Mai Elements

Mai Elements All healing is self-healing.

09/21/2026

𝗡𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝘀 𝘀𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝘆 𝗮𝘀 𝗮 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲.

Look inside something as solid as your bones.

Their collagen is arranged through layers that change direction, helping bone tolerate forces without behaving like a brittle block.

And your skeleton is alive. It senses mechanical load and continually remodels around the forces you repeatedly ask it to carry.

Zoom out.

Those forces don’t stop at the border of one bone.

Muscle pulls through tendon. Connective tissue transmits force. Your foot changes what your knee receives. Your hip changes what your spine has to manage.

Even your heart doesn’t beat like a piston. It twists and untwists with every contraction.

The body seems to understand something we easily forget: strength is not the same thing as rigidity.

Chinese medicine gave me another language for this.

It placed bone, marrow, aging, hormone, the lower back, hearing, hair and fear within one functional system.

Because the body was never understood only by asking:

“Which part is broken?”

But also:

“What is this part in relationship with?”

For the past few centuries, we have become incredibly good at taking the human body apart.

One muscle. One joint. One organ. One diagnosis. One problem to fix.

We learned more and more about every individual piece.

And somehow became less accustomed to seeing the person carrying all of them.

Because you were never just a knee.
Never just a hormone.
Never just a nervous system.
Never just the emotion you couldn’t regulate.

You have always been one whole human being, living one whole life, in one whole body.

MERIDIAN YIN YOGA TEACHER TRAINING
Vancouver · January 2027

Chinese Medicine, Meridian system, functional + visceral anatomy and the practice and teaching of Meridian Yin Yoga.

Enrollment opens late September 2026.

Comment “MERIDIAN” for priority access to program details and early-bird enrollment.

09/15/2026

“What if I missed something?”
“What if I made the wrong choice?”
“What if I think about it one more time?”

You can lie completely still while your mind works overtime.

In Chinese Medicine, excessive thinking and rumination are associated with the Spleen and stomach.

And that means much more than digestion.

The Stomach channel crosses the breasts and ni***es into the abdomen.

The Spleen channel enters the abdomen and connects into the wider Blood, Chong–Ren and reproductive network involving the uterus.

Deeper inside, the stomach, spleen and pancreas also share close vascular, peritoneal and connective-tissue relationships, while the abdomen mechanically interacts with the uterus, pelvic floor and other pelvic organs.

So my friend, you, who cannot stop replaying the same relationship in the head, struggles with digestion and stubborn weight, and notices recurring breast, menstrual or reproductive symptoms(prostate issue for men) may appear to have completely unrelated problems.

Chinese Medicine asks:

What if they are clues within 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗽𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻?

Because worrying, overthink, ruminate, Spleen–Stomach function, nourishment, fluid metabolism, Blood and reproductive patterns exist within the same TCM picture.

And underneath all that thinking may be one uncomfortable feeling:

I cannot control what happens next.

So stop pulling.

Find a sweet edge.
Be still.
Let time do the work.

For two minutes, practice what rumination hates most:

Not knowing.
Not solving.
Not controlling.

Leave the story.
Stay in the body. 🫧

Give your system the chance to practice the feeling: I can be safe, even when I’m not in control.

09/14/2026

Beyond what acupuncture point to press or what herb to brew, Chinese medicine gives us a framework for understanding the movement of the year, and the cycles of life within it.

We are very good at adding things in the name of wellness.

Another supplement.
Another routine.
Another goal.
Another healing practice.

But nature doesn’t only add.

Every autumn, deciduous trees withdraw reusable nutrients from leaves they will eventually lose.

Not because the leaves were bad.
Their season is simply complete.

And maybe we need that reminder too.

Because maintaining things costs us something.

Time. Attention. Energy. Physical space. Mental space.

And when our lives become chronically overcrowded with obligations, stimulation, unresolved decisions and things requiring our attention, that doesn’t stay neatly separated from “health.”

It changes how we sleep.
How much we recover.
How much stress we carry.
How much attention we have available for our bodies.
How much capacity we have to adapt when life changes.

You cannot supplement your way out of a life that leaves no room for you to recover.

This is why I find the autumn correspondence in Chinese medicine so beautiful.

Autumn belongs to the Lung and Large Intestine, to descend, the movement inward, and to grief.

Because a complete cycle requires release.

Your lungs cannot only inhale.
Your digestive system cannot only receive.
Nature cannot only grow.

𝗡𝗲𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂.

And grief belongs here too.

Sometimes grief isn’t evidence that something went wrong.

Sometimes grief is the emotional cost of allowing something that mattered to become complete.

09/11/2026

After Ang Lee won his first Best Director Oscar for Brokeback Mountain, he recalled his father saying:

“You’ve got an Oscar. You happy now? It’s time to do something for real.”

I think about this story a lot.

Because if even an Oscar might not be enough, at some point you have to ask:

What exactly am I still trying to earn?

To be seen?
To be trusted?
To finally hear, “I’m proud of you”?

I know this pattern well.

I love the life I’ve built. Yet I’ve lost count of how many times it has felt less “real” simply because it doesn’t resemble the life he once imagined for me.

A wifey. A mother. An accountant. A submissive girl.

And somehow, I still became the overfunctioning Asian eldest daughter.

Proving. Achieving. Explaining. Carrying.

Today, I caught her(on video) again.

Almost crying over my favourite dessert while being coached on how I should write my own book, before there was even curiosity about what the book, or what I actually do, was about… (writing this with my Jimmy O. Yang impersonation face, iykyk).

And somewhere between wanting to cry and wanting to defend myself, I caught the pattern happening in real time.

I wasn’t just feeling something.
My whole system knew this dance.

And that brought me back to the question at the heart of my work:

What happens when an emotional pattern becomes a pattern your body knows by heart?

What keeps asking your system to return to that pattern?

Not so you can blame your parents for your body.
Not so a few affirmations can magically make physical symptoms disappear.

But because if the person in front of you never changes, does your system have to keep responding the same way?

Maybe this is where the work becomes yours:

I don’t have to fight you to remain free.
I can hear your opinion without abandoning my decision.
I don’t need to be understood to know what I know.
Your trust would mean a lot. But I can stand without borrowing it.
I can grieve what was missing without spending my life trying to earn it.

𝗜 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗲𝗲 𝗺𝗲.
I no longer disappear when you don’t.

I wish you healing. 🩵

09/09/2026

FOMO has quietly become a wellness habit.

In TCM, digestion and mental processing were never treated as completely separate conversations.

The Stomach receives.
The Spleen transforms.

And I’m not only talking about food.

Everything you take in becomes something your system has to respond to.

The information you consume.
The 7663 Instagram carousel you have saved.
The upbeat background music playing in restaurant.
The highbeam of the rear car hitting your eyes.
The tension in someone’s voice.
The 37 tabs still open in your brain.

And more input means more for your system to filter, interpret, respond to and recover from.

We’re so afraid of missing what might help us,
we never ask what is the cost for our spleen and stomach to handle all these.

In TCM, the Spleen is closely tied to 意, loosely translate as thought, focus and mental processing. Excessive thinking and worry can burden the Spleen; when the Spleen is weak, the mind may feel even more tired, foggy and stuck in thought.

The more overwhelmed you are, the harder everything feels to process.

Dampness. Heaviness. Fullness. Bloating. Loose stools. Poor appetite. Fatigue. Brain fog. Overthinking. Worry.

That is why learning Chinese Medicine isn’t simply learning what to add.

It is learning to recognize:

What is deficient?
What is excessive?
What is stagnant?
What is accumulating?
What is failing to transform?

Join us and 100 pioneer campers in a 9 weeks virtual TCM camp of learning how Chinese Medicine actually reads the body:

Organ function and dysfunction, body constitution, pattern recognition, and how different patterns call for different responses.

45 bite-sized, on-demand lessons.
A new ~10-minute lesson drops in Camp Base every Monday–Friday.

Plus 4 live Camp Summits to bring everything together with replays available if you can’t join live.

Learn a little. Observe. Apply. Digest.

Orientation begins September 27.

Squad 2 is now open, and the first 100 campers receive $100 off.

👉🏻 http://www.mai-elements.com/read-your-pattern

09/08/2026

That 16-year-old version of me showed up again.

Trembling. Teary. Defensive. Trying so hard to explain herself with words she didn’t have back then.

She almost flinch, but I paused for a second, looked at her and said:

I see you.
I’ve got you this time. 🫂

I never really had a family, a home home… until I was 16.
That story is too long for today.

But I think a part of me stayed there.

I had built this almost romantic fantasy of what having a mom, a dad, siblings, and a home would feel like.

I got most of it from books. (The only free entertainment that I get running away from the real life)

There was so much I needed but didn’t know how to ask for.

Guidance.
Care.
Safety.
Trust.
Support.

Someone to tell me I didn’t have to figure everything out by myself.

I didn’t have words for those needs then.
So I learned to swallow them.

And for years, underneath all that swallowing, I was angry. Disappointed. I held grudges I didn’t know what to do with.

Until years into my own healing, I finally understood something:

I had spent years asking for warm meals from people who had no food to offer(then), and who had never been taught how to cook.

That realization softened something in me. Not because what I needed suddenly stopped mattering. It mattered.

I just started seeing them as human beings instead of the people who were supposed to have all the answers.

And as far as I can see, we have all been trying with whatever we had.

I still love them… yet they can still trigger THE HELL out of me.
Two truth co-exist.

Knowing your patterns when you’re alone is one thing.
Being back inside the relationships where those patterns were formed?

That hits different.

You can spend years learning boundaries.
Learning how to communicate.
Learning how to regulate yourself.

Building a life you’re proud of.

And then one breakfast with your parents…
and suddenly you’re 16 again.

We are a collection of every version of ourselves that got us here.

They aren’t just memories.

Some of them are old survival strategies that simply never got the update that we’ve made it. We survived.

Show them this time, instead of pushing them away:
I’be got this 🩵

09/07/2026

Raising your foot temperature by just 1°C could change how you sleep.

In a Korean sleep study, participants who slept with their feet kept warm had an average foot temperature about 1.3°C higher.

They fell asleep 7.5 minutes faster, slept 32 minutes longer, and woke up around 7.5 fewer times throughout the night.

All while doing something as simple as keeping their feet warm.

So yes, sleeping in socks, soaking your feet, foot massage, and meridian scraping(I’m targeting the kidney meridian here) are all simple practices we often use in TCM to keep the feet warm and stimulated.

But constantly cold feet, or cold hands and feet… can tell us much more than how well you sleep.

In TCM, the same cold feet can come from completely different patterns:

Yang Deficiency — always cold, always tired, never restored.
Qi & Blood Deficiency — everything drains you way too easily.
Qi Stagnation — exhausted, but your body never unwinds.
Cold Stagnation — the cold settles into painful places.
Blood Stasis — the same stubborn aches keep returning.

Same cold feet. Completely different bodies. Completely different needs.

And this is why TCM isn’t about matching one symptom to one remedy.

It’s learning to recognize the pattern your body has been showing you all along.

Join me and over 100 campers at our up coming virtual TCM m Camp, we’re spending nine weeks learning how to identify these patterns and what to actually do once you recognize them.

Kind reminder: there’s so much more to learn about what NOT to do, instead of adding another never ending to do list to your already burnt out life.

Comment “MANUAL” to join the camp.

08/29/2026

Comment ”Meridian“ now to save $200.
Early bird limited to 10 seats.

It starts at the big toe.

It climbs the inner leg, through the knee and inner thigh, into the groin, and wraps the pelvis before reaching the lower abdomen.

The same channel that holds the emotion and the blood also runs through every joint you stand and walk on.

So when the feet run cold, when the foot loses its function and the chain above it stops loading, the circulation through the whole pelvic bowl slows with it.

Cold feet are not a small thing. They are the far end of the line that reaches the pelvis.

In men, the organs are external, and they belong to the realm of sinew. In women, the organs sit inside, governed more by the deeper reservoirs, the sea of blood that gathers in the pelvis.

What is internal is easy to ignore until it speaks.

The mood you can‘t shake. The period pain. The 3am waking. The cold feet. The low libido.

These 5 areas would easily send you to five different specialists. One channel already connected them, two thousand years ago.

That is what learning the meridians gives you. A way to read the whole person, not isolated symptoms.

This is one channel.

Twelve run through the body. A 60-hour training maps them onto living movement, not charts to memorise.

Hong Kong. 2-8 Nov. 🇭🇰

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