Who We Are

Welcome!

My name is Sonia Lee, the Heart Explorer, and I am deeply grateful our paths have crossed.

Many people with emotional pain suffer in isolation. They may come to believe no one sees them nor cares for them. They might feel lost, abandoned, rejected, ashamed, or unworthy. Although these feelings make sense based on the individual’s experience of deep suffering, there is a pathway that leads to healing, connection, transformation, flourishing, goodness, and expansion. But this requires engaging our stories.

Too often though, we may feel afraid of our own pain and therefore, reluctant to face our own stories. So, we might overwork instead. We might become masters of perfectionism or narcissism. We might hide behind titles, we might over-achieve, spiritually bypass, people-please, over-shop, over-caffeinate, or use any other drug of choice in order to suppress, avoid, or dismiss the sharp shards of pain, shame, and trauma within our hearts.

We might decide that becoming honest about our experience is too risky. What if we get judged, criticized, or abandoned by that relationship, friend, club, or group we so long to be a part of. So, we might keep suffering in silence hoping we can keep the pain far away, or drown it out with enough success, popularity, things, money, substances, or relationships.

Meanwhile, the ache cries out from deep within, and trapped within that ache, might also lie our resilience. Maybe even a new, more authentic version of ourselves.

Land of the Living was founded to honor our humanity through engaging our stories in community. When we go through life alone, grief and pain can feel overwhelming. But when we have proper support, grief and pain can become thresholds into a pathway of deep love and great compassion that transcend time, space, and human understanding. It is possible to learn how to tend to our emotional bruises, fractures, and wounds. As we engage our stories, these bruises, fractures, and wounds can become the very places through which light, grace, healing, compassion, self-forgiveness and deep love can enter in and transfigure us.

I’ve had the honor to have journeyed with many courageous survivors of depression, anxiety, addiction, and sexual abuse for over twelve years. I have trained, coached, and supported organizational leaders and have created and planted hundreds of trauma care groups in a variety of settings. I have been fully beside each of these hearts, fully invested into their wholeness.

This beautifully sacred work was birthed out of my own journey through the fire of shattering heartbreak. This fiery gate opened up deeply painful childhood memories which had been buried deep within my being: Memories of a five year old little girl who is frozen in terror as she witnesses her dad torture and beat her mother brutally. One day, these memories came back at full force and fell on me like a Tsunami wave: the little girl was me. That was my mother. She was eight months pregnant. Although I try my best, I cannot protect her enough and the life in her womb is irrevocably taken. Not one time. Several.

As I came face to face with the agony of this tragedy, I realized if I did not begin to explore this pain, I was not going to be able to really live. So I took the road less traveled. I stumbled my way through dark valleys of weeping, where the fog of betrayal, worthlessness, and grief felt too dense, with no end in sight. I painfully trudged up thorny hills, shallow breath, knees shaking as I faced fanged beasts of fear and despair within my stories. I fought through the whispers of darkness, shame, defeat, abandonment, and hopelessness that set onto my body, cold chills down my spine and burning pains in my stomach.

And as I began to intentionally write, examine, name, weep, mourn, and grieve my deep losses, tragedies, and heartbreaks within safe community, as time went by, a mysterious process of rebirth began to gently weave new life into my being. This is how I evolved into the explorer of my own heart.

In these sacred depths, I carefully began to gather the sharp shards that were embedded in my heart: the painful debris from a terror-filled childhood with brutal, exploitive, and addicted parents, the deep loneliness of orphanages and foster homes, and the ways I unknowingly had continued generational trauma in my own life through staying in religious abusive institutions and in toxic, harmful relationships.

Gathering these shattered pieces has allowed me to begin to:

• Breathe in the midst of deep losses and incomprehensible betrayals.

• Name, grieve, and release pain and despair so as to receive healing, hope, and goodness.

• Forgive myself for my own mistakes. Forgive others.

• Reclaim deep connection with myself, the Divine, and safe-others.

• Sit in the fire of reality, illusion gone, and allow it to transfigure me.

• Transcend tragedy and move further into purpose, vision, agency, and real life.

• Live from a deepening process of transformation instead of living from performance, unrest, or the bondage of seeking people’s approval.

• Learn from my mistakes and failures and use them to grow and deepen my capacity, strength, ability, embodied resilience, and compassion for myself and others.

• Find, rescue, and re-member the broken pieces of my heart and story so I can become the most AUTHENTIC version of me.

• Discover there is a type of death of soul and spirit that sometimes happens on this side of life, but it does not have to be the end. For me, it was the beginning.

This is the sacred journey I invite you into. To become an explorer of your own heart.

It is not an easy journey. But it is worth it.

I am grateful to hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Dallas Baptist University and a Master of Divinity from Mercer University. I also hold several years of trauma and abuse training from several beautiful sources, as well as training in Spiritual Direction, Trauma-Sensitive Yoga, and other somatic and contemplative approaches to trauma care. I am of Chinese & Spanish heritage, which I have discovered to be luminous sources of light and wisdom in my life and in my work.

My hope is that my life experience, my professional experience, and a variety of trauma care tools might serve you in your own journey to flourishing. Gently facing, naming, and properly grieving our tragedies is a crucial part of healing and transformation that cannot be bypassed.

Our hearts will continue to cry out until we begin to explore the sacred terrain of our stories, to tend to the bruises, fractures, and wounds in our beings. My hope is that as we walk together, you might discover that there is love that is real, it runs deeper than your pain, and is stronger than any suffering, anxiety, depression, trauma, failure, or betrayal you may have experienced in your past.

Healing, flourishing, and transformation are possible for you. I invite you to meet Mercy, taste Compassion, and breathe in Hope in the landscape of your story. I look forward to being fully beside you as we explore tragedies and discover wonders in your sacred story.

A deep bow to you, and all that it took to bring you here,

Sonia Lee 李索尼婭