October 1, 2024 Homecoming – An Impromptu PoemI left my hometown when I was young and came back in my old age. Although my local accent has not changed, the hair on my temples has turned gray.When the children in my hometown saw me, no one recognized me. They smiled and asked me: “Guest, where did you come from?” – He Zhi Zhang, written in 744, Tang Dynasty Dear Friends, How have you been this month? This past Friday night, I attended Anu Gupta’s book launch for Breaking Bias, and it was a profound experience. His deep exploration of various biases resonated deeply with me, prompting reflection on my own immigrant journey and my biases surrounding rootedness and stability. When I arrived in NYC at age 12 from China, my family moved six times within the first three years. I attended fifth grade in Brooklyn, sixth grade in Chinatown, and returned to Brooklyn for seventh and eighth grades. Each school defined graduation years differently, so I graduated three times in four years. This instability continued through high …

September 1, 2024 “Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants How are you all? I haven’t led a hike in a couple of years.  For our upcoming hike, Sebene wrote these beautiful questions for exploration: – How do we heed the call of indigenous communities who insist that land acknowledgements are not enough?– How do we forge a connection to the Earth that goes beyond ideas of ownership and extraction (even recreational extraction) to ones of reciprocity and stewardship? – How do we cultivate a restoration of relationship to nature?  As I am contemplating these questions, asking permission and making offerings come to mind as a starting point.  I first encountered the practice when I was learning to give tree meditation and solo retreat instruction from Johann Robbins, who learned it from …

August 11, 2024 “ My father would always say, people who practice martial arts go through three stages: seeing yourself, seeing the world, seeing all living beings.” – The Grandmaster, film by Wong Kar Wai How are you all? Last Sunday I led a sunset meditative walk to the Brooklyn Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge Park. Just two hours before our meeting at 6:30pm, a fierce thunderstorm had engulfed New York. I hesitated for a moment, wondering if I should cancel and reschedule. Yet, another voice within reminded me, “We practice in all weathers. Life isn’t just made of sunny days.” With the weather forecast predicting that the rain would likely clear up, I decided to proceed as planned. As it turned out, the rain had mostly stopped by the time we gathered, leaving the air refreshingly crisp. As we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, we were greeted by a magnificent rainbow stretching between the Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge. It even evolved into a double rainbow, shimmering in the dusk light—a rare and magical sight in New York. Throughout the …

April 20, 2024 “Love yourself.  Then forget it. Then, love the world.” – Mary Oliver How have you been?!  It’s been a while since I last wrote.  Where do I start?  I spent last year teaching the Soul-Centric Midlife classes and it’s been a fulfilling journey.  Exploring the common challenges we face while fostering a sense of community has filled me with profound gratitude. It’s touching to witness the bonds formed through shared tears and laughter, as we support each other on our human journeys. By the end of last year, we have cultivated a strong community that continues to thrive, meeting monthly this year.  For this year, I am excited to share that I am offering a 6-month course on ecodharma that is a dream come true.  It combines nature meditation, dharma practices around the climate crisis, and learning about regenerative practices from an urban farm.  Living close to the seasons and developing an intimate relationship with the Earth is central to understanding and responding to the climate crisis.  My hope is that we can build a …

February 2023 This weekend I hosted my first AAPI community gathering and it was really moving to hear the shared experiences in a community setting.  There is something really comforting and supportive to hearing our individual diaspora experiences mirrored in a larger group.  Afterward, we shared homemade rice dumplings and baked goods in a potluck – communal sharing warmed our hearts and spirit.   And now I am excited to build another community – for those who are going through changes in midlife.  The Soulcentric Mid-Life class registration is now open.   Back in December, I read a long quote by Paul Weinfield, an NYC meditation teacher I hadn’t heard before.  When people talked about Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journeys,” he said, they think of heroes slaying dragons and conquering obstacles, and returning home to share success and wisdom after a long journey.  When very often, in real life, by the time people come to midlife, the dragons have slayed us, where we have experienced challenges and failures, and life hasn’t turned out the way we envisioned it …

January, 2023 “I believe we each carry true wilderness, and thanks to that wildness, our lives need not be determined by our biological inheritance or our prior experience.  Perhaps our lives are most creative and fulfilling when we have accessed and embodied that wildness, our deepest individual potentials and destines for which we were born…our souls.” – Bill Plotkin, “Nature and the Human Soul” Happy New Year, friends! How have you been?!  I took a year of sabbatical with this newsletter – miss you all and hope you have been well!   Coming out of the isolation of the pandemic in 2022, I needed to reengage with life in the physical world and spend less time digitally.  Revenge travel was a term I learned that describes people who travel extensively due to the sense of confinement during the pandemic years. And revenge travel I did in 2022 – I hiked in Yosemite, climbed a tree net in a cloud forest of Costa Rica, journeyed to the volcanos and virgin forests of the Pacific Northwest, and …

January 2022 What we once deeply loved we can never lose,for all that we loved deeply becomes a part of us.” – Helen Keller How has your holiday season been?  As we passed the winter solstice and sunlights gradually returning to a longer duration in the northern hemisphere, are you taking in the light and warmth, even if it’s a little a day? With the latest Covid wave, an in-person retreat that I was planning to attend moved to online last minute.  After the initial disappointment, I ended up appreciating the richness of an at-home retreat, especially when the conditions are right when I was able to practice in solitude.  I saw my patterns more vividly and clearly since they were even more evident in the home environment.  And I saw the beauty and richness of my neighborhood in a way never before.   As I was doing walking meditation in a city park nearby, even though I have walked, played, meditated in this park in the last 15 years, for the first time, these small plaques on the back of the …

November, 2021 “Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.” ― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants How have you been this fall? One question that I have been pondering since the pandemic is how do we build communities? Zoom definitely helps when often in-person connections are not possible or risky, especially in large groups.  Yet there is something intangible that we can’t quite recreate through online connections – the nonverbal cues, the small talks that help us understand each other’s life, the spontaneous ideas that come from casually chatting and so on.   With that in mind, I’d like to focus my energy and time to build communities and connections through a year-long in-person course in 2022.   As many of you know, climate resilience is a topic that is dear to my heart. I would love to go through a …

August 1, 2021 I thought the earthremembered me, shetook me back so tenderly, arrangingher dark skirts, her pocketsfull of lichens and seeds. I sleptas never before, a stoneon the riverbed, nothingbetween me and the white fire of the starsbut my thoughts, and they floatedlight as moths among the branchesof the perfect trees. All nightI heard the small kingdoms breathingaround me, the insects, and the birdswho do their work in the darkness. All nightI rose and fell, as if in water, grapplingwith a luminous doom. By morningI had vanished at least a dozen timesinto something better. – Mary Oliver, Sleeping in the Forest How have you been this summer? I just came back from teaching the 10-day ecodharma retreat at the Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center and my heart was full from the journey.  I was deeply moved by the vulnerability and wisdom of yogis who wanted to do the work of facing climate crisis and did so courageously. During this retreat, I slept two nights outside alone without a tent for the first time in my life.  It was such a …