Meet Jade Chen

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jade Chen. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Jade , we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

I get my resilience from my Ancestors. On my Mother’s side I am Southern Vietnamese, from the Mekong Delta. Originally we are river people. On my Father’s side I am Northern Chinese, and Eastern European. Both sides of my family have experienced war. Both sides of my family have experienced displacement, refugee immigration, poverty and forced American assimilation. Every morning I light an incense to my ancestors and I thank them for their resiliency; their efforts to survive so their future generations could have an opportunity to continue and hopefully thrive.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

My practice is called The MudLotus and involves a lot of different branches. Mud Lotus stems from a Mahayana Buddhist teaching from Thích Nhất Hạnh, that you cannot have the lotus without the mud.
I believe this to be true for all beings including our earth.

My modality of teachings often include practices from both Buddhism and Shamanism. In my VN lineage, Shamanism predates Buddhism and both are still practiced in VN today. Although I am first generation born and raised in America, I feel strongly that one generation of separation between myself and my motherlands wasn’t enough to strip me from my ancestral gifts and wisdom that are very much alive in my DNA. This becomes clearer and clearer as I continue step forward in my gifts and practices.

On one branch, I work with Women one on one as they traverse the many ups and downs of their own inner healing work. The women I work with, are not only healing from their own traumas, but also have an intuitive nature about them, that is inviting them to discover their natural gifts and to use them for the good of themselves and the greater good.

I also offer deep dive guided journeys inside of Self. These are opportunities for Women to truly activate their own selves as the ‘healers’ they are truly are for themselves. To be able to truly listen, and experience our own inner selves is a true gift and a practice. I hand Women the tools to be the drivers and the transformers of their own story. It’s very powerful work.

I teach at various Women’s retreats, classes, workshops etc. I am also starting my own radio show/podcast. That is something I am very excited to share with the world soon. To be continued on that..

For now if Women want to find me and work with me, the best way is through my website Www.mudlotuslife.com or Instagram @the_mudlotus.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

The 3 qualities that really come to mind are my Curiosity, Courage and Claire Gifts.

I have been curious since childhood. Ive always been a seeker to understand the what and the why’s of life. I remember as a young 11 year old, it was a mission of mine to understand religion and ultimately to see what faith I should ‘belong’ to. I had a list of questions and I went around the neighborhood, knocked on doors and asked my questions to anyone who gave me the time of day. I remember not like anyone’s answers and came to the conclusion that no religion was right for me.

It’s my courage that really allowed me to get out of my own way and take leaps in my life that were really out of the box of what ‘normal’ was. In 2016 I was working for a major corporation and I was doing really well in the company. The boxes were all checked and I should have been the happiest Ive ever been. But the truth was I wasn’t happy at all. In fact, I felt like I was dying a slow death and I felt trapped in a life that looked really good on the outside, but wasn’t resonating with my inner knowing at all. Courage allowed me to leave the corporate world as well as a dead end relationship, Courage gave me permission to tune out the outside noise from family, friends etc and listen to my own guidance. Courage gave me the platform in which to leap.
I did that leap and it has ultimately lead me to my life’s work today. I am so grateful for my courage.

My Clair Gifts are the final and arguably most important quality I have today. I have always been ‘sensitive’. My whole life is filled with stories of experiences of moments where my sensitivity allowed me to see, feel and hear things that weren’t so obvious on the surface. For example, the first time I had a true Clair Sentient and Audio experience, I was in the 3rd grade. We were on a field trip to a mission in Old Town San Diego.

While we were inside the church, I began to feel really sick and really afraid. I was sitting in a pew next to other classmates and I began to hear other children crying and asking me for help. I remember looking around and seeing everyone paying attention to the Mission’s tour person. No one seemed like they were in distress. But the sounds of the children became louder as if they were happening inside of me. I began to see flashes of black hair and brown children’s faces. Faces that looked like mine. I was very scared.

We all got up to form a line as our tour was continuing on to the next thing. I approached the Man guiding our class and I asked him point blank “ what happened to the children here?” He pretended to not hear me, so I asked him again. He stopped his narrative to the other kids and looked at me with very serious and direct eyes and said, “ If you speak again, you will go and sit on the bus by yourself.”

I immediately went silent for the rest of the field trip.

Over the years, I learned to lock away these gifts because it seemed every time I was outspoken about what I felt, heard or saw I was punished, silenced or dismissed.

After my big leap of 2016, I reopened all the doors to my Clair Gifts and have been cultivating them ever since. Growing my abilities has become a life and daily practice. These gifts allow me to go much deeper into the layers of people, places and everything in between. These gifts come from my ancestors and my ancestors were so dialed into the nuances and natural laws of earth and the Universe and they have passed them down to me and all of their relatives who are chosen to grow them and use them.

Today, I use my gifts to serve other women in a way that allows us to go deeper in to her healing and spirit journey. I use them for channeling, guiding and receiving guidance for myself, others and all of life.

What has been your biggest area of growth or improvement in the past 12 months?

My biggest area of growth and improvement over the last year and even 3-5 years has been doing my lineage work and healing. Healing generational trauma is necessary for anyone, and certainly anyone who wishes to step into the healing arts.

Being first generation born in America as a seed from the Vietnam war, really disconnected me from my Maternal lineage. My mother out of her need to survive and conform to an American way of life, didn’t teach me Vietnamese. Not having your language means you miss so much in the way of learning your culture and traditions. It’s like having your tongue cut out of your mouth.

So, I was raised with American ideologies and culture and as a young girl, I fully subscribed. Even though I grew up in a community that was heavily populated with Filipino and SE Asians, we were all subscribing to the same American beliefs and if you even spoke your own language, you were seen as not American enough , even by us. We were down with our roots but only as a way of keeping us separate from other Asian and Islanders.

Now I am an adult and see life through a very different lens than my formative years. I went to Vietnam for the first time in 2019 with my Mother and family. There is no way to describe the empathic feeling I felt when I touched the soil of VN for the first time. It was visceral. Since that experience Ive dove into VN history (outside of war), culture and finally language. I sit with a VN tutor twice a week to learn my language.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Www.mudltotuslife.com
• Instagram: @the_mudlotus

Image Credits

Sarah Kathleen
Lila Gray
Kelley Lotosky