Jacqueline Chan, M.A.

My Story

As a baby, I was born with congenital hypothyroidism.  I moved from a big house in Markham to government social housing due to family divorce – I was constantly feeling like I did not have enough. 

As my mother worked with Grandmaster Wu to build a local qi gong/chi gong learning institute in Toronto, I also went to chi gong (qigong) classes with them and helped them out with demonstrations in health trade shows. I practiced chi gong for 3-4 hours each week with them and my hypothyroidism remained very stable throughout my childhood and young adulthood.

I worked hard from an ESL (English as Second Language) student with C+ English grades to become a straight-A student. I graduated elementary school with averages in the mid-80s to 90s. I was an angel child at home.

Life was content. I had high self-esteem.

My perfect life came crashing down when I discovered I belong to the LGBTQ+ community as a bisexual woman, when I segued into an underground same-sex relationship at church in high school. Leading up to the needed break up, was perpetual devastation. I was baptized at birth as a Catholic and regularly attended religious sermons into high school.

The shame I felt,  guilt, and anxiety at this secret relationship I had eroded my self-worth.

• I  failed in my education – I skipped classes and got 60s in my classes
• I constantly fought – I started expressing my pent-up emotions
• I felt completely abandoned by my friends and I felt so much pressure so I avoided people 

These changes brutally shook up my world.

I started to scrutinize what I was mentally ingesting (sometimes from religion:  disempowering on repeat)

Life became a daily challenge and lonely.

I realized I needed change: I started my true inner and spiritual journey.

I read books like, “Happiness is a choice” written by a man who helped his son who was autistic become extremely high-functioning. And “The Power of Now” Eckart Tolle, along with “The Seven Laws of Success” Deepak Chopra.

My history teacher saw me reading Eckhart’s book during class, and told me he felt it’d be hard for me to understand the book. True -I reread it a couple times and gained new wisdom from it each time!

I started meditation in 2007. I tried kundalini yoga to heal myself from my sexual desires. I tried different types of frequency entrainment sounds at the time (binaural beats, etc.) to calm my frantic mind.

I kept this mostly away from my mother, who I was distant from at that time – I felt her mourning was an abandonment of my needs. We did not have understanding of psychology, emotions, spirituality at the time. We were very ordinary people then.

I ended up committing myself to getting into university – stayed 6 months to get my marks in for university. Thankfully, I made that decision because post-secondary education also changed my life and expanded my world.

At York University, while I struggled in my 1st year as I still felt alone and isolated – I found myself a nice friend group. They really uplifted me and made my time in university phenomenally fun, with laughter.

The Breakthrough

I must have been ready for a shift.  I joined university student leadership clubs. By the time I graduated, I was an honour student for 3 years straight. I went to graduate school at Ryerson University for a M.A. and studied hard to complete a major research project (thesis equivalent) on a paediatric health-care and school initiative for inner-city families. I even got the chance to present similar research in Ottawa, at the Canadian Autism Leadership Summit a year later through my work with St. Michael’s Hospital.

In 2018, I decided to practice my qi gong (chi gong) everyday and as I became a Chi Gong Teacher and lead the Qi Gong Pilot Project at SickKids in 2019, I realized I am meant to be a teacher and a healer. In 2020, a few clients came knocking on my (virtual) door for 1-on-1 sessions and I realized I am an intuitive, insightful, compassionate healer. The joy in my heart and the ease of connection, along with teaching opportunities, helped me finally embrace who I fully am – a teacher, healer, and researcher.