INTERVIEWS | GENTLENESS AMBASSADORS

You Can Embody Ferocious Compassion as a Super Empath

Interview with Tia Ma— Qigong Artist

Growing up in an abusive household with a narcissistic mother, Tia Ma never felt safe and never felt at home. Even after moving away from her family, she still felt a lot of anxiety inside her and found healing and release through the holistic arts. Using her super empathic skills and training in Qigong, massage therapy, and holistic coaching, she now coaches and teaches her clients specific Qigong forms to help them feel safe and relaxed.

I love that Tia Ma has a very calming presence. She is friendly and fun-loving, and yet not afraid to be honest and vulnerable. Spanning across two time zones, during one of her evenings in Florida, USA, and my late morning in Singapore, we spent a little over twenty minutes over Zoom chatting about Gentleness. Here are some of the key highlights of this insightful interview:

Gentleness = Surrender

Gentleness, to Tia Ma, is about surrender. It’s about finding the flow in life and going with it — not swimming upstream or paddling upstream.

Gentleness is also about letting go of her willpower and choosing instead, to lean back and soften into the organic pattern of the Universe.

This is intimately connected to the concept of effortlessness in Qigong, where we don’t force anything, and instead, we focus on doing less and feeling held, while tapping into Nature.

As her business identity transitions from being a massage therapist to a Qigong artist, she finds herself learning lots of new business skills such as doing Facebook Ads, tracking spreadsheets, and drafting business plans. She’s not entirely sure what her business will morph into. Practicing gentleness in her solopreneur business includes practicing adequate self-care, allowing her business to shift organically, and asking the Universe to help her in doing the best work possible.

Qigong Artist vs Qigong Master

I was very lucky to experience Tia Ma’s Qigong demonstration at our online business networking session. It feels so different from the way I used to learn traditional Qigong.

She made a short Qigong sample for you to take a quick peek at.

Tia Ma calls herself a Qigong Artist. The way she teaches Qigong is very light-hearted, relaxing, and fun. She used descriptive phrases, such as “move your arms through the air like you’re moving through thick honey”, that add to a rich sensory experience. The way I was taught Qigong, by traditional “Qigong Masters”, was to control my head, arms, torso, legs, and even my breathing in very specific ways, so that I could do it correctly. That felt much more stressful for me as a sensitive person.

The harshness of ego

Tia shares her experience in releasing the harshness of ego from Qigong:

“I’ve been doing Qigong for 27 years now and I’ve had some harsh experiences. I’ve had some very patriarchal men who are full of ego, yet they were teaching real Qigong. So there was this power of Qigong but with a distorted male ego and it was painful. It was very confusing because I couldn’t feel safe. My nervous system did not feel safe with their teaching which was very confusing because I fell in love with Qigong. So these experiences kind of mirrored some of the abusive relationships that I had growing up.

In 2017, I met Robert Peng who is an amazing teacher. He’s not lost in his ego. He’s very humble, nerdy, goofy, and fun. He laughs at himself! So, I finally found a teacher who doesn’t want to be a guru. He doesn’t want people to worship him and follow him. He just loves Qigong and wants to share it. He happens to be the clearest Qigong teacher I’ve ever experienced, so I really trust his Qigong.”

We don’t want orders. We want invitations.

I so appreciate the way that Tia Ma adds the spirit of invitation and play into her Qigong teachings.

“We don’t want orders. We want invitations. We want options. We want suggestions. So I think that’s where some of my verbiages come from, which is to really empower people to take care of themselves.” ~ Tia Ma

Through the way she offers the Qigong practice, she is empowering her clients to trust in the natural intelligence of their bodies. Our Qi is intelligent and it knows where it needs to flow.

On Healing From Narcissism

Through her holistic healing practice, Tia Ma is passionate about helping other people move out of traumatic relationships and dysfunctional family systems. She offers specific Qigong forms to help them readjust their stress responses, so they can move out of their stuck fight/flight/freeze mode, back into calm relaxation.

“What I’ve found is the grooming and the patterns of abuse are so entrenched. They’re in so much of our western culture, our music, and our way of living. There’s a lot of toxicity in our unconscious belief systems and I like helping people wake up to this and showing them other options.” ~Tia Ma.

Share your painful truths and listen

Tia Ma shares that narcissists have these three top qualities: 1)lack of empathy, 2)feeling entitled to have it all, 3)exploiting others to get what they want. Knowing this has helped her tremendously in her healing journey.

She is feeling this huge collective shift, where many of us who are super sensitive and intuitive, are no longer keeping quiet about things that don’t feel safe for us now. We are becoming more aware of how some of our toxic relationships with our family members arise because they happen to be narcissists too.

Personally, Tia Ma felt a need to open up and share the truth about her mother being a narcissist, and thus is incapable of loving another person. By showing up as her vulnerable self and sharing her truths, her clients find it safe to share their truths with her too. Through this act of sharing and listening to these truths, listening to the flow of subtle energies in their bodies, and listening to the elements of nature, they start to find deep and profound healing.

How to treat the narcissists in your life

Here’s a piece of homework you can try out if you need to deal with narcissists in your life:

“As a super empath, my homework is to not become an ‘echoist’. When a narcissist says — “I’m amazing, everyone, look at me!”. As an empath, I don’t go, “Oh, you are amazing. I will look at you” and lose myself.

So the homework for me is to say, “I have value as well. And you’re not that amazing right now because you just yelled at me and that’s not okay. So here’s a boundary”. I am standing in my own self and that’s a big difference for a lot of people who have been abused.” ~ Tia Ma

Practice Ferocious Compassion

I love that Tia Ma practices ferocious compassion, and encourages fellow super empaths to practice it too. She firmly believes that as super empaths, we need to reclaim our space and feel safe being seen.

Inspired by Goddess Green Tara, she believes that we can have compassion and boundaries too. Here’s a mantra she shares to keep in mind if you have trouble keeping boundaries:

I no longer preserve the reputation of those who hurt me by erasing my truth.

I Am in Qi, and Qi Is in Me

Our world is being pulled out of balance with too much masculine yang energy right now, with so much power struggle and whole countries suffering from uncontrolled fires. Tia Ma believes that we need to be reminded of our gentleness, to soften from our inside, and getting ourselves in flow with this big ball of Qi whirling outside us in the world. We don’t have to use our willpower to force things to happen the way we want.

“In Qigong, I am in Qi, and Qi is in me. We do that by inhaling through every pore of our body and then we exhale out every pore of our body.

I just love that prayer because it reminds me of that tree over there. I’m with that tree, that tree’s inside me, and I’m inside that tree, and these clouds and the birds. We are all so connected.

When I open up to let my energy come out and be bathed by that it’s just such a beautiful thing. So your gentleness invitation goes hand in hand with bringing more yin in the world, being more internal, and sharing that.” ~ Tia Ma.

Thank you, Tia Ma, for embodying ferocious compassion, and for offering such a gentle, playful, and refreshing way for us to feel safe in our bodies again.