Before I had any awareness of this trend of being in a “very Chinese time” of one’s life, of being a "Chinese baddie", I was already feeling the sheer inundation of another kind of messaging. It was the non-stop messaging around this year’s Lunar New Year and everyone’s interpretation of the Yang Fire Horse energy. It hit my system hard, especially a s someone who studies BaZi, the metaphysical cosmology that maps the elemental energies of time, the very system that defines 2026 as a Yang...

I have long felt attuned to and aligned with the natural world. This awareness has lived in me for as long as I can remember. Little me enjoying Summertime in the forest As a child, I carried a quiet but persistent grief, a kind of premature eco-grief - a deep and unnameable knowing. On drives to my family’s cabin, I would look out the window at the towering trees with tears in my eyes. I didn’t yet have the language for it, but I knew something wasn’t right. I sensed that the way we were...

I want to share the deeper calling behind offering the Mingjing Yunnan Tea Journey - an incredible immersion to Yunnan, China I am co-leading in November of 2026. The first thing to say is that this is not meant to be a retreat. It is an immersion. Retreats, as we tend to understand them, are often designed around personal healing, rest, and reflection. These are beautiful and necessary things. But what I experienced in Yunnan, a place renowned as the birthplace of tea, was something that...