Cover Melissa Indot and her mother, Datin Patricia Indot at the HolyMama Retreats in Ibiza in 2018 (Photo: Wonder Fotografie)
Melissa Indot and her mother, Datin Patricia Indot at the HolyMama Retreats in Ibiza in 2018 (Photo: Wonder Fotografie)
1 / 1
“The biggest trigger in my life has been my mother”, reveals the life coach and singer-songwriter, who now partners with her mom to lead a retreat focused on unspoken tensions, joys, and impacts within the parent-child dynamic
What is a ‘mother wound’? And how does a woman’s relationship with her mother affect her whole life and wellbeing? These are questions that life coach and award-winning singer-songwriter Melissa Indot has long grappled with. She sheds light on this topic, sitting down with Tatler to talk about what inspired her upcoming mother-daughter retreats, which she'll be facilitating alongside her octogenarian mother, Datin Patricia Indot.
Read more: Sacrifices and rewards: A mother's perspective on running a startup
“The relationship, the bond that we have with our mothers defines all the relationships that we have in our life,” she says. “Whether we have a good or a bad relationship from that perspective. There is so much that we can do to bring stability and alignment back into that mother relationship so that the trajectory of our lives creates space for loving, nurturing relationships going forward.”
Above Melissa Indot and her mother, Datin Patricia Indot at the HolyMama Retreats in Ibiza in 2018 (Photo: Wonder Fotografie)
Melissa Indot and her mother, Datin Patricia Indot at the HolyMama Retreats in Ibiza in 2018 (Photo: Wonder Fotografie)
1 / 1
A self-declared ‘professional misfit’, Indot's relationship with her mother had its fair share of challenges and difficulties, which she’s openly discussed in a popular episode of her Fearlessly Curious podcast featuring Datin Patricia as a guest speaker.
A gifted singer who has enjoyed a successful career as a recording artiste in Malaysia and the UK, Indot’s first solo album, Eclecticism garnered an Anugerah Industri Muzik award in 2008. Having opened for international performers like Natalie Cole and Sean Kingston, Indot’s music passion has significantly shaped her life.
So strong is its influence in her life that she founded Intuitive Music Programming, using music to help change mindsets, reprogram behavioural patterns and heal trauma. She’s also a certified life coach, specialising in emotional healing. Despite the success of this colourful career, Indot knew she had to address her relationship with her mother and start the much-needed journey of emotional healing.
“The biggest trigger in my life has been my mother,” Indot says. “I know that I have been a challenge for my mother. The more I have explored that, the more I’ve seen how I’ve replicated this activated relationship with my mother in my other relationships. I’ve carried it forward. Our relationship took a turn in 2017 when I started this deep immersion into my personal growth and development–my spiritual and personal healing journey. I started exploring that with my mom, and I’ve seen and experienced the benefits of investing my time and heart into healing my ‘mother wound’.”
The 49-year-old adds, “So many people ask, ‘What if I don’t have a relationship with my mother? What if different people brought me up?’ That’s not a bad thing. It’s all about bringing awareness to what you perceive to be your relationship with your mother. It’s about bringing awareness to that and seeing how that bond makes you feel–Does it make you feel empowered? Loving? Does it make you feel full or less than? Imperfect? Abandoned? Rejected? From that place, we can navigate to bring you back into an aligned space. It isn’t so much about who your mother is but about who you are in relation to your mother.”
#Throwback: Sarah Illyas Answers Your Questions About Parenting During MCO
During the pandemic lockdowns, Indot recalls being able to spend more time with her mother and talk more fully about her work as a life coach. Throughout these conversations, Indot says she invited her mum to co-facilitate a mother-daughter workshop at the end of 2022 involving a one-to-one session with a mother-daughter duo.
“It was magnificent and beautiful,” she remarks. “That anchored this possibility of running an entire mother-daughter retreat with my mum. It’s one thing for me to do it as a daughter. But to have my mother there so we can be in full vulnerability and model to other people what that looks like–yes, it’s ugly. It’s painful. But only at first. And honestly, if we can sit in the sh*t together, we can make it through anything together.”
Slated for the end of 2023 and early 2024, this mother-daughter mindfulness retreat will be organised under Holidays with Intention, a holistic wellness concept co-founded by Indot. Entitled Mum & Me: Healing the Mother Wound, the 4D3N retreat includes sound baths and yoga sessions alongside hands-on sessions that address conscious relating and compassionate communication, facilitated by Indot and Datin Patricia, lovingly dubbed ‘Aunty Pat’.
Below, Indot clues us in on the importance of inner healing and what she aims to achieve with these mother-daughter retreats.
Does 'mother wound' refer to intergenerational trauma?
Not exclusively. Trauma exists on the spectrum. Whether we're talking of trauma from sexual abuse, emotional abuse and mental abuse, or the fact that maybe your mother was a working mum, and you hardly saw her when you were growing up. That too can be traumatic for the child and it can imprint a narrative and a belief about themselves that in reality is not true.
How did Holidays with Intention come to be?
So as a life coach, I work one-on-one with clients and I had group coaching sessions back in 2018. I had an amazing mentor, Claudia Spahr, an integrated health coach. She is the founder of HolyMama Retreats, a very well known and successful retreat that focuses on mothers and babies. I met her at a Feminine Leadership Retreat many years ago. I did her retreat leadership training and worked on her retreats in Ibiza in 2018. It was an incredible experience.
Once I got certified with her, I returned to Malaysia in 2019 and started running my own retreats under the name Holidays with Intention. My dream for that was to move into more family retreats. So imagine Club Med-style holidays, where you have something for the adults and something for the kids. You’re going on a holiday that creates more peace, harmony, connection, and communication within your family.
What’s the most important thing people should know about these mother-daughter retreats?
What is the benefit of participating in a retreat like this? It’s to be your own freaking hero. It’s to stop looking for external validation. To stop thinking, ‘I want my mum to see me. I want my mum to love me. I want to be enough for her.’ And if you can’t get it from your mum, you look for it in all your other relationships.
I have a history of addiction, alcoholism and drugs. I had a racy lifestyle that was self-abusive. Through my [healing] journey, I have reaped so many benefits. I live healthier and get so much more out of life. I have more freedom, joy, and so much more love. The more that I do this, the more that I learn, the more that I practice, the more that I share, the more that I coach, the fuller my life feels. I get to be the person I need to be and support others to do this for themselves.
I hope that when you come to this retreat, you go out feeling as complete as you can for today. You’ll live each day, in each moment, as the fullest version of who you are, magnetising people into your life who will harmonise and complement who you are.
What’s the greatest lesson you've had from your mum?
You’re never too old to learn something new. And this is coming from an 85-year-old woman. She has consciously decided to take these steps of healing and growth with me. Most people at that age will be like, ‘Forget it. What’s the point? It’s your problem, not mine.’ But she’s invested. One of the biggest things she’s done in her twilight years is overcome her 40-year fear of closed spaces. For 40 years, she had claustrophobia. She could never even get in a lift back then. Now, she lives on the fourth floor of an apartment and gets in and out by herself. She tried yoga for the first time at age 80. I took her to a studio and recorded two songs with her, which I released as a Christmas present, so now she’s on Spotify. She was spotted by a scouting agent for Disney to audition for a part in the movie Coco. Just that feeling of being seen and recognised at the age of 80 was like living a dream that she had.
Are you nervous about opening yourself up to this level of vulnerability with a group of people in this retreat?
When I allow myself to be myself, I remember I must show up as fully me. Then I’m not lying to the world and myself. Not everybody’s going to like me. Let’s face it. I don’t want everyone to like me. So, if I don’t like everybody, I’ve to permit other people not to like me too, you know? When I show up as me, then making friends and finding community is something that I don’t need to put an effort into.
Previously contributing to Esquire Malaysia, Expat Lifestyle and Newsweek, Tania oversees digital stories across Tatler’s key content pillars, also leading the Front & Female platform exploring issues and topics affecting women today.
