I am a commitment to Being, for the sake of creating space for all beings to find their way home.
I was born and raised in Thailand to a Chinese father and a Filipina mother before immigrating to the United States as a teenager. My life has been shaped by both profound loss and extraordinary love, by trauma and resilience, by movement and stillness. Over many years, I have found my way home through the practice of deep listening—to my body, to nature, to silence, and to the quiet teachers who have appeared throughout my life.
Today, my work centers on creating conditions where people can slow down enough to hear their own inner wisdom. Through writing, deep listening circles, somatic coaching, meditation, qigong, and what I have come to call my Be Like Water philosophy, I invite others to inhabit the space between certainty and not knowing, grief and joy, doing and Being. I have come to believe that transformation is rarely something we force. More often, it emerges when we cultivate presence, curiosity, compassion, and enough spaciousness for what is asking to come alive.
The name The Ahnung Way comes from my beloved soul dog, Ahnung, whose name means “star” in Ojibwemowin. She entered my life when my heart had long ago learned to protect itself. After losing my Papa at the age of four, I learned to keep moving. Movement became how I survived. If I stayed busy enough, achieved enough, or left before someone else could leave me, perhaps grief would never catch me. It took me decades to discover that healing asks something entirely different of us. It asks us to remain. Then cancer entered our lives, and everything slowed. During the final two years we shared together, Ahnung became my greatest teacher—not by rescuing me from grief, but by teaching me how to stay. To remain present with love even as loss drew near.
Until then, I had thought grief was something to fear or overcome. Ahnung showed me something entirely different. She taught me that grief is one of love’s deepest expressions—that we cannot open ourselves fully to one without welcoming the other. Somewhere along that journey, grief softened the guarded places in my heart. In learning how to grieve, I learned how to love more deeply. And in learning to love more deeply, I slowly began finding my way home. Her quiet wisdom continues to shape everything I write, teach, and practice.
For more than two decades, my work has focused on leadership, conflict transformation, restorative practices, trauma-informed care, and the intersection of human and animal well-being. My path has led me to collaborate with Indigenous communities throughout Minnesota, co-found nonprofit organizations, support leaders and organizations, and build partnerships rooted in relationship, trust, and belonging. I am a certified somatics coach through the Strozzi Institute, a founding member of the Deep Listening for Social Change project, and currently serve as Board Chair of Women’s Advocates, the first domestic violence shelter in the United States.
My daily practices of meditation, qigong, writing, and time in nature continue to anchor me. I share my home with three beloved dogs—Ishkode (“fire”), Migizi (“eagle”), and Nibi (“water”)—who remind me every day that wisdom often arrives on four paws.
Whether through writing, coaching, facilitating circles, or simply sitting with another human being, my hope is to create spaces where people remember what they have perhaps always known: that beneath the noise, beneath the striving, beneath the uncertainty, there is a quieter wisdom already waiting to guide them home.
Ahnung Way 