Bao Bao Philosophy
My coaching and practice philosophy is deeply important to me. I arrive here feeling afraid the words I choose won’t reflect the depth and conviction I feel in my soma. I fear being misunderstood and/or misinterpreting myself. I fear giving an incomplete representation of who I am, who my ancestral lineage is, what we stand for, and who I am becoming. At the same time, I strongly believe that all being, all knowledge can and ought to be emergent. I sit in this contradiction -- one piece of myself feeling paralyzed in fear of publishing something incomplete and another piece revering the power of emergent knowing. Ironically, and perhaps perfectly, the concept of emergence is at the root of my teaching and coaching philosophy. So here’s to noticing my worries and continuing on anyway. This is me embracing my own emergent journey and hoping you’ll join me.
At the root of my coaching and practice philosophy rests the concept of emergence, which is the process of becoming, of coming into being. I rely on the concepts of abundance, nurturance, critical consciousness, wholeness, humanizing emotions, and embodied change to foster emergence.
We need a sense of abundance to know there is enough time, resources, space, capacity, and support to continue becoming even when things get tough. Abundance grounds us in our spaces and on the lands we reside. We must nurture one another and ourselves to sustain ourselves as we pursue emergence. To be cared for in our growth as a collective is to foster resilience, hope, and motivation to keep going. Critical consciousness helps us question, challenge, engage, explore, and discover aspects of ourselves, our communities, our systems, and the broader world around us. In our becoming, it is vital that we continue to center our wholeness, integrating our entire somas into each step. Our bodies, minds, spirits, emotions, sensations are all intertwined within our individual selves and also woven into the collective. In seeking liberatory emergence, we humanize ourselves and others. I’m here to assist clients as they reconnect with their aliveness.
Emergence
Emergence isn’t an end state to strive for; it’s the exact opposite; a dynamic, ever-evolving, process of change. At my core, I find the most fulfillment in being present in my own emergence and in witnessing others’ emergence. The beauty of emergence is that it can be applied to many vectors. People, knowledge, emotions, sensations, social movements are all emergent. They are all changing with us. Finality does not exist in any of the realms and ought not to. If we decide that we know everything about any particular subject or any human experience, we close off opportunities for further growth and experience. Humans have the capacity to continue changing and becoming for their entire lives. Knowledge shifts and is created all the time. We will never know everything. Our emotions and sensations constantly flow when we let them. If we can approach our experiences with curiosity, we are limitless.
Abundance
Abundance is the principle I struggle most with personally. As a child of immigrants that grew up at poverty income-level in a homogenous white town, I grew up living in survival mode. Every decision I made was done in scarcity and lack. I got “good” grades so I could get into a “good” college, and get a stable well-paying job. I laughed at and made racist and misogynistic jokes to fit in. I internalized the idea that my worth was tied to my productivity, achievements, and proximity to whiteness. None of my actions were driven from a place of abundance or knowing that things would be okay -- that there fundamentally was enough for everyone to be okay. I am only now beginning to wrap my soma around the concept of living from a place of abundance. This principle of abundance stems from Indigenous philosophy, Daoism, and Buddhism. Robin Wall Kimmerer describes a reciprocal giving economy that results from gratitude of the land that provides enough for all and a sense of abundance. In knowing that there is enough for everyone, we give when we can and receive when others give. We recognize that we each have things to offer whether they are material or not and we accept each others’ gifts with humble gratitude. When we live from a place of abundance, we heal our interdependence. I bring the principle of abundance into my coaching by recognizing that our current predatory capitalist society can make it feel impossible to live from a place of abundance and challenge myself and fellow learners to imagine what decisions we can make to move towards abundance. How can we all contribute towards mutual care? How does imagining one has enough, shift the decisions we make and build towards collective liberation?
Bào Bào
When I was young, I used to stretch my arms out to adults and say “bào bào” when I’d want them to pick me up and carry me. In Chinese, Bào Bào means hug or to be held. A key aspect of my somatic opening process was holding myself. I find it easy to nurture others, but to turn that care, affection, and reverence towards myself and to accept that I was worthy of my own bào bàos has been and continues to be a challenge. I am currently learning how to accept care, love, and patience. I want to help others in their processes of accepting nurturance too. We must nurture one another and ourselves to sustain ourselves as we pursue collective liberation. To be cared for in our growth as a collective is to foster resilience, hope, and motivation to keep going. I apply this principle of nurturance in the way I show up in space, the learning resources I offer, and the practices I encourage. Nurturance extends beyond well-being. We also nurture our abilities to trust our ancestral knowledge--to validate ways of knowing that have historically been invalidated, to foster critical consciousness amid a culture and society that tries to marginalize some of us. We nurture our theoretical ideologies, ways of knowing, and forms of resistance. We nurture our interdependence in our communities and solidarity among oppressed people. We nurture the courage, dedication, strength, and resilience to fight, rest, resist, and build. We must be intentional about our growth. We must actively nurture the empowerment of ourselves, our communities, our society, and our futures. It is in the love, care, and encouragement of nurturance that we contribute to the liberatory futures we deserve and need. Much of the inspiration behind this principle stems from the teachings of Fumiko Hayashida, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Staci K. Haines, Thi Bui, Grace Yoo, Thích Nhất Hạnh, and Resmaa Menakem.
Critical Consciousness
Asian Americans have been racialized to uphold oppressive systems and norms. The model minority myth seeks to dehumanize Asian Americans and limit our collective abilities to seek a liberatory future built in solidarity with fellow oppressed peoples. White-body supremacy, settler colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, ableism, compulsory heterosexuality, male supremacy, and neoliberalism all seek to exploit many of us so that a few can profit. We must nurture our critical consciousness as individuals, as a community, and as professionals so we can see past the distractions that steal focus away from contributing to our collective liberation. It is through critical consciousness that we can recognize the harm done by these systems of oppression and move towards healing.
I situate my work within the psychological framework of Radical Healing which is rooted in liberation psychology, Black psychology, ethnopolitical psychology, and intersectionality. Key scholars who influence this work include Paolo Freire, Lilian Comas Diaz, Isaac Prilleltensky, Shawn Ginwright, Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde. Through collaborative questioning, we can work together to build our critical consciousness, which allows us to radically dismantle what gets in the way of our liberatory emergence.
Wholeness
I have always been a sensitive person, but I learned to mask my sensitivity when I was young. My choice strategy was disassociating, mentally withdrawing from the emotions and situations. While effective, sometimes disassociating works too well and I can’t communicate with my body. On the outside, I appear to be here; my body is here. But inside, I am gone. I relied on this skill from childhood all the way through my adult career while working as a young, Asian American femme in tech. With every incident of harassment and microaggression, I nodded and pretended not to mind, but I was gone inside. I eventually got so good at disassociating and relied on it so much that I didn’t even realize I was doing it. Dissociating was my autopilot state. My conscious self didn’t realize I was doing this to myself, but my body felt the toll of self-betrayal.
For many of us, to succeed in the cis white settler heteropatriarchy, we had to make sacrifices to our beings. We had to turn off or ignore our gut feelings that told us when things were wrong, which signaled that we were not safe. We had to stay “quiet”, “respectful”, “nice”, “calm”, “composed”, and in “control” to stay in the good graces of people in power. We shut down or ignored feelings and emotions coursing through our bodies to dampen our pain from the violence we were subject to. We sacrificed our alignment with our whole selves. We separated our minds, spirit, emotions, feelings, and bodies to conform to the pathologizing and disintegrating Westernized understandings of our somas.
Our bodies, our minds, our spirits, and our emotions are integrated. They combine to create our whole selves. When our minds are off and away, stress can still enter our bodies. To pursue moments of liberation, we must both honor our protective mechanisms like dissociation and also expand our ability to intentionally choose to be fully integrated. We must be able to opt-in to experiencing the full range of emotions and feelings our somas provide us with. These sensations, thoughts, and moods provide us with critical information about our integrated well-being. They can guide us towards making choices that are in alignment with our values, our needs, and our longings. When we can hear not only our thoughts, but also our felt senses, our intuition, our emotions, we have the opportunity to be in alignment, which enables us to emerge in alignment as a whole being.
Humanizing Emotions
As a child of immigrants, I am uniquely positioned to be the holder of my parental dreams and sacrifices. This responsibility can be both a privilege and a burden. What an honor it is to be the generation where parental sacrifices are supposed to pay off and dreams are supposed to come to fruition. But also, what an immense amount of pressure there is to succeed. I know (only some of) the sacrifices my parents made to give their future generations the opportunity to succeed. Many of these immigrant parents, mine included, persevere through family separation, violence, poverty, the anxiety of almost being caught, and wondering if they will ever see their loved ones again in their journey to America.
As a child of these resilient parents, it is easy to compare the struggles they went through with my struggles and scoff. How can I honor my own struggles when it seems like my parents went through so much worse? For many second-generation Asian Americans, the answer is that we don’t. I know I didn’t create space to honor the feelings of grief, guilt, shame, weakness, inadequacy, and embarrassment that entered my soma when I struggled to achieve success while remembering the terrors my parents persevere through. I actively shoved my emotions deep down within me, hoping to contain them. I saw my parents do this and followed their modeling. This is how we survived and continue to survive.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this way of handling emotions. I don’t believe that holding in emotions or selectively paying attention to them is an inherently unhealthy behavior (unlike much of mainstream psychology). I see the power, resilience, and utility of choosing when to feel emotions. I value this skill in myself and others. That said, I believe in intentional choicefulness. Emotions are valuable sources of information that our soma passes down through many generations. Our somas, our emotions, our bodily wisdom can propel and motivate us. They can support and nurture us. They can bring us closer to one another. And of course, they can warn us when something is wrong. It is vital that we expand the options for how we interact with our bodies for the sake of being capable of intentionally using ALL of the wisdom we are given.
I would like to humanize intense emotions in POC bodies. I want to be a witness to anyone who wants their emotional selves to be seen and held in community. I want to invite BIPOC people to witness the depth and complexity of emotion in our bodies. I want to help others connect the dots between emotions and the systemic societal forces that influence our abilities to thrive.
Embodied Change
The principle of embodied change I bring with me into my coaching stems from Staci K. Haines’s The Politics of Trauma, somatics with social analysis, Resmaa Menakem, somatic abolitionism, cultural somatics, embodied social justice, and Rev. angel Kyodo williams. Haines describes the importance of embodied change and healing when she writes:
“As we purposely engage in embodied change and healing processes, we become more embodied. That means we are more able to feel ourselves, our sensations and aliveness, our longings and commitments—and to organize our lives and relationships around them. We are able to feel and tolerate a wider range of sensations and emotions, allowing us to respond instead of react, to make choices rather than act in or act out. We also can feel others in a more present and grounded way [...] Embodiment encourages us to keep growing, to move toward more aliveness and possibility, to both soften and enliven. [...] [Embodiment] brings us to the knowing of interdependence, even while our social conditions teach us individualism, how to ‘other,’ and build enemies. Embodiment rejoins us to being part of life on the planet and the deep resonances of living in relationship rather than dominion. There is intelligence in the felt sense. There is intelligence in the aliveness that moves in and through us. Embodiment allows us to access this and be reminded.” (Haines, 2019, pp. 160–161)
Embodiment assists us in intentionally acting in alignment with our values, beliefs, and purposes. It moves us to collective action, organizing, community building, hope, and change. I integrate embodied change in my work as a coach by offering somatic practices that guide decision-making, reflection, rest, ease, and a sense of abundance. I encourage co-learners and myself to integrate our purposes, sensations, emotions, trust in ourselves, embody boundaries, and envision possibilities in decision-making.