After years of working across the globe in the fast-paced film industry, Corie Chu returned to Hong Kong to further pursue her work with energy healing
These days, more and more people are turning to alternative healing practices when it comes to wellbeing. The city has seen a huge surge in popularity around yoga studios and, more recently, meditation centres, and a leading practitioner in the energy healing movement in Hong Kong is Corie Chu. Focusing largely on Reiki and numerology, this warm spirited individual has a passion for helping others that is second to none. I went to find out more about Corie’s journey into healing and to try a Reiki session for myself.
Reiki with Corie Chu from Corie Chu Healing
First up, I needed to actually try a session at Corie Chu Healing, right? I’d tried Reiki a few times before when I was younger and always enjoyed it but never found it overwhelmingly helpful, but my session with Corie was immensely different. As she worked across my body I started to see a vision of a turquoise box popping out of a hole on wall, as if something was pushing it from behind.
When we chatted after our session, it was interesting to learn that Corie herself had seen similar things, and she suggested that it seemed like a lot of suppressed sadness breaking free, especially around my stomach (an area that has always been a trouble spot for me.) As we continued to break down the session afterwards, she mentioned some things that really resonated with me and gave me some ideas for dealing with problems in different ways. I can’t wait for the next session to see what more I can learn about myself, but before that, I wanted to find out more about how she found herself in the world of energy healing.
An interview with Corie Chu
Hey, Corie! Thanks for the Reiki session and for sitting down with me. Tell me a little about your background
So, I was born in Hong Kong and then moved to LA when I was younger, and we moved between Hong Kong and LA for a bit before I went back for the end of high school and for university there at UCLA.
During uni, I really wanted to intern in PR, so I was like: I’m here, I’m in Hollywood, why not give it a go? So I started in an agency called BWR, an entertainment PR company which was owned by Ogilvy. And it was totally bananas! It was amazing, working with musicians and celebrities that I really admired. But then you see the not-so-pretty side too.
After I graduated, I moved through another few agencies, and then I came across this job at Paramount Pictures. And I stayed there for five years before I decided to move to Argentina. I’d been there the year before and it just felt like home. I really felt like I just needed to be there.
Everyone thought I was bananas, including my parents. But I just thought: let’s just go with it! So I moved to Buenos Aires and I lived there for about a year, travelling around the whole country. It was amazing.
And did you work while you were there?
Well my goal wasn’t to work. I’d saved up the year before, so I was more about doing my own sort of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ journey, but I just got so massively bored!
But funnily enough, then Paramount rung me up and said they were doing their first ever international junket and premiere in Argentina for Puss in Boots with Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek and asked me to help. I had done nearly 100 of these during my time at Paramount so I was happy to step in. That job really started the whole freelancing gig for me.
So then I could travel around even more, to Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, and it was just magical. I had met so many healers, teachers and learned about so many forms of medicines along the way, it had opened my heart up even more. But then I just got to this point where I felt that I needed to come home to Hong Kong and bring all that I’d learned back, even though I didn’t know what that meant right then.
Ultimately, what I wanted was to share the energy work, meditation and all the amazing healing tools that had helped me immensely on my path of self-discovery to my roots, with others.
So you’d been learning those things in Argentina?
No. So that all started in LA. Actually, as I child, I just loved crystals; I was obsessed with them, and loved collecting them, but I really had no idea what any of them meant back then. My mom also used to take me to Qigong classes with her which I had quite liked.
Then while I was working at Paramount and felt like I needed a little more balance in life, I met a lady named Vida who was an Afro-Brazilian Samba Dance Minister, and she integrated so many modalities: Qigong, energy healing, all into the dance practice. So, without really knowing, as students we were already learning a lot. Then I studied with her and she really taught the foundations of most energy healing modalities that I know today.
At that time, it was more of a hobby, but it was amazing. It really opened up the journey towards self discovery and realising that there’s just so much to life, and that nature is really such a huge force in itself. I mean, whenever I would get out of work early, I’d head down to the beach and I’d meditate until sundown. And, it sounded weird at the time, but I felt like it was listening to me, the sun light would come out even on cloudy days as if to respond to my reflections; I couldn’t have felt more at home.
So then it was time to come home, home to Hong Kong?
Yeah, so then I wanted to bring all these things back to, in my opinion, one of the most challenging cities in the world. It was really tough. I moved back in 2012, and initially I was living with my parents and I didn’t want to do PR, so I moved through some different jobs, but then Paramount called me up again and said they wanted to do the first Hollywood World-Premiere in Hong Kong, for Transformers 4 (Age of Extinction) so I couldn’t really say no!
And that lead me to start working in China as a result, but the reason I’d come back to Hong Kong was to see how I could share my energy healing work, so I realized that film PR wasn’t really in alignment with what I truly wanted to do.
Then after a few years of fighting insecurities and the realities of living, I saved up a little bit more, and I started teaching classes part-time. Actually I started with a kind of dance/movement class out of Yoga Bam Bam that was all about exploring energy zones, but at the same time if people just wanted to sit and release, then that was fine too. I mean, at that time there weren’t very many places like that for people in Hong Kong.
And how did the Reiki come in?
Well it was about then that I decided I wanted to explore some other modalities and I decided I wanted to learn Reiki. I went to Thailand and around Asia, and I studied with amazing teachers along the way, and over the years, I decided that I wanted to be a Reiki teacher.
After I finished my teacher training in 2017 I didn’t feel completely ready to teach, so I only started training practitioners this year. Most of the people I’m training to become practitioners have regular 9-5 jobs, but they just want a little balance in their lives, to be able to apply Reiki for self-healing or for their family and friends. There’s four levels of Reiki training; and I teach it as I had learned it, very traditionally in respect to the lineage, but after you learn the foundations, you’re also invited to make it your very own, which is nice. Reiki is great as a standalone healing modality and complimentary with most therapies.
I’ve also been running group Reiki classes for about a year, which are really different from one-on-one sessions. But it’s been a great way to get more people to try out Reiki without making a huge commitment, and we’ve had classes at IRIS:Your Escape and I run regular classes at The Naked Hub on New Street and at the new Enhale Meditation Studio. Each class has always been inspiring as the collective energy is different with every person who walks in. My intention is to make it more accessible for anybody that just needs a boost of energy in their day, and I get my students who I’ve trained in Reiki to come along and help out when they’re able to. My second intention is to build a network or community of Reiki enthusiasts so my Reiki students are able to do more with their skills afterwards if they wish to.
And if you were to describe Reiki for those who don’t know about it, what would you say?
So, I like to compare Reiki with bottling water. Imagine there’s this glacier in Iceland and we want to bottle this water because it’s so clean and pure and delicious, and every single drop has a tube carrying it into this glass bottle. And the way I see Reiki is, as a practitioner, we are the tubes; we help you bring this pure, cleansing, healing energy to you.
So then the numerology, was that something you started doing in California?
Yes. My teacher Vida, she introduced me to numerology. It was really interesting, but I really didn’t focus on it until I started working with a more modern Numerology system inspired by Yogi Bhajan taught by another numerology teacher who was visiting Hong Kong, Tyler. So it’s very similar to some of the yoga philosophy, and it’s based in the idea that there are 11 energy bodies and that’s why the numerology system is numbered from 1 to 11. This system is super easy and practical, it makes it so simple for me to create a birth chart and see a map of a person.
And the integration of Reiki and numerology?
For me, it was just very natural for me to integrate the two together. I think numerology really gives you a good analysis of who you are. You get to understand things that happened to you as a child and how you dealt with those challenges (or perhaps you haven’t and that’s where Reiki healing comes in). Often we acknowledge repeated problems in our lives, but we don’t do anything about them, and numerology is the universe’s way of explaining that to us. Reiki comes in to support us through those challenges, whether they be physical, mental, emotional or spiritual.
What has the general response to Corie Chu Healing from people in Hong Kong been like?
I mean, it takes a little time, right? Reiki has been around a lot longer, so more people are open to it. Of course, there are a still a lot of skeptics, and that’s fine. It’s all about timing and whether a person is open to experiencing it or not. Sadly, it often takes a really unfortunate incident to come up, or a heartbreak or something for people to start questioning how they can better deal with pain or discomfort, which then leads them to a journey of self discovery.
I think that yoga opened the door to holistic healing and wellness, meditation kind of came second (but really as a comeback since it’s been around forever) and I think energy work is going to be next. Whatever happens, I just love doing what I do and helping people along the way.
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