Land & Lineage Acknowledgement

Because the work we’re about to embody together involves the past, present, and future, I would like to extend my wholehearted gratitude to the luminaries whose work I’m building upon and the beings who teach me to serve with unconditional love and courage.

I’m deeply grateful to be pouring my heart into Come Back to Care as a guest in the stolen land of the Objibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations (Chicago).

It’s both a blessing and a dream come true to infuse my ancestral & cultural knowledge with my Eurocentric & institutionalized training in order to inform my liberation practices.

This list is evolving as I’m a lifelong learner, mistake maker, and norm agitator.

My ancestral traditions:

  • Traditional Thai Medicine and bodywork in the lineage of Shivagakomarpaj and Wat Phra Chetuphon Wimon Mangkhalaram Rajwaramahawihan

  • Theravaya Buhddhist teaching, meditation, and animism

  • Daoist energy cultivation practice, such as Qigong

  • Classical Chinese Face Reading

  • Traditional Thai dancing and Muay Thai

My liberation practices…

…began with the transgender sex worker community in Thailand. These fierce and beautiful beings first taught me how to practice transformative justice and mutual aid before I even learned the formal definitions of the terms. They taught me to survive and thrive outside the dominant system without losing my integrity and with a lot of lip liner (remember those overdrawn lips days?). The more contemporary influences include the following:

  • Transformative and disability justice: Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, Mimi Kim, Mariame Kaba, Staci Haines, Stacy Milbern, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Their work guides me to center the humanity of the families with infants and toddlers with special needs I work with.

  • Healing justice and harm reduction: Prentis Hemphill. adrienne maree brown, Cara Page, Erica Woodland, and Shira Hassan. Their work guides me to remember the importance of joy, pleasure, connection, and community.

  • Education: bell hooks, Paolo Freire, Leticia Nieto. Their work guides me to weave truth, courage, and equity in everything I do, most of the time.

  • Somatic Abolitionism: Resmaa Menakem and the Education for Racial Equity team. Their work guides me back to the liberation that’s been in my body, heart, soul, and spirit.

My Eurocentric & institutionalized training:

  • Interpersonal Neurobiology

  • Polyvagal Theory

  • The Neurosequential Model in Education

  • Circle of Security

  • Infant-parent psychodynamic psychotherapy

  • DIR/Floortime

  • Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

  • The Newborn Behavioral Observation

  • The Gottman Institute’s Bringing Baby Home