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Mai Elements All healing is self-healing.

10/21/2026

𝗪𝗲 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 “𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴” 𝗺𝘂𝘀𝗰𝗹𝗲.

When you feel “stiff,” you aren’t feeling a hard muscle; you are feeling fascial sheets becoming glue-like and tethered. The muscle is just a passenger trapped inside a tight, sticky sleeve.

For decades, 𝘄𝗲 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 told you that muscle spindles—your body’s internal GPS—were inside the muscle meat. 𝗪𝗲 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘄𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗴. Latest research highlights that these sensors actually live in the fascial network.

Here’s the truth: Your muscle is essentially “blind.” It is the 𝗳𝗮𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗮 that feels the environment. If the fascia is fluid, the GPS works. If it’s dry or “damp,” the signal breaks, and your brain interprets that failure as pain.

Science is finally catching up to what TCM has known for thousands of years: 80% of acupuncture points align with these connective tissue planes. This means when you “reclaim the space,” you aren’t just stretching—you are clearing the “𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀” that stops your system from sliding.

𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗽𝗹𝘂𝗴𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗿𝗶𝗱 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗶𝗻.

In Chinese Medicine, a blocked meridian is a systemic blackout. When your fascia gunks up, your internal logistics collapse. Your organs are forced to run on backup batteries, leading to chronic fatigue and a “broken” metabolism.

𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗠𝗮𝗽, you are just guessing while your system drifts further offline.

In the 𝗠𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗖𝗮𝗺𝗽, we don’t work around another “to-do” list of exercises. We hold the space for us to finally understand our own map. Because once you truly see the architecture of your meridians, you stop chasing symptoms with temporary hacks.

You gain the clarity to change your habits based on what your body actually needs. Stop being a passenger in a body they never properly explained to you. It’s time to plug the grid back in.

𝗠𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗶𝗮𝗻

10/20/2026

I remember spending entire afternoons at home, completely overwhelmed. There was so much I felt I needed to do, yet I couldn’t bring myself to do any of it.

I would just freeze. Sometimes for hours.

And as the time got closer for my partner to come home, I would become increasingly anxious.

Sometimes, I would even get up and pretend to be doing something.

Just so I wouldn’t be seen doing nothing.

I still remember how heartbreaking that felt.

Not because I hadn’t been productive.

But because I couldn’t even let someone I loved, someone I believed loved me, see me as I was.

I’ve learned very young that being useful kept me out of trouble. That doing more meant fewer complaints. Fewer disappointments. Fewer reasons for someone to be angry with me.

Even I was no longer that little girl, all the way to my thirties, when nobody is demanding anything from me, I will still live as though I’m about to get in trouble for resting, for just, being me.

Until my body pull the lever for me, so I could shut down to just rest and be…

𝗟𝗶𝗳𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝘀𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗬𝗮𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗬𝗶𝗻.

Yang represents activity, movement, and outward expression. Yin provides the nourishment, stillness, and restoration that support it.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, constantly pushing ourselves without enough rest can gradually drain what keeps us going.

When your mind never stops worrying, even the smallest decisions can feel impossible. You second guess everything, lose confidence in your own judgment, and spend so much energy thinking about what needs to be done that you have nothing left to actually do it.

You can exhaust yourself through work, exercise, worrying, or even the endless pursuit of becoming better. Your body doesn’t care how admirable your reasons are. It still needs time to recover.

We cannot keep asking our bodies to give what we never allow them to receive.

𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝘀𝗻’ 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝗽𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲.

Sometimes, it’s the discipline that allows us to keep living.

With love,
Mai 🤍

10/04/2026

Chinese medicine does not have a neat equation that says shame belongs to one organ and guilt belongs to another.

It asks a different question:

What happens to the whole person when an emotion becomes a way of living?

Years of hiding.
Years of judging yourself.
Years of thinking you should be smaller, prettier, different.
Years of moving because you feel guilty, or not moving because you do not want your body to be seen.

Eemotion and physiology were never treated as completely separate conversations in Chinese medicine. Emotional states can affect the movement of Qi. Rumination and self-reproach can be understood through, prolonged thought can bind the movement of Qi.

So when I talk about “weight,” I am no longer talking only about kilograms.

I mean the weight that follows us into the way we eat, move and rest.

The weight that follows us into relationships.
Into work.
Into how much space we take.
Into how visible we allow ourselves to become.

To me, the other side of self-hatred was never self-love.

In fact, asking someone who has spent decades hating their body, their personality, the way they take up space, to suddenly “love yourself” can feel almost brutal.

I couldn’t.

And thankfully, I didn’t need to.

My version of stopping self-hatred only required compassion.

The same compassion I was somehow always capable of giving everyone else.

I didn’t have to look in the mirror and convince myself that everything was beautiful.
I didn’t have to wake up loving every part of who I was.
I didn’t even have to believe all the nice things people told me about myself.

I just had to stop participating in my own rejection.

Sometimes it is recognizing what was handed to her, what she unknowingly handed to you, and becoming compassionate enough with yourself to decide:

I can understand where this came from without carrying it any further.

Some things can end with us.

Love, Mai 🍜

09/22/2026

This is me processing grief in front of your very eyes.

Grief lives in the Lung.

A feeling is physical. It’s somatic.
An emotion is the meaning we’ve given to that sensation.

Grief is the name.

The feeling is the cold pull in the chest, the downward sink, the rib cage that won’t fully open. That is the real thing, and most people never touch it.

Isnt it true you’ve skip to the story and live there for years, analyzing it, talking about it, understanding it, while the tightness under the ribs never gets seen.

I haven’t been able to eat much lately. I’ve felt a little dissociated. I knew it was grief spreading through the body. And when I noticed I couldn’t even get food down, I didn’t force myself to keep functioning.

I went to the mat and did what I showed you. I wanted to be with the energy sitting in my chest, in the Lung, in the Metal element.

What rose was grief moving along the Lung. Metal moves down and in. It contracts, it descends, and grief moves the same way. So when the chest caves and the shoulders fold and the breath goes shallow, do not be afraid of it. That is not your body breaking down. That is grief moving along the exact line it was always going to travel.

And only in stillness does the cycle get to finish.

You stay with the feeling, you don’t run from it, you don’t judge it, until the physical sensation slowly fades. When it fades, the cycle is complete. And your nervous system receives a new thread. I am safe, even while moving through this.

This is why I keep asking you to practice. To stay in the body. Not to feel good for an afternoon. To build that sense of safety, one cycle at a time.

Healing is not a straight line. It is a spiral. I won’t promise you that two or three minutes of this makes grief disappear for good. It will come back.

Discomfort in life is unavoidable. But every time you stay in the stillness long enough to let the energy finish its cycle, you widen how much you can hold.

Freedom in the body was never a life with no grief. It is a body that can carry the wave when it comes, and still remember how to breathe.

09/21/2026

𝗡𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝘀 𝘀𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝘆 𝗮𝘀 𝗮 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲.

Look inside something as solid as your bones.

Their collagen is arranged through layers that change direction, helping bone tolerate forces without behaving like a brittle block.

And your skeleton is alive. It senses mechanical load and continually remodels around the forces you repeatedly ask it to carry.

Zoom out.

Those forces don’t stop at the border of one bone.

Muscle pulls through tendon. Connective tissue transmits force. Your foot changes what your knee receives. Your hip changes what your spine has to manage.

Even your heart doesn’t beat like a piston. It twists and untwists with every contraction.

The body seems to understand something we easily forget: strength is not the same thing as rigidity.

Chinese medicine gave me another language for this.

It placed bone, marrow, aging, hormone, the lower back, hearing, hair and fear within one functional system.

Because the body was never understood only by asking:

“Which part is broken?”

But also:

“What is this part in relationship with?”

For the past few centuries, we have become incredibly good at taking the human body apart.

One muscle. One joint. One organ. One diagnosis. One problem to fix.

We learned more and more about every individual piece.

And somehow became less accustomed to seeing the person carrying all of them.

Because you were never just a knee.
Never just a hormone.
Never just a nervous system.
Never just the emotion you couldn’t regulate.

You have always been one whole human being, living one whole life, in one whole body.

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Vancouver · January 2027

Chinese Medicine, Meridian system, functional + visceral anatomy and the practice and teaching of Meridian Yin Yoga.

Enrollment opens late September 2026.

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09/15/2026

“What if I missed something?”
“What if I made the wrong choice?”
“What if I think about it one more time?”

You can lie completely still while your mind works overtime.

In Chinese Medicine, excessive thinking and rumination are associated with the Spleen and stomach.

And that means much more than digestion.

The Stomach channel crosses the breasts and ni***es into the abdomen.

The Spleen channel enters the abdomen and connects into the wider Blood, Chong–Ren and reproductive network involving the uterus.

Deeper inside, the stomach, spleen and pancreas also share close vascular, peritoneal and connective-tissue relationships, while the abdomen mechanically interacts with the uterus, pelvic floor and other pelvic organs.

So my friend, you, who cannot stop replaying the same relationship in the head, struggles with digestion and stubborn weight, and notices recurring breast, menstrual or reproductive symptoms(prostate issue for men) may appear to have completely unrelated problems.

Chinese Medicine asks:

What if they are clues within 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗽𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻?

Because worrying, overthink, ruminate, Spleen–Stomach function, nourishment, fluid metabolism, Blood and reproductive patterns exist within the same TCM picture.

And underneath all that thinking may be one uncomfortable feeling:

I cannot control what happens next.

So stop pulling.

Find a sweet edge.
Be still.
Let time do the work.

For two minutes, practice what rumination hates most:

Not knowing.
Not solving.
Not controlling.

Leave the story.
Stay in the body. 🫧

Give your system the chance to practice the feeling: I can be safe, even when I’m not in control.

09/14/2026

Beyond what acupuncture point to press or what herb to brew, Chinese medicine gives us a framework for understanding the movement of the year, and the cycles of life within it.

We are very good at adding things in the name of wellness.

Another supplement.
Another routine.
Another goal.
Another healing practice.

But nature doesn’t only add.

Every autumn, deciduous trees withdraw reusable nutrients from leaves they will eventually lose.

Not because the leaves were bad.
Their season is simply complete.

And maybe we need that reminder too.

Because maintaining things costs us something.

Time. Attention. Energy. Physical space. Mental space.

And when our lives become chronically overcrowded with obligations, stimulation, unresolved decisions and things requiring our attention, that doesn’t stay neatly separated from “health.”

It changes how we sleep.
How much we recover.
How much stress we carry.
How much attention we have available for our bodies.
How much capacity we have to adapt when life changes.

You cannot supplement your way out of a life that leaves no room for you to recover.

This is why I find the autumn correspondence in Chinese medicine so beautiful.

Autumn belongs to the Lung and Large Intestine, to descend, the movement inward, and to grief.

Because a complete cycle requires release.

Your lungs cannot only inhale.
Your digestive system cannot only receive.
Nature cannot only grow.

𝗡𝗲𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂.

And grief belongs here too.

Sometimes grief isn’t evidence that something went wrong.

Sometimes grief is the emotional cost of allowing something that mattered to become complete.

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