NHP Goes Local: QT-Viet Collective

The Navajo Healing Project (NHP) started seven years ago. It began with a friendship and an exchange of healing. Over time the healing expanded with pop-up clinics offering free and accessible Chinese medicine treatments to the Navajo community. In an attempt to make the medicine more sustainable an internship program developed and NHP is now on its fourth cycle of year-long internships. We currently have 10 new Indigenous interns as well as 5 returning interns from previous years studying the profound teachings of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). And now, this year, we have an experimental local cohort of 10 interns from the QT-Viet Cafe Collective studying TCM in that same style! These two cohorts are currently learning and sharing with each other and I can already tell, it will be a powerful year of healing. How did all this come about?

Over the years, in developing curriculum for self-study and self-care through TCM and seeing the amazing results, I realized that the NHP way of study, sharing and healing is also much needed locally. There is so much that we can do with TCM’s profound healing outlook in the way of self-care and community care. For a couple years now, I dreamt of developing a local curriculum, but it felt like a distant dream imagining that it would be some time before I could find the time or resources for such an ambitious project.

Earlier this year, a dear patient of mine approached me for healing support for their community. As I thought about what might be possible, I decided to take a leap of faith and develop a local cohort. It felt like the right response to the times—more healing.

We’re only at the beginning with this budding local cohort of interns, but it’s already feeling radically healing and full of potential. I am learning so much from the beautiful, colorful and varied individuals that make up both cohorts and feeling a profound support from the Universe. It is our intention to learn healing, allow healing, be healing and share healing collectively.

If you would like to support the Navajo Healing Project, please donate using the link below. We can also use massage tables for our many new interns!

In Community,

Snake Year Musing

Hello beloved BCA Community,

It’s been a long while since I’ve mused with you in writing. The beginning of Spring and Snake year has gotten me in a musing mood and it feels good to reconnect as I’ve been laying low since last Fall, when Dragon year (last year) petered me out. 

The second half of last year was the first time I wondered if I was experiencing what people call burnout. I’ve treated burnout, I’ve counseled on it, I theoretically understand it, but I haven’t really experienced it. I get tired and then I rest and at some point my energy and connection for things return. Sometimes it takes a day and sometimes it takes weeks but it has never been as prolonged as it was last Fall and Winter. At some point, I wondered if it was time to retire. It wasn’t so much that I was exhausted all the time, just that I noticed I didn’t have the umpf, the spark, the joy to the things that I always loved doing: the books I was writing, the crafts I had been obsessed with, the podcasts I was making, the projects I was involved in, the activism and revolution I always felt was at the heart of my work.

It was at this point, my patient, Barry, invited me out to join him in plein air painting (or landscape painting). I have never painted in my life so I said yes, why not? Maybe it will be fun. First time out painting, and I was hooked. It was all I wanted to do. My energy came back but only for painting. As fun as it was, something felt amiss; I didn’t trust my new found verve for painting. I had the sneaking suspicion it was compensation for something. But what? And why? 

While out painting with Barry one day, I wondered out loud if my exclusive excitement for painting somehow felt related to working too much. He told me that burnout isn’t just working too much, but the feeling that all your hard work doesn’t bear fruit. I considered what he said, and I can see how this was indeed what I was experiencing: a growing subtle feeling of fruitlessness that started to plague me last year. I could also see that maybe it was and is a collective feeling of fatigue, despair and doubt. In this political environment, I’m sure many of us are wondering if all the hard work we’ve put in actually matters. I am generally a positive person, things don’t weigh me down too easily, but something was happening just below my consciousness because I was getting tired, and the things I was putting energy into didn’t seem to bear the fruit I was expecting.

As I thought about why I loved painting so much, a few things came to light. It is a still, silent and profound activity. I realized that in all the busy-ness and distraction of Dragon year, I had lost sight of the things that painting provided me: joy, perspective, silence, presence and Nature. Painting became my time to be present with Nature and let Nature’s perspective inform me, to let all the responsibilities and busy-ness fade to the background and create something beautiful out of presence, silence, attention and color. As Barry said, “painting is your acupuncture.”

I painted obsessively through Fall and Winter, and as Dragon year came to a close and Snake year began two weeks ago, I started to feel a familiar energy come back to me for all the things I loved and felt disconnected from in these past months. I also started to see the buds and fruits of efforts and endeavors planted some time ago—buds from plants that I was fearing were dead—blossoming.

Last week, we began our fourth year of recruitment for the Navajo Healing Project (NHP) and this year has gotten an overwhelming response which is surprising after a difficult and challenging Dragon year. I recently received my first request for a wholesale order for my Spirit of Spring book :) and we had a joyful and food-filled New Year’s dim sum gathering of our lovely BCA crew which included a few fresh new faces who joined BCA this past year. 

In thinking about all the support I continue to receive from the community of BCA practitioners and patients—on the daily—I realize that BCA is the tree of healing planted 17 years ago and tended to with the care of the community. It is a well established tree that bears much fruit in the world, in me, in patients, and in all lives that it has touched (even and perhaps especially through the most challenging of times). 

Happy Lunar New Year of the Wood Snake to you my dear BCA community! Snake year is a good year for engaging in your version of painting. A still, silent, and present activity which allows for introspection and creativity. It is a year to reflect deeply on all that Dragon year kicked up; to rest and strategize wisely so that when it is time to “strike” or act, the timing will be just right. It is also a good year to shed patterns that deplete you or go against your innate nature; a good year to move into a more authentic version of who you are and to trust the good fruits of anything you’ve planted in the name of healing, joy and connection.

In Community,

Spirit of Spring Book: An NHP Inspiration!

Dear Community,

I’d like to update you about the Navajo Healing Project, a project dear to my heart that continues to grow and thrive in unexpected and beautiful ways. For those of you who have followed me on this journey, you know that the project has roots dating back 7 years and that the internship program started during the pandemic. For those of you who have contributed with heart, hands, donations, and more, I hope you can feel that your contribution at the time was what was exactly needed for us to be here today. And as of today, we have collectively given more than 1,000 free treatments on Dinétah and trained 7 practitioners–Christa, Kaene, Esther, Eirena, Nizhoni, Keisha and Karla. We are about to onboard a new cohort of at least 5 more in the coming weeks. (I’m rattling off modestly impressive numbers for a small project simply because we are accustomed to measurements of success in a certain way, but there really isn’t a number large enough to convey the extent of healing that this project has ignited in the world.) True healing is a miraculous force that brings everything, everyone together as one.

To my BCA patients who have benefitted from working with me, you should know (and many of you do know) that what I do is inextricably connected to what I have learned about Medicine from working in the Diné community. And the work continues to ripple outward.

I want to let you know that in connection to this project, I am excited to publish my first book: The Spirit of Spring: Timeless Chinese Wisdom for Everyday Living and Healing. It is a book about you and Spring and about living in harmony with the world around us.

This book began with the intention of writing a manual for my incoming NHP intern cohort. While writing, I realized that a “manual” is not consistent with my teaching or writing style. It also dawned on me that the information I wanted to communicate may be helpful to countless more people. My Spirit of Spring book is now expected to be birthed (published) in the coming weeks :) I hope you will get it and pass it on to all your people.

For those of you who would like to continue to support the NHP project with a donation of $50 or more, I would like to thank you by sending you an advanced, signed copy of my Spring Book, hot off the press. My vision for the future of NHP is ambitious and completely attainable with your support. Thank you <3

Click the link below to see preview images of the The Spirit of Spring book you will receive when you donate :)

In Community,