HANNAH Lo was already a successful model and singer, when she realised that she was missing something in her life.
That sent her on a journey of self-discovery, and these days she happily shares all that she has learned with other women in her new role as a women empowerment advocate, as well as a love and relationship coach.
In November 2016, Lo was engaged as a speaker at MURFEST, a Music, Dance and Wellness Festival, and her success at the event led her to be invited to speak and host many other events that focused on women’s empowerment and wellness.
When theSun caught up with her recently, Lo said she has been a women’s empowerment advocate “for the past four or five years”.
She recalled: “It started when I was about 26, I started asking myself a lot of questions, like why weren’t my relationships working, why I wasn’t really happy in the work I was doing.
“In the entertainment industry, there is a lot of focus on what you look like. You will always find [something] wrong [with yourself] when everything is under scrutiny. So there were a lot of parts of my life that I was not happy with.”
She started asking a lot of questions, and met with other people who were on a similar journey.
“I ended up spending seven years on self exploration,” Lo said. “I went to retreats, travelling, meeting amazing gurus and spiritual teachers in places, like India, Egypt and the US.
“I finally found some answers and started healing myself.”
After she noticed something shift tangibly and began experiencing some positive results in her life, she felt the need to share what she had learned with others.
At the time, Lo had spent about three-and-a-half years living in the US city of Boulder, Colorado which has the reputation of being a popular spiritual hub of sorts.
She said: “That is where I met some amazing teachers. I had felt so out of touch with my femininity and also in my relationships with other women. I realised that there was stuff that I was missing, and so this was my missing puzzle piece. I didn’t know how important it was.
“I was surprised at how [easy] it was to feel safe among this group of women, and to just share what was ‘real’ at that moment, the emotional things I was struggling with.
“Once I had enough experience, life drew me back to Malaysia. I knew in my heart I had to do what was meaningful to me.”
Her talks are about female empowerment, essentially putting across the message that femininity is in fact a strength.
“There is a lot of shame and judgement, a lot of misunderstanding around what it means to be a woman. I found through my work, I can show them there is beauty in our femininity.”
She wants women to know that having beauty is not a curse.
“Collectively, there is this belief that women are ‘less’ than men. So it is shifting all that out on an internal level, not just in the mind.”
Eating healthy is part of her new outlook as well, because as Lo puts it everything is connected.
“Our emotions, our body, our mind and our thoughts are connected. What I eat, what I put inside me affects how I function on a day-to-day basis.
What I consume in terms of conversation, gossip and even TV, all of that contributes to how I generally feel.”
All this plays a part in our overall wellness.
“I think I define wellness really simply,” Lo said. “How do you feel on a day-to-day basis? Do you feel joy? Do you feel love? Do you feel energy? Do you feel inspired?
“It could be different for everybody but for me that is what it is. On what scale am I on different things? Am I at peace with myself in my relationships and my past? That culminates in wellness. How well do you feel? Do you feel alive?”
On a personal note, Lo said things have improved for her since her journey of discovery.
“If we were all taught to heal ourselves, rely on our own intuition instead of listening to what others say about us, or live up to people’s expectations, generally we will be a lot happier.”
