
The mediums I work with may keep changing. But maybe change is simply its natural state.
Today’s loose thoughts can also be read as a brief accounting of the thinking and work of the past few years. As for what comes next — we’ll find out as we go.
