Meet Alexandra Chan

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alexandra Chan a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Alexandra, we’re so appreciative of you taking the time to share your nuggets of wisdom with our community. One of the topics we think is most important for folks looking to level up their lives is building up their self-confidence and self-esteem. Can you share how you developed your confidence?

I think this is probably, for many people, including me, a lifetime work in progress. No one I know has perfect confidence and self-esteem in every situation. There is always room for growth and evolution in this. There is always the possibility for painful failure that challenges us even “at the peak of our game,” which forces us to retreat and lick our wounds, and find the courage to try again. I developed my confidence and self-esteem the old-fashioned way: through experience. Learning to take risks–at first, maybe, just the small ones–and seeing how it all pans out in the end gave me courage to try again, with something a little bigger, and so it went. In this way, we build trust in ourselves, so that, even when something we try doesn’t work out, we have our other successes to soften the blow and confidence enough in our own fundamental abilities that we can dust ourselves off and try again. Outcomes are never guaranteed, but curiosity, courage, and perseverance will always take us far. My dad used to say, “Stay curious, and you’ll always be okay.”

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I am an archaeologist, author, and artist who has made it my business to find and share beauty in unexpected places, and to help people shift, awaken, and heal, through the power of storytelling–in my books, my art, and my public speaking. I am an international speaker on the archaeology of slavery in the north, based on three years of excavation I led at the last-standing slave quarters in the north, located outside of Boston. I’ll be travelling to Ireland in October to talk more about exactly that!

My primary activity these days, however, is as an author and an artist. My multiple-award winning book, In the Garden Behind the Moon: A Memoir of Loss, Myth, and Magic won American Book Fest’s Best Book of the Year in Multicultural Nonfiction and the Independent Publishers Book Award Gold Medal in Aging/ Death & Dying. It feels kind of funny to say “I won!” about death and dying, but here we are! It’s a book for readers of reflective memoirs (Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, Katherine May’s Wintering, or Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous), people navigating grief, ancestry, or self-renewal of any kind, and those drawn to lyrical, myth-infused nonfiction. Amid climate dread, global unrest, political turmoil, and personal grief, wonder is not a luxury! It’s how we begin again. The book is an invitation to find that wonder again in yourself, and a lantern that lights the path to do that.

My paintings (Chinese brush paintings done through my Rising Phoenix Arts store) work in a similar way–to help people awaken to their own mythic imaginations in their quest for beauty, healing, and meaning in a disconnected world. And in fact, many of the paintings are included, in full-color, as illustrations in the book, In the Garden Behind the Moon, where they are not just decorative, but an integral part of how the story and the healing unfolds.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I think everything we do has to start with a strong sense of curiosity and “Beginner’s Mind”–that childlike, innocent urge to ask “What if?” When you get good at asking “what if,” the weight of whatever it is you are contemplating immediately lightens. Have you noticed? Try it and see what happens. For example, In the Garden Behind the Moon is structured around the arc of the Chinese zodiac, beginning in the Year of the Ram and ending in the Year of the Tiger. I didn’t start the project knowing that that was how it was going to all fit together, but one day I asked myself the question: WHAT IF…this book unfolds by the years of the Chinese Zodiac? That gave me permission to loosen up and try it, knowing that nothing was written in stone, it was purely in the spirit of curiosity, experimentation, and play. And as it turned out, it was exactly what the book needed to come together. But even if it hadn’t turned out that way, there was no burden of “failure” around the experiment. Because I was just “playing around.” “What if?” is a powerful question.

For anyone in the creative arts, I also think “showing up” counts more than raw talent. I treated writing like showing up for a job, every day at the same hour, for a set amount of time (at a minimum), and whether or not any “customers” showed up (here, inspiration, words flowing onto the page) was none of my business. I was “open for business” regardless. This was a 180 flip from how I had approached writing and creativity in the past. I had thought I needed the inspiration first before I could get to work. What I found instead was that inspiration often comes only after you’ve sat down and made yourself available to it. What I also found was that “showing up” day in and day out allowed me to move through dry periods and creative blocks with more equanimity. I didn’t try to run from them as much. And the inspiration returned much more quickly as a result. This gave me confidence to keep going even if things got fuzzy for a while and I didn’t know which way to go. Eventually, the way always becomes clear.

What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?

My parents instilled in my a sense of magic, wonder, and possibility. I was as introverted as they come in childhood, but this sense of curiosity and wonder has made a seeker out of me, in both literal and metaphorical ways, leading me on adventures around the world and through my own inner cosmos.

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Alexandra Chan

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