“Life is pure magic,” says Vancouver’s legendary Little Woo. We are sitting together on a sun-dappled park bench in East Van. She’s dressed like a modern-day pirate with short pants, white shirt, vest, and red wraps entwined in her waist-length hair. Everything about her—her outfit, her demeanour—is playful. But her turquoise-eyeliner-rimmed brown eyes reveal that when it comes to magic, she’s not joking around.

Little Woo is a relatively new nom de guerre for the gifted performance artist. As a child growing up in New Brunswick, she had a challenging childhood that she describes as a prolonged “dark night of the soul.” But she says there are no regrets, because it helped create who she is now. To escape, she read voraciously, focusing on mythology, fairy tales, and paranormal phenomena, and spent days at home quietly writing stories and reinventing herself even then. “I wanted to be, let me see, an actor, musician, detective, writer, psychologist…pirate,” she laughs, gesturing at her outfit, “unicorn, mermaid….” (which was her alter ego the day of her photo shoot with SharedVISION).

Since no university education could lead to her dream job as a unicorn, Little Woo pursued a more earthly vocation: film studies at Concordia University. After graduation, she received a national screenwriting grant, and moved west to experience the Vancouver film scene. She spent two years in the industry, but grew jaded with the business side of filmmaking. “So I had to walk away from it to preserve my love of the art,” she confides. She decided to focus on music, developing her talents as a singer-songwriter. It was a romantic, bohemian immersion, but without a financial life jacket, Woo soon ran out of money.
That’s when she landed a plummy job with the Employment Insurance department of the federal government: full-time work, benefits, security. Day in and day out in client services, she talked to people about how they lost their jobs.

“I thought I’d do my filmmaking, music, and art at night,” she says. “But for me it didn’t work that way. When I spent eight hours a day forcing myself to do something that wasn’t aligned with my heart’s desire, it created a schism.”

She might have pushed her dreams of art aside, but for a disturbing development. “The thing is, I started to have bleeding cysts on my forehead.” Distressed by something so visibly strange in the middle of her face, Woo tried every possible remedy over the next two years, from medication to acupuncture to infrared therapy. Nothing worked—until she took a two-week break from her job.

“It healed entirely,” she says, still sounding a little awed. When she went back to the office, the skin condition returned, leading her to the realization that: “I wasn’t living in my real skin.”

Woo took the hint. To the surprise of co-workers, after three and a half years, she quit her job. Her skin immediately cleared up, and she decided it was time to invest in a deeper level of healing. She spent four years exploring her spiritual side. In her case, the investment was quite literal: she drew on a bank loan to support herself, as well as various odd jobs. “It was a tight time, because I wasn’t looking at income. I was doing inner work.”

In 2005, Woo was finally ready to cash in herpersonal investment and step out into public life once again. “I really thought, ‘OK, I’m healing. I’ve got a really strong grip.’ And that’s when I discovered my community.”

The arts, healing, and activist communities seduced her: “I fell in love with myself, and then I fell in love with the world.”

The enraptured woman changed her name to Little Woo. She is now creatively prolific, teaching dance and performing around the city at burlesque festivals, parties, and even a cross-cultural collaborative learning day with Senator Roméo Dallaire. She’s perhaps best known for her popular and sensually ingenious invention of burlesque yoga.

“I was doing yoga in my home…and I suddenly felt a desire to bring together the ideas of the sacred and the profane.” She’s adamant that no line separates the two. “Even burlesque can be a spiritual act.”

Her other venture—giving workshops and one-on-one counselling sessions in Epic Alchemy—is all about working with energy. It, too, pushes boundaries and challenges people to look at the world from a different angle. “It’s an active, conscious thing.” Woo pauses, and thinks. “It’s the transformation of the mundane into the sublime. So, nothing is mundane.”

Remember that the next grey morning when your alarm clock anxiously blares its call. Smiling blissfully in the sunlight, a landlocked pirate without a care, Little Woo is content. “What I want people to understand is that it’s all grand. It’s all magical. It’s all profound.”

Jennifer Croll is a Vancouver writer who is no stranger to the snooze button. When she grows up, she wouldn’t mind being a mermaid or a ninja.

Discover Your Passion

Feel like you too could use a bit of change in your life? Artist Craig Conway has posted a Follow Your Bliss Compass on his blog, oneletterwords.com/bliss. Just click on the compass and—poof—the arrow will spin and land on some prescient advice.

ManifestYourPotential.com is a career guidance site with a mission: to help people around the world thrive by helping them
discover their uniqueness.

Vancouver career- and life-path expert Alanna Fero wants what most people wish for themselves: to do good in the world and do well for themselves at the same time. With this in mind, she has written Love Made Visible: Values-Driven Approaches to Work/Life. And classics of the personal-transformation genre include Life’s a Bitch and Then You Change Careers by Andrea Kay; What Color Is Your Parachute? 2007 by Richard Nelson Bolles; The Artist’s Way by Julie Cameron; and The Art of Happiness by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.C.

Little Woo recommends books by Abraham-Hicks, Goddard, Caroline Myss, Neville, and Vancouver’s own Eckhart Tolle.

And if you’re stuck in life, or just stuck in traffic, the CD The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Growth by Don Miguel Ruiz might offer some soothing advice. Ruiz was a surgeon until a near-death experience changed his life. Now a shamanic teacher and healer, he exposes self-limiting beliefs and presents a simple yet effective code of personal conduct learned from his Toltec ancestors.

Upcoming workshops with Little Woo

• Alchemy of Manifestation (Nov. 24 or Dec. 3, 10, 17)
• Alchemy of the Heart (Dec. 4, 11, 18)
• Alchemy of Community (Dec. 2 & 9)

To register and for more information about workshops or private sessions, visit littlewoo.org [1].