By Nina Huang
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
As the nation observes both Mental Health Awareness Month and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, AAPI practitioners and community members are drawing from centuries-old cultural healing traditions to support mental wellbeing. From ingesting ancient herbs, to finding emotional sanctuary in the outdoors, and pinpointing pressure points to relieve mental and physical stress, AAPI healers are reshaping how communities view wellness, while preserving cultural heritage.
Forest bathing: Finding healing outdoors
Chloe Lee grew up in Indonesia and moved to Seattle when she was 17.
“I lost my sense of connection with nature, which was a prominent part of where I grew up,” she said.
But when Lee started going outside for walks, something shifted.
As she adjusted to life in the United States, she started noticing little things like nature sounds, trees, smells and in sensing that connection, she became curious and looked up what was happening to her body, why was she feeling better? She learned about forest therapy, which is a formal practice. It wasn’t just her imagination, there were profound things happening and she decided to make it a regular thing and pursued it professionally.
Lee owns her private clinical practice and conducts office therapy, but she also does work outdoors focused on mental health in group settings, as well as teaches yoga and meditation.
“As someone who cares deeply about nature-based cultural traditions, I craved that when I moved to America. This practice really resonated with me, being in nature as a healing space, there are so many important healing practices that come from cultures with deep wisdom. The more than medical way to address health; forest bathing is a beautiful expression of that,” Lee said.
Credit: Chloe Lee
She was introduced to the Japanese practice of forest bathing called shinrin-yoku. She trained with the association of forest therapy guides and got connected to others in the area. Lee and three other guides formed Cascadia Forest Therapy, a nonprofit that provides support and resources to connect professional nature and forest therapy guides with the land, their communities, and each other.
Shinrin-yoku is a wellness practice that originated in Japan in the early 1980s, but Lee said that it’s based on much older traditions of connecting with nature, traditions that existed for centuries; bathing in the atmosphere of the forests—through sight, sound, smell, touch, and even intuition or heart sense and body radar.
Lee said it was a national public health intervention to help address urban maladies such as stress, burnout, and mental illness that was happening in Japan and worldwide during that time.
“It’s really about shutting down the usual ways of getting information and tuning into the innate body connection to nature. It’s different from hiking or outdoor exercise, it has a slow pace and specific intention—usually a guided walk that moves slowly like going less than a mile over two hours,” she said.
During guided nature walks, people are invited to experience a natural world, listen to bird sounds, sit still, and notice how the forest makes you feel, which is the opposite of what we do in nature. It’s not about performance or productivity, it’s just about presence, she said.
Since then, Lee said that Dr. Qing Lee has conducted extensive research that proved that forest bathing creates positive outcomes such as lowering stress levels and blood pressure, strengthening one’s immune and cardiovascular systems, and reducing depression symptoms.
Lee’s recommendation to experience the benefits of being outdoors is to go on a walk.
“Turn your phone on silent and commit to being there for five minutes. Take a few deep breaths and just close your eyes. We constantly rely on our vision. What are you feeling? What are you hearing? Can you feel something you couldn’t feel before? When your eyes open back up, you notice things you didn’t notice before. It’s about letting the body have more time and space to receive information without analyzing it, which is an important quality of this practice that relates to tension restoration therapy,” she said.
Forest bathing is a sensory-based way of being outdoors. The intention is to slow down and connect in an unhurried way. Lee said it could be done as a walk in the park, or in a natural place where one feels safe and comfortable like sitting on the balcony looking at your house plants.
“Forest bathing is gentle, it doesn’t require fixing yourself. It allows you to tend to yourself in a way that’s really open and non-performative,” she said.
Reiki: Restorative energy flow
Over the last six years, Maridelle Levya dealt with losing identities that she had been familiar with.
Levya discovered reiki after realizing she wanted to focus on her mental health and parts of herself that she needed to tend to. She wanted to find other modalities other than talk therapy—something deeper.
She recently became certified as a Holy Fire® III Master to help people who want more alignment, purpose, and peace in their lives.
“My identity has shifted and changed. I went from being an active mother to an empty nester; from corporate, to finding my place in what I want to do, and now I’ve focused on helping people to thrive in a way that brings more ease into their lives,” she said.
Similar to qi in Chinese culture or prana in Hindu culture, reiki is a form of energy healing, a type of alternative medicine originating in Japan.
“The journey of that is not easy. Going through dark nights of the soul, you just become aware of who you are, and what you’re processing in life. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last six years. It’s been beautiful, hard, life-changing, and I’m so grateful for this space I’ve been able to make for that,” she said.
Levya said that reiki can help clear blockages in energy flow and because energy can be received across any distance, you don’t have to be hands on; nor in the same room because energy flows across any distances.
“It taps into the nervous system, bringing the state of calm, the state of peace, relaxation, working with the body and nervous system. It really does work with the body’s natural ability to heal and restore and the philosophy is about getting you, an individual where they are able to regulate or restore yourself and remove blockages—to get energy flowing in a more balanced way,” she said.
Levya said that this energy modality works with life forces and our bodies have every ability to heal and restore itself.
“It’s these modalities that work with that belief. You can go deeper than your conscious mind. When I started receiving it for my own journey, it slowly became something I was more interested in. It helped me, I practiced it for myself, friends, and family,” she said.
Levya said that reiki and somatic practices can help to heal and stay—it’s a way to facilitate one’s own wellness and wellbeing.
“I’ve learned to channel a specific reiki energy and I’ve experienced it and can share a channel through any distance. Like a radio signal, this frequency or energy of radio signal can move across any distance, and we as human beings can receive energy the same way,” she said.
She also said that reiki is now used as a complementary therapy in major hospitals—especially for people experiencing pain or stress from cancer treatments, and even for children and animals.
Levya’s philosophy is about making reiki accessible from a financial and time perspective, as Reiki can be received from anywhere.
“You receive this energy in a relaxed way and you don’t have to do anything. It can be hands-on or it can be done in a group session. It’s all energy like how electrical impulses help to regulate a heart rate, but it does it in a much more peaceful way,” she said.
Ayurveda: Ancient medicine
Growing up in India, Dr. Anup Mulakaluri was surrounded by ayurvedic home remedies and ritual practices.
“In Ayurveda, we use the evaluation of symptoms and understanding the underlying physiology that’s causing the symptoms and treating the person based on the imbalance functions of the different system,” Mulakaluri said.
Ayurveda is a traditional Indian system of medicine based on the idea that disease is caused by an imbalance or stress in a person’s consciousness.
Mulakaluri said that Ayurvedic practices are good for those looking to experience an internal personal growth as part of healing their anxiety, depression, or anger.
“Ayurveda is a good system because what we try to do is create an internal self-counseling system and you take counsel within yourself. Ayurveda believes that our personality is imperfect and we are also the soul that has potential for perfection. We use herbs to make us calmer. Breathwork makes us more meditative and insightful. We try to develop this internal relationship between what is experienced as a soul and personality to be able to counsel yourself and guide yourself—to feel safe within yourself as a way to become self-sufficient, more emotionally regulated, and confident to follow what’s in your heart without the fear of judgment and control from outer forces,” he said.
Ashwagandha is a commonly known herbal prescription that calms adrenal systems and allows cortisol levels to balance and normalize. Mulakaluri said that it’s a warming herb and useful for folks experiencing anxiety or for those feeling cold, shaky, or ungrounded.
On the other hand, shatavari is more of a cooling herb for those who feel hot-tempered, irritable, angry, or frustrated.
Mulakaluri also shared other traditional ayurvedic body therapies that have their own benefits.
Abhyanga (ayurvedic massage) is a way to receive full body relaxation and grounding effects through the peripheral nervous system. He said this is good for people who experience the physical ungrounded shakiness in their bodies or sense of depletion associated with anxiety or emotional experiences or trauma.
For those experiencing lower back pain, kati basti is where a large volume of oil is held in the location of stress, often shoulders or lower back areas, to promote restorative and healing changes.
Lastly, dhara (flow therapy) is an oil drip on the forehead that stimulates the pineal gland, supporting production of melatonin and serotonin. It’s given to give the mind a meditative state to release and relieve tension and supports healthy sleep. Mulakaluri said that he treats company executives who are stressed because they’re juggling a lot in their lives. Their tension is not on the body, but their anxiety is in the head and the body is becoming tense from the head.
Acupuncture: A holistic approach
An acupuncturist at International Community Health Services (ICHS), PhucTien Nguyen said that acupuncture is a good modality to treat physical pain, but it can also be used to treat mental or emotional issues as well.
“A lot of the time patients come in for something physical, but often that’s because they don’t associate something that’s treated for more mental or emotional. That’s where I inform them of its greater potential or expanded therapies,” he said.
Nguyen said that while acupuncture is viewed as treating the physical, it’s simultaneously also treating out aspects. It works with the energetics of the body, and it’s not common to think of it that way because it’s not something that can be readily seen or felt, but acupuncture more or less influences the energy of the body.
“It’s the qi in Chinese medicine, prana in ayurvedic, and ki in Japanese, there are different names in different cultures that influence the body. When it comes down to it, it’s primarily all vibrations to the very core, everything functions in a vibratory sense,” he said.
Nguyen said that acupuncture can also be used to treat insomnia, depression, and other non-physical issues. He’s worked with patients experiencing hallucinations or psychosis.
“Working on that layer is a bit more expanded, it’s more focused as well. It’s not something we think about, but it certainly can be addressed with acupuncture if you know what to focus on and what organ system to work with,” he said.
He said that the basic structure is that when he palpates the patient’s pulse, he can determine which organ system is deficient or out of alignment with other organ systems. The pulse is one aspect, but Nguyen works with the entire body so he can get information by palpating the hands, wrists, ankles, abdomen, or head as one unified unit.
Nguyen said that sessions can last from 20 to 80 minutes once the needles are in.
“Sometimes there may be blockages to get information, more or less, so you can get a good amount of information just by palpating and feeling the patient’s qi and knowing which systems are in or out of harmony, which channels are blocked, or energetic or emotional. A lot of it comes down to palpatory skills for me,” he said.
Nina can be reached at newstips@nwasianweekly.com.