From Hair Color to Cambodia: getting roots done and talking spirits

From hair roots to a grandfather from Cambodia

Last week I had a really amazing experience. I had an appointment at the hair salon to do my color and ended up connecting with a grandfather from Cambodia.

I need to get my hair done every three weeks or so because I have a lot of gray roots. I used to do the hair color myself, until my hair fell after I left the hair dye on for too long and I found a professional who would not make the same mistakes I made. I also found an amazing “feminist” salon that is very cool and everyone who works there is different and unique in their own way.

Eddie* (not his real name) and I started slowly, I showed him my bald patches and he said he could help. One time I told him what I do and I told him about my interest in the nervous system. He connected with what I was describing, so I did a reading/healing session for him once and each time I stop by we do something. One time while the clock was running on the hair dye, we went over his own reading did a healing thing on the sofa there. People walked by and saw it.

MAKE UP TIPS AND ORANGE LIPSTICK

Julie* (not her real name), who cuts hair there, gave me her information, she said she was interested in a reading. Next time I went there, she pulled a stool next to chair and we started talking about make-up.

She was wearing a vibrant orange tone lipstick that looks good on people like us. Ever since YouTube make-up tutorials became a thing, I realized how much my skin tones resemble Asian skin tones: we shared the same MAC NC 25/30 yellow-toned foundation. As humans, we are much more similar than different from each other in so many ways. So I asked her what was her ethnicity. She said her family was from Cambodia. 

And as we were talking about make-up, and she was showing me her phone and the page of her friend who worked at Hourglass, the excellent make-up company,  the most amazing thing happened. 

HER GRANDFATHER FROM CAMBODIA HAS A MESSAGE

I got this feeling, I got this image of a man who I thought was her grandfather. For some reason, I kind of knew it was her grandfather. And she was a tiny, tiny baby he was holding. It was like an aged photo, and he was standing on the sidewalk on a hill-y street. 

So I asked her, “I’m sorry if this sounds like a strange question, but do you have a grandfather who has perhaps passed, that you may worry about?” She said “YES OMG” and at that moment, when it happens when things are really true for me. At that moment, I started crying. Bawling/crying. That happens when I do personal readings sometimes and people come through and that feels so real that I explain to them in the middle of bawling “I’m not sad, it’s just a confirmation that this is real.

She started crying too, and was telling me that even though she has never really met her her grandfather, as she was born in in America, she thinks of him every day and he is the first person she thinks off in the morning when she wakes up, and she says she's grateful for him, but she never met him. 

The message was to not worry, he’s fine he is okay and he is always around. He wanted to say hello to her and then also that her family. Her mother especially should not feel bad or guilty that “she left him behind”. She felt so guilty. 

But you may or may not know that in Cambodia, there was a horrific civil war that killed millions of people. Her parents immigrated from Cambodia then. When they left, things happened so quickly and brutally that they lost contact with the grandfather.  

“Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten”

This is a wonderful documentary I watched a few years ago about the exciting and sophisticated music scene in Cambodia before the Civil war took over. The music, influenced by rock & latin music reflected a cosmopolitan and vibrant culture that was brutally destroyed as soon as the Khmer Rouge regime and its genocidal policies took over.

He said he was at peace even in life because he understood his fate. He told me through images “Rosie I was like you I could see the future”, that he knew it was his  fate to stay and he said he had told his daughter that she had to cross the ocean. He saw it in something like a board maybe with sticks, he had his own tools of divination but also visions, that it was his daughter’s fate to cross the ocean.

I got this understanding that he was a very spiritually developed person. He said something so profound, “I had found the divinity within no matter what the external circumstances” and he had this sense of peace about him even if the circumstances that caused his family to immigrate, weren’t. It was almost as if he had been a “saint” in his life, I told her. He had seen heaven so to speak and he lived with that knowledge, he functioned from that deeper understanding.

She then tells me: “He was a medicine man”. As she told me that, her grandfather was telling me, “I can teach her if she has any questions about what I knew”. She said “Yes, I've always been interested in that.” I saw her also traveling to Cambodia to learn about non traditional medicine in Cambodia and keeping that tradition alive.

CHILDREN OF HER GENERATION WILL REBUILD CAMBODIAN CULTURE BEYOND ITS BORDERS

I also saw that she, and others, children of that first wave of immigrants, will have a role in rebuilding Cambodian culture within and outside of its borders, as the country seeks to rebuild its memory after genocide and civil war.  And I also saw her going back, learning about their practices and eventually writing about her experience.

I saw images of her mother crying at night to his image, with the guilt she felt about leaving him behind. He said:  “don't feel guilty. I was at peace I knew that was the fate, the fate that came to me and I knew you had to go to America”.

So this was just one of those amazing things. It was so intense to experience this and then get the dye off my hair and go run errands and appointments and a live stream.

All I did was go to the hair salon and get my hair color done, but it felt so transformative to learn from her grandfather and Cambodian history. It felt so meaningful, we were both crying the whole time.

I cry, not because experiences are sad or happy, It's because it feels overwhelming and connected to truth that feels so much deeper. We watch news about refugees, and we don’t hear the stories of families that immigrated, the ones left behind and how their presence has made this country so rich and vibrant.