The Story of KAI YIN Spells & Skills

On this first episode I’m introducing myself and the podcast, and sharing a bit about the vision behind KAI YIN Spells & Skills, my multidimensional portal of offerings to support sacred wellbeing and also to create profound and sustainable avenues to shift systemic oppression. 

I get very personal immediately and share a bit about myself and my hopes and dreams for the podcast (and the world), and finally I invite you to share your thoughts on what you would like to hear in future episodes!

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Stay in touch with all KAI YIN Spells & Skills updates by signing up to my newsletter on my website, and following me on Instagram and Facebook! I love hearing from you; let me know what you’d like to learn more about in future episodes! 🐉

Transcript

Hey everyone! Thank you so much for joining me on this podcast! It’s my absolute pleasure to welcome you to the very first episode of the KAI YIN Spells & Skills podcast! Super exciting, this is also going to be a pretty episode because I’m actually recording on the morning of my 35th birthday. That’s right I’m a Pisces! You’ll learn more about that I’m sure as we get to know each other. 

So on today’s episode I’m going to be introducing myself and also the podcast, and sharing a bit about the vision behind KAI YIN Spells & Skills. 

Ok so, first off, hi! I’m Anabel, I’m a psychotherapist, facilitator, an interdisciplinary artist, and a writer based in Toronto. I’m also a first generation settler here, on the traditional lands of the Huron-Wendat and Anishinabek First Nations, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nations.

I am also a queer, non-binary, diasporic Chinese person, and my lived experience has moved me to help other marginalized people to process our intergenerational pain and also to fully embody one’s power and worth.

 KAI YIN Spells & Skills is my multidimensional portal of offerings. It houses services I offer to support sacred wellbeing and also to create profound and sustainable avenues to shift systemic oppression. So these offerings are informed by own journey of healing and learning and as well as my own ancestral and intuitive healing traditions, my time doing social justice movement building, my current practice in kung fu and martial arts, and as well my clinical psychotherapy training. 

 These offerings include one-on-one therapy for BIPOC, so I work with Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour one-on-one through a holistic approach, it’s trauma informed, body oriented, and anti-oppressive. We work together through various dimensions of your being: through the body, the mind, the heart, and the spirit. Through my one-on-one work, it’s a non-judgmental and empowering space to see that you do have the wisdom and ability to heal and together we would collaborate to help you develop those skills that you need to safely honour and process that pain. 

 Another offering I have is workshops, so I offer trauma informed facilitation services and resources across a variety of topics related to healing and social justice. So I’ve done workshops on somatic self-care for performance artists, boundaries for 2SLGBT+ youth, somatic awareness for white allies, as well as co-facilitating with my friend Camille --who will be featured on the podcast next episode—we did a workshop for BIPOC on embodying collective liberation. So those are some examples of workshops I really enjoyed doing. 

 Another thing I do is that I facilitate ceremonies and rituals. I offer a collaborate process to help folks create experiences or transformative moments where they need support holding a sacred space, honouring a meaningful moment such as a commitment ceremony, grief rituals, self-love rituals and more. 

 And yeah finally the last thing of course, is the podcast! Which we’re doing right now! So on the podcast I’ll be sharing conversations – I really want to prioritize BIPOC voices, but we’ll also have allies on as well – reflections, I’ll be bringing thoughts on things I’m noticing, things I’m curious about. Just  having space for that to just in case other folks are asking the same questions as well. And I’d also like to offer resources on mental health, somatics, rituals, social justice. There’s probably going to be a lot of feelings. I can talk about feelings for a very long time, so be prepared! But I also want to balance that out by talking to other people as well. I’m thinking I’ll have some reflection episodes and resource episodes coupled with interviews with folks. I’m also hoping as well to do if possible with each episode a prompt or practice that you can get inspired by or adapt. 

5:38 

Ok, so a big part of what is behind KAI YIN Spells & Skills is my personal healing journey of course. It’s a really personal endeavour, it’s a personal collection of things I really want to offer based on ways that I been learning to reclaim traditional ancestral healing practices, holistic ways of approaching social justice. There’s a lot of  ways that I’ve struggled and ways that I’ve been supported by others, and so the things that I offer are ways to pay that back in a way, like pay that forward. 

Generally a big theme for me growing up was not feeling like I had a lot of power and self-worth. There’s a number of reasons; mostly internalized racism as  a first generation immigrant. I was actually born in Penang, Malaysia. I think I spent my first three years, but I grew up mostly in Montreal actually. That experience on not so much a conscious level, really impacted me in terms of the way I ended understanding my role in the world, like where did I belong. That was a big struggle for a while. Maybe some folks out there, you’ll relate to that feeling. Like not feeling like enough, maybe you’re not enough of your own “original” culture. Like I didn’t feel Chinese enough at all, like I failed out of Chinese school. And that was so heartbreaking. At the time, I felt sad, but when I think about it now, it was actually deeply heartbreaking. And also I obviously wasn’t “white” enough, because I’m not, and I no longer aspire to be. But it’s a tough place to be in, that weird in between and of course on top of it being queer and non-binary and not having the awareness to articulate that. It led to a lot of imposter syndrome, a lot of deep shame. These are all things that were bubbling under the surface. I wasn’t really aware of them. 

 A big way I started to become aware of them was through the body. I ended slowly trying embodied practices like dance, yoga, theatre, and kung fu and it sort of unlocked this new level of awareness. That disconnection and the ways that we hold a lot of trauma in our body. A lot of unprocessed emotions and what’s called “false core beliefs” about ourselves. They’re literally stored in our body and nervous system. On a rational level, even those of us who have a very broad understanding of social justice issues, on a rational level we understand how maybe oppression works to make us feel worthless. There’s also this whole other side though, this process that involves the body, finding what safety, and power, and self-worth actually feels like in the body. Like how do you heal through that day to day? So yeah that was a really huge piece that led me to want to do more work one on one with folks to understand that. You know I’m going through that process too, it’s sort of a life-long thing, but I’ve learned some skills that have been really helpful for me, and that I’ve seen have been really helpful for other folks as well that I would really like to share. I think that’s a really big piece of what my work is about and what this podcast could be too. I guess really embracing our pain in a way that we can both hold space for how hard it’s been and also ways we gain wisdom from it, without sugarcoating it, but being able to understanding the complexity of different ways that we learn to know ourselves. 

10:37 

Over the past ten years, I’ve also began reconnecting to my own intuitive skills and ancestral elemental and energetic practices. So I’ve been for example trying to find my way back to Chinese intuitive and elemental approaches to trauma, healing, and magic. So understanding the way energy works in our bodies, our nervous systems, our spirits, and understanding that through the elements. So in some Chinese traditions, there are five elements and there is a cycle in the way that show us ways that we actually naturally know how to adapt to change, ways that our bodies try to help us heal, or protect ourselves and to nourish ourselves. And that’s something that’s a bit more new, and I’m trying to reconnect with that. Of course there’s a lot of grief that goes with that, a lot of rage, but it feels worth it and I think a big part of why I’m really excited to share this work, because it’s helping me feel like… to step into that courageous space, and it will probably hurt, but it will be worth doing together. 

So what does KAI YIN Spells & Skills mean? Maybe you’re wondering what Kai Yin means. And it’s kind of fun to share this today, because like I mentioned it’s my birthday today. So Kai Yin is the Chinese name that was given to me by my parents when I was born. So my mom, she tells me that the name for her means “enlightened mountain” and you know there’s no perfect translation, but that’s the intention behind it, which I didn’t really embrace. It’s something I didn’t share with anyone, because mostly people couldn’t register what I was saying, people couldn’t pronounce it, so I’ve hidden my Chinese name for most of my life. But yeah, enlightened mountain, that’s pretty epic, I’m pretty into it. I feel for me when I was trying to internalize more, to really let that in and to understand this is part of me, this was given to me, this is one of the only ancestral pieces I feel like I’m holding, like this clue, that I’m trying to decode in this way. 

I guess for me it expresses this in between balance of dualities. I imagine this energy of sitting at the top  of a deeply rooted mountain and having this wide open sky all around me. It’s a really beautiful energy to tap into, so for me that’s been a practice I’ve been trying to create. To have this embodied way of connecting to my name. In this in between, there’s this expansive groundedness. Like a sense of alignment that for me, it’s lending clarity, an expansive capacity to hold, process, and move through this ever evolving complexity. There’s just a lot of space to hold things that are amazing, things that are hard, or overwhelming. It just feels expansive, so that’s the spirit that I wanted to bring to KAI YIN Spells & Skills. In a personal way, I want to invite myself to embody that aligned, authentic version of me, and it’s something that I also want to offer out to people. To have this space, like I want to be able to hold this space for others, to be able to help you find what this space feels like for you. And it’s like a coming home, like this is a dimension of being and awareness that we’re always probably constantly trying to return home to. But you know that’s kind of beautiful as well, to have that journey. 

15:10

I think of magic as a practice and a portal possibility that I want to facilitate for folks. In capitalist and colonial systems and institutions, for example, having an extraction based economy, police, prisons… the way these institutions work is they are based on the premise that there is no other way, like as if these things are necessary, that the destruction of the planet is necessary and inevitable. So it’s important for me to, while I’m reclaiming my own ancestral practices that have been co-opted in a lot of ways into white culture and capitalism, like embodiment and mindfulness, to create ways of living that center and focus on potential and possibility and healing. Not just on an individual level, but as a collective… what does collective wellbeing and liberation mean? It’s all intertwined but I think the first step is to be able to invite that sense of possibility. Which is really hard, like even we want to believe it sometimes it doesn’t feel like… there’s so many obstacles and challenges… but I think just the practice of trying is creating possibility. That’s something that has really inspired me; this isn’t really just coming from me, I’ve been inspired by so many folks who have been having these conversations for so long, doing such incredible work on the ground, and of course like I mentioned I really want to talk to people doing this work and continuing to learn.

17:03

So as this name, Kai Yin, was given to me on this day 35 years ago, in the spirit of miraculous creation and all the potential of a new life ahead, I want to offer KAI YIN Spells & Skills to you as a portal into this transformative possibility. I feel honoured and obviously I’m nervous… I feel I’m so grateful and I have this nervous energy but I also have excitement, love, and fear that is here, but just trying to make space for that. And I hope you can feel all those bubbling emotions coming at you, and I hope it’s something we can continue to shape together, and I’m excited to hear from you!

So the first interview we’ll be featuring is going to be an interview with my friend and somatic therapist Camille Djokoto. We did this workshop on embodying liberation and in our interview we talk about alignment. What does that feel like, what does that mean? Non-Eurocentric approaches to healing through the body and the elements. It’s such a sweet interview. It was during COVID… I think we ended up laughing a lot, you can decipher that through the interview, but I’m so excited to be sharing that. The following episode is going to be talking about survival strategies, like what those are, what does that mean, what might that look for you, and we’ll be getting more into that in the future as well.