Nakba Day Reflections

In advance of Nakba Day, I was reflecting on my learning journey about the Zionist occupation of Palestine. As a result, I made a very loose timeline to honor its significance in my life, and to encourage others to keep learning about Palestine, taking action to stop the genocide, and talking about it in their …

Dialectics of Liberation: Gentleness and Resistance for Endurance

Summary: In this post, I make my case for gentleness to exist alongside resistance. I provide dialectics that give us room to embody both of these qualities. At the end, I have compiled a dozen sets of links for us to take action -- I invite you to choose one. Photo by Holly Booth The …

“A Doctor’s Benevolence” | 医者天下心

This translation is dedicated to the doctors, patients, and families massacred at Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical complex and central hospital in the Gaza Strip, located in Gaza City, Palestine. 医者天下仁心惆怅 只求人无病檀木为匣尘生药方 生死各有命为何有了心怀天下的胸襟 问天上南星任凭花开花败落树影斑驳 来时雾散尽 yī zhě tiān xià rén xīn chóu chàng zhī qiú rén wú bìngtán mù wéi xiá chén shēng yào fāng …

Personal Foundations in Traditional Chinese Medicine: My Lineage, Interest, and Experience

Image by: Luna Hu Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM or 中医) is one of the world's oldest medical systems, which focuses on treating and preventing disease by restoring the balance of qi in the bodymind. My TCM Lineage Chinese Medicine was taught through the generations (家传) on both sides of my family. However, my great-great-grandparents’ generation …

The Paradigm Shift We Need For Understanding and Preventing Chronic Disease

Inspired from a thread started by Kathy Eagar, quoted with permission Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya A paradigm shift is needed for chronic disease. They are thought to be caused and prevented by lifestyle factors and individual decisions... But many “mild” infectious diseases can have devastating impacts after the acute phase, even years to decades later. …

Blueprint for Allyship: Health Update and How You Can Help (pw)ME

Hoping, praying, expecting, wishing, manifesting, longing for folks to pay attention to this post and read to the very end! Help! This is a call to action and a cry for solidarity. ME advocates cannot sustainably do this alone, so here’s a blueprint for allyship. See my previous posts if you think ME is “me” …

2022: Years that Answer

Content Note: At the beginning of the Gregorian year, people in our generation tend to show off the highlight reels of their achievements and social lives. For those of us who have largely spent the last three years in isolation, this can be especially challenging to witness. We are simultaneously experiencing a mass disabling event …

When I Talk About the Pandemic, I am Ghosted

People get awkward about it. They leave me on read, they stop engaging, and I feel like I am speaking to the void. I know it makes people uncomfortable, because we're in the era of the great forgetting. We want to forget that the world ever saw covid disrupt our lives, and the trauma and uncertainty during those "unprecedented times." It might be easier to imagine that we are safe and can go about our lives without masks and without caution than to accept the opposite. Yet, even common sense tells us that ignoring something doesn't make it go away.

Samsara, Fasting, and Eating Disorders

CW: discussion of eating disorders, weight loss behaviors, effects of colonization, religion/religious fasting1573 words, ~12 minutes At this point in my journey, I find more insights into understanding my experience through non-Western frameworks. In a respectful way, the Buddha could be considered an early icon for the eating disorder experience. (He’s iconic in many other …

100+ songs to sustain a movement — a playlist for the streets

Favianna's iconography of the migrating monarch butterfly is a symbol of immigrant rights. Calvin's project, Wakanda Dream Labs, bridges fandom with activism, because popular culture and the dreams of Afrofuturism are the foundations for Black liberation. In Poetry is Not a Luxury, Audre Lorde wrote that "[poetry] is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action."