Mai Elements

Mai Elements All healing is self-healing.
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05/29/2026

I’m still a little like her.

I love understanding things. I love getting to the bottom of why I feel the way I feel, tracing it all the way back. I’m not giving that up — it‘s how my mind works, and I like my mind.

But I also had to learn something that stung.

You can understand your pain completely and still feel nothing move. Not because you haven‘t understood enough — but because understanding is only one part of you doing the work, and you are not only your thoughts.

We‘re taught to treat the thinking mind and the body like two separate things. They were never separate. Your mind is always reading your body — how tense it is, the shape it’s bracing in — and then it feels and thinks from inside that shape. So the body isn‘t somewhere your feelings are hiding. It’s the whole vehicle you live and move in.

You can understand everything about the road and still go nowhere, because understanding the route was never the same as moving the car.

For years I sat in the driver‘s seat, retracing every wrong turn that brought me here. Where it started, who did what, why I am the way I am. And understanding the road behind you matters — but no amount of staring into the rear-view mirror has ever moved a car forward.

You can know every mile you’ve driven and still be parked in the exact same place, engine cold.

So if you‘re tired of understanding yourself and changing nothing, here’s where I‘d start — not even by trying to feel, but start with the shape your body is holding, because that you can actually do:

Notice the jaw.
Most of us hold it tight without knowing.
Let it unclench.

Drop the shoulders.
Feel how far up they’ve been living.

Let one breath go all the way down, past the chest, into the belly — and let it out slowly.

That bracing is the wall. And when the shape softens, even a little, what it’s been holding finally has somewhere to move.

Sometimes that‘s tears.
Sometimes it’s just more room to breathe.

Come back to this vehicle — the only vessel that will ever carry us toward the kind of future we’re aching for. The one that’s warm, and bright, and soft.

05/16/2026

There is a conversation no one in the healing world wants to have.

That some of what we are carrying was simply too big.

Too big for the children we were.
Too big for the adults we became.

Too big, sometimes, even for everything we have access to now. The teachers. The practices. The books. The tools. The careful and beautiful life we have built around understanding ourselves.

There are people walking around looking radiant, accomplished, beloved, who still wake up some mornings with a body that knows something is wrong before the mind catches up. Who still flinch at a certain tone, a certain silence, a certain shape of the day. Who have done so much work, and still meet the old thing waiting for them in the doorway.

For a long time we are taught that this means we are failing at healing. That if we just kept going, kept practicing, kept becoming, eventually the wound would be gone.

That one day we would wake up and she wouldn’t be there anymore. That healing meant becoming someone the thing never happened to.

Some of us were handed something at the start of our lives, or in the middle of them, that we will be working with for a very long time. No amount of becoming impressive, accomplished, or “healed-looking” makes that weight disappear.

What has been true, in my own quiet way, is this.

She does not need to be deleted.
She needs to be met.

She does not need to be cured.
She needs to be companioned.

The moment we stop asking her to leave, the moment we stop treating her existence as proof that we are broken, something begins to soften that no amount of doing ever could.

If you are someone quietly carrying something the world keeps telling you should already be gone…

The fact that you are still here. Still soft. Still trying. Still reading something like this. That is not a sign the healing failed.

That is the healing.
🤍

05/16/2026

Emotion = energy in motion.

And every emotion lives in the body before it lives in your mind. You don’t think sadness first — you feel it in your chest. You don’t think anger — you feel the heat rise.

Which is why you can’t “release” an emotion you don’t want. Energy can never be erased. It can only be transformed from one form into another.

So instead of trying to make anger disappear, give it a portal:
→ Tighten your fists with awareness
→ Push against a wall like you mean it
→ Go hiking in spring and scream your throat raw until you feel like you might die from it
→ Dance. Bike. Throw clowns at the arcade (my favorite) 🎯

In Chinese medicine, the Liver governs anger and resentment. In modern language, part of what we call the “Liver system” overlaps with the autonomic nervous system — and the Liver opens to the eyes. Which is why eye movement practices (EMDR, peripheral gaze, looking at the horizon) are now considered one of the most powerful nervous system regulation tools.

Eastern and Western frameworks keep saying the same thing in different languages.

For me, the harder one to move isn’t anger — it’s resentment. They’re the same emotion on two ends of a spectrum: one explodes, one suppresses. Both need the same medicine — full body movement with the eyes involved. Hiking. Cycling.

Looking around instead of looking down. Arcade games where my hands, eyes, and feet are all online at once.
(My arcade removed the DDR machine and now I have something more to grieve on 😭)

Emotion isn’t mystical. It’s biology, anatomy, and energ.

05/13/2026

I am not ashamed to admit that I have been the clown in every crowd I’ve ever stood in.

I am also not ashamed to admit that it took me years, and a kind of quiet shock in hindsight, to realize that this was never just a personality trait. It was a coping mechanism. It was, quite literally, how I survived.

I mean. With that much of practice, I genuinely believe I was born funny 😮‍💨😂

I was once asked what my spirit animal was, I was a bit too young and not entirely understanding the question, I answered with the only name that had ever felt like a mirror, Robin Williams, my spirit animal is Robin Williams… (ok now I’m crying in a coffee shop 🥺)

The loneliness of the clown is not the loneliness of being alone.

It is the loneliness of being seen for a version of yourself you can never put down, in front of people you can never quite let see the rest.

It is, in many ways, the loneliest kind of loneliness there is. And it is also one that almost no one talks about — because the people inside it are too good at making everyone else feel un-lonely to be recognised as lonely themselves.

Loneliness is now being called an epidemic.

There is a phrase in Chinese medicine: 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗿𝘆 𝗵𝗶𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗻 𝘀𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗼𝘄, 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗾𝗶 𝗼𝗳 𝗹𝗶𝗳𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗯𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗽𝘀 𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺.

The loudest moment of your laughter when you didn’t really mean it is often the moment the deepest part of your qi has gone quiet.

What truly softens a constricted liver, settles a restless heart, and lets the qi begin moving again is something almost embarrassingly simple:

Being your real self, in front of someone you trust, inside a room that has finally become safe.

Not having to be funny. Not having to hold the temperature of the table. Not having to wrap the heaviest things in a punchline before they’re allowed to be said out loud.

Just — breathing, telling the truth, being seen.

It takes tremendous time, a painful amount of practice to stay, stay you stay real stay true…

Well, no one can do the work for you,
yet I’m here with you.

Yours,
the funny Mai 🍜

05/10/2026

We thought 𝗲𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝗴𝘂𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 meant staying calm.
Staying happy. Staying fine.

Well, at least that’s what I believed, and what I tried to train myself into in the early stages of my healing journey.

Here’s what nobody told me, and what took me a good few years to finally realize:

Emotional regulation was never about building a life so curated and protected that nothing uncomfortable could ever reach you. (Which, by the way, basically turned me into an avoidant.)

That’s not healing. That’s a bubble.
And the second the bubble cracks, you’re back at zero.

⛷️

This video was captured while I was snowboarding alone in the French Alps. The last gondola down shut as a blizzard rolled in.

I was trapped on the mountain, cold, with almost zero visibility, and the only way off was a long blue run I’d hesitate to take on a good day.

Old me would have spiraled. Oh s**t, oh s**t, oh s**t.

But standing at the top, something was different. The fear was there. And underneath it: I know my skill, I’m not good but I shall not say for sure I cannot do this.

I can do this slow.
I rode it down.
Safe and sound. (But very very tired and I won’t lie I felt fearful in the midst of it)

Not because I was being blindly optimistic. Not because I’d manifested a positive mindset. But because all the work I’d done on my nervous system had finally added up to something real:

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗱𝗶𝗱𝗻’𝘁 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗳𝘆 𝗺𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘁.

And that moment also rewired my nervous system with a new lesson.

We can survive even when it’s scary. The feeling is inevitable. The reaction doesn’t have to be.

That’s what I’ve been building this whole time.

Not so you stop feeling bad.
So that feeling bad stops running your life.

The blizzard will still come.
I just wish you to feel comfort to ride it down.

05/09/2026

My first therapy session happened during the deepest depression of my lifetime, when long Covid was drowning me. Because of that strange time in human history, my first few sessions happened by back and forth text messages.

I don’t know if you think differently when you talk and when you text, but I do, like I’m talking but from a distance…?

And in the middle of typing, for the first time in my life, i get to really see/read the story too… I started to doubt the story I had been telling everybody since the beginning of time. That though I had a really bumpy childhood, I was well taken care of. That I was loved. That everybody around me treated me well. That I was adored. That I was well fed. That I had what I needed.

Until a point my whole body went:

… hold on. This isn’t true…..!!!!! IT WAS ALL FILTERED!!!!! Everything, and everyone in the story was given a pink bubblegum like filter.

Yet with a hindsight I think I needed it to be true. I needed to believe my childhood wasn’t that different because admitting otherwise felt like admitting I was too much, too broken, too far from the rest of the world to ever come back.

And the warm, easy, endlessly understanding girl I became was the architecture I built around all of it, so no one would ever have to know.

That’s what makes healing so hard.

It isn’t the behaviours, it’s the identity.

You spend your whole life guarding and protecting and defending the soft one, the good one, the one everyone can lean on, because she is the only version of you the world has ever rewarded.

And then one day your body tells you the truth your mind wouldn’t: the autoimmune disease, the dissociation, the depression, the exhaustion that no amount of sleep can fix.

The defending was costing you everything.

You have to be willing to let her slip. Knowing that the love you received while wearing her was never fully love of you, because nobody had ever met the rest.

If this found you today, please send it to the friend who is always the warm one. The one everyone leans on. The one nobody ever asks if she is okay.

Tell them they are not too much.
Tell them they need to be held too.

🤍

05/07/2026

I used to do that too.

The “you deserve happiness,” all the soft little fixes. Only later I realized I was invalidating something so deeply human. Sadness, grief, loss, heaviness, that slow ache of falling apart…

None of it is negative. It’s human. It’s part of life.

I actually thought about whether I should post this darker part of my healing journey. But then… what’s the point of only showing you the healed version of me and completely removing the part of my life that touches yours. The real work I’m still doing on myself.

Fawning is what kept me survived as a little girl: overpleasing, saying yes when I mean no, performing for others ease, smoothing things over to avoid conflict, abandoning needs to keep someone else regulated, apologizing reflexively…

Until I freeze into an inward-facing collapse, that my dorsal vagal shutdown…

I’ve been in this cycle for more than 20 years, knowing more than enough I no longer have to abandoned myself to be protected.

… and this is exactly what I’m grieving lately that with this much of healing I have done, I drift back to fawning again… until I shutdown like what I’ve described…

Yes, I can name every symptom of mine, and yes life has been thriving in ways it wasn’t before I started the inner work.

But putting in all the healing work doesn’t mean immune. Life will send you tests, tests that struck us hard, very intense, very suffocating… and being soft and open about it is part of my healing. Because expression is the antidote of depression.

If you’re doing the work too: understand that the body keeps the score long before the mind catches up.

And sometimes… when we’re under this kind of stress, all we really need is to take care of the basics.

Sleep a lot. Eat to what the body needs, not what we think we should. Walk in the sun, talk to people you trusted…

Don’t force the healing… just live.

I have the right to grieve for as long as I need. While gently giving my nervous system a softer, new response…

You too.

So… do you have two minutes to stay present and grieve with me?

🤍

05/07/2026

The third option: Build a body that can hold a different response

You can leave the relationship, quit the job, but if you walk into the next one with the same nervous system, the same person shows up wearing a different face.

You can “change” your beliefs, journal it out, affirm yourself daily… but the moment that voice raises, an email comes in, some names lights up your phone, your body still floods with the exact same chemicals it did when you were 7. (If your body is stuck in the same tension you can’t really change your beliefs…)

Because here’s what we were never taught: the trigger isn’t living in your mind. It’s living in your tissue.

A multi-center study found 63.8% of IBS patients had adverse childhood experience... research also shows higher emotional suppression in those with fibromyalgia, where emotional expression is negatively correlated with fatigue.

The body is carrying what the mind hasn’t processed. A nervous system wired by old patterns expresses itself as chronic illness, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, chronic gut dysfunction.

This is no longer in question... So why does almost every approach to healing skip the body entirely?

… most emotional work is engineered in reverse.

The neural nodule has to soften before your nervous system can receive anything new. Your ribs have to find space before your breath can reach the places it’s been locked out of for years. Your pelvis has to remember its lightness before your body can stop bracing against a fear it no longer needs to carry.

Only then can insight land. Only then can mindset hold. Only then can the heart open without armor.

Every person’s path through that conversation is different.
What remains the same is the map, the map is the biology of feelings.

Which nerve. Which breath. Which organ. Which knot. Which release... that you can finally learn to read what you don’t have the language for.

Drop a “Camp” to join us on a 5-week expedition into the map of your heart.

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