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Mai Elements All healing is self-healing.

10/04/2026

Chinese medicine does not have a neat equation that says shame belongs to one organ and guilt belongs to another.

It asks a different question:

What happens to the whole person when an emotion becomes a way of living?

Years of hiding.
Years of judging yourself.
Years of thinking you should be smaller, prettier, different.
Years of moving because you feel guilty, or not moving because you do not want your body to be seen.

Eemotion and physiology were never treated as completely separate conversations in Chinese medicine. Emotional states can affect the movement of Qi. Rumination and self-reproach can be understood through, prolonged thought can bind the movement of Qi.

So when I talk about “weight,” I am no longer talking only about kilograms.

I mean the weight that follows us into the way we eat, move and rest.

The weight that follows us into relationships.
Into work.
Into how much space we take.
Into how visible we allow ourselves to become.

To me, the other side of self-hatred was never self-love.

In fact, asking someone who has spent decades hating their body, their personality, the way they take up space, to suddenly “love yourself” can feel almost brutal.

I couldn’t.

And thankfully, I didn’t need to.

My version of stopping self-hatred only required compassion.

The same compassion I was somehow always capable of giving everyone else.

I didn’t have to look in the mirror and convince myself that everything was beautiful.
I didn’t have to wake up loving every part of who I was.
I didn’t even have to believe all the nice things people told me about myself.

I just had to stop participating in my own rejection.

Sometimes it is recognizing what was handed to her, what she unknowingly handed to you, and becoming compassionate enough with yourself to decide:

I can understand where this came from without carrying it any further.

Some things can end with us.

Love, Mai 🍜

09/22/2026

This is me processing grief in front of your very eyes.

Grief lives in the Lung.

A feeling is physical. It’s somatic.
An emotion is the meaning we’ve given to that sensation.

Grief is the name.

The feeling is the cold pull in the chest, the downward sink, the rib cage that won’t fully open. That is the real thing, and most people never touch it.

Isnt it true you’ve skip to the story and live there for years, analyzing it, talking about it, understanding it, while the tightness under the ribs never gets seen.

I haven’t been able to eat much lately. I’ve felt a little dissociated. I knew it was grief spreading through the body. And when I noticed I couldn’t even get food down, I didn’t force myself to keep functioning.

I went to the mat and did what I showed you. I wanted to be with the energy sitting in my chest, in the Lung, in the Metal element.

What rose was grief moving along the Lung. Metal moves down and in. It contracts, it descends, and grief moves the same way. So when the chest caves and the shoulders fold and the breath goes shallow, do not be afraid of it. That is not your body breaking down. That is grief moving along the exact line it was always going to travel.

And only in stillness does the cycle get to finish.

You stay with the feeling, you don’t run from it, you don’t judge it, until the physical sensation slowly fades. When it fades, the cycle is complete. And your nervous system receives a new thread. I am safe, even while moving through this.

This is why I keep asking you to practice. To stay in the body. Not to feel good for an afternoon. To build that sense of safety, one cycle at a time.

Healing is not a straight line. It is a spiral. I won’t promise you that two or three minutes of this makes grief disappear for good. It will come back.

Discomfort in life is unavoidable. But every time you stay in the stillness long enough to let the energy finish its cycle, you widen how much you can hold.

Freedom in the body was never a life with no grief. It is a body that can carry the wave when it comes, and still remember how to breathe.

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.

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

Enrollment opens late September 2026.

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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?

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

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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 🩵

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