I am moved by the way Mother Nature demonstrates her power. Her relentless hurricanes laughing through our lousy infrastructure, her arctic glaciers melting as if to a conductor’s cue, her sultry wildfires licking at million-dollar timeshare homes like an infected wound. What happens when colonization extracts everything from the Earth but it still isn’t enough? Cognitively we understand that we face the annihilation of not only humanity but our non-human relatives also, as r

It feels strange to heal in a traumatized world. I bubbled up to the surface expecting to catch up on what untraumatized people had been up to, but quickly realized that most people are still traumatized. It reminds me of days I spent aimlessly driving through suburbia, lost in miles upon miles of strip malls, searching for meaning somewhere along the asphalt. Millions of acres of indigenous land paved over with the cement of false promises. I cry when watching videos about t

The ancient Chinese viewed rituals, people, animals, plants, and the land as inseparable. I have been learning about the complex relationship between Chinese occultism, Confucianism, Daoist magic, and esoteric Buddhist traditions via @bellwen. In the Neolithic period, centuries before the birth of Christ, the imperial historian Cangjie invented writing based on the footprints of birds. During the Xia dynasty, shamanic practices facilitated a harmony between gods, people, and

My parents were like yin and yang, the darkest and lightest energies I have ever known. Yin is the expansive night sky, the womb of existence which envelops us all, and her lunar cycles govern all life. Yang is the sun, stunning and powerful yes, but a finite star in the infinite expanse of the universe. Mother Universe has the capacity to swallow stars whole and the charade of humanity stands no chance against the threat of her cosmic collapse. I have always known my mother

I used to avoid cooking Chinese food…it brought up emotions I wasn’t ready to handle. Until this year, when my body began telling me the story of my ancestors, allowing me to heal. I am told I am a “free individual,” but I know I embody the collective wisdom of my ancestors. Instead of pathologizing my parents for emotionally neglecting me, I contextualize my trauma within generations of uprooting, as a call from Mother Earth to remember her wisdom. Food has brought all of my

I was born into a culture of individualism, but I come from a culture of collectivism. All indigenous societies understand that we are inextricably connected, only colonization has us believing we are somehow separate from each other. There is no independence that I celebrate today…instead I cherish my interdependence with all life. A lot of the problems we struggle with as a society including war, illness, relationship issues, and religious and political divisions are the re

We have come to a point in evolution where we must heal our collective trauma in order to survive as a species. To do this, we must learn to witness the pain of our enemies instead of fighting it. Our enemy is only an enemy because they mirror back a part of us that is in need of healing. Colonization continues through a karmic cycle of violence perpetuated through bodies who did not know how to transmute pain and inflicted this harm on others. Your hatred comes from the woun

My body has been trying to find her way home for so long. As I sit here writing this, drinking the Chinese herbal tea I got in Chinatown today after meditating in a Chinese Buddhist temple, I am feeling immensely grateful for the thousands of years of wisdom cultivated by my ancestors that allow me to experience this moment. Due to the trauma of colonization, poverty, immigration, and assimilation I had been avoiding my culture for so long because my family had become a place

The garden is my poetry…this morning, the plants were singing the song of spring and I bathed in it. My body re-energized with the other...