Saigon and all.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, after a few years, my dad decided to retire from active duty.

He found a job in New York City as a civil servant.

Basically, he was a safety engineer.

Terms at DKNG.co slash offer.

he didn't speak the language.

Yeah, that was a strange time.

So he ended up finding a job in New York.

So he found this job as a civil engineer.

He was a safety engineer for OSHA.

So we moved from Japan to Japan.

New Jersey.

because tell us a little bit about that first marriage that you ended up being courageous enough to leave so that you could live your best life but while you were in it tell us about that connection you made between your dad and this abusive relationship that you entered into

I'm hoping you can get us started today by telling us a little bit about how you got into this work you're doing and what drives your passion for it.

the book okay so that's another kind of work that's personal work it's a very long story starting from very early on i am a world war ii baby my mother was japanese my father was an american military man he was irish english background maybe a little italian in there somewhere But my parents met post-World War II.

Since my father was stationed during the occupancy of Japan, at one point he decided to retire from active duty and became part of the Army Reserves.

But he needed a real job and he had difficulty finding a job.

So he found work in New York, New York City, which caused my family, my older sister, my mother, myself and my father to have to move.

So we left Japan when I was four and a half years old and got on a military ship cruised across the Pacific Ocean and then boarded a train and arrived in New Jersey where my father was from.

That is sort of what I call, and I didn't really know this until much, much later in my own personal work, but that's what I call the original sin in my life.

Yeah, it's very, very different.

I want to hear

it.

Perfect.

Perfect.

So I think, you know, for your listeners, to give everybody a little bit of background.

I was born in Japan.

My mother was Japanese.

And I think it's obviously it's true because it's not the first time I've heard it.

How do you understand that image now?

Well, it was so wild how that imagery came up for me during that session because before I actually took the medicine, my therapist and I talked about intention, what was the intention of doing that particular session.

And I didn't know what was going to come up, obviously, during the journey, but I had brought photographs of my parents, of my grandmother, of my life in Japan when I was a little girl.

They somehow seemed important for me to bring.

So my therapist had this little altar that was set up and I had the pictures there and she had some other little crystals and just different little elements to sort of bring the energy into the session.

So when I got into the journey and these images started coming up, the whale was sort of symbolic, I guess, of my teacher or maybe a part of me, maybe a part of my psyche that took me back to Japan because I was born in Japan.

Um, my father was American military and my mother was full-blooded Japanese obviously.

But before that session, did you intellectually know that leaving Japan, you knew it was traumatic or was it something you really understood emotionally afterwards? Yeah.

[laughs] That's okay.

I grew up with this feeling of not belonging anywhere.

I felt very out of place.

I didn't know if I was Japanese or if I was American or white or...

I, I grew up with this feeling of being in limbo, and it really took me a long time to really unravel all of that and to realize that original trauma, and then therefore other traumas that occurred in my life, which is all in my book.

That was the tone or the drone, if you will, of my emotional life underneath this very pretty, very glamorous career that I was lucky enough to have singing with Pink Floyd and Sting, Pat Benatar, George Benson.

I was very lucky to have some wonderful jobs in my singing career.

Mm-hmm.

Mm

... of, of what I needed to get to.

And so I found this woman, my husband drives me down to New York City during lockdown, [laughs] and I go to this person's apartment.

You know, we were all vaccinated and checked ourselves for COVID and all this stuff, and I did my first journey.

It's really important just to have honest conversations, you know?

Absolutely.

And, you know, I've been thinking a lot about this as well, and, um, the title of my book being Naked Out Loud and what that means to me is exactly what you're saying in that I think this is what the world needs is more of us talking about-