The GINA Method – Grounded Intergenerational Neurobiological Authenticity.
As a holistic practitioner, I offer alternative therapies that integrate science and neurobiology with Eastern spiritual embodied healing approaches, hence, The GINA Method.
- Grounded – Having the experience of safely being supported through embodied therapeutic approaches that are grounded in science and Spirit.
- Intergenerational – Tuning into the ancestral field, opening and welcoming the ancestors in your life, accepting the cultural gifts of healing and transformation by letting go of entangled or ancestral burdens and walking with joy alongside your beloved ancestors.
- Neurobiological – Through understanding your own nervous system using a neurobiological lens, stories of surviving and protection transform to stories of thriving and connection.
- Authenticity – Realizing and discovering a dimension within you that has always been well, has never been traumatized, is unwavering, steadfast, and still. Making room and trusting your own authentic ground of being and awakening to your intelligence, voice, love, power, gender sexuality, and reclaiming all the parts in your body, mind, and soul.
These counseling approaches and healing modalities that I have been drawn to have supported my clients in profound ways. I hope that as you continue to read, you will begin to see and feel how working with me using The GINA Method might bring you comfort and ease.
Using a science-based Polyvagal-guided approach to understanding the nervous system, the integration and weaving of the Realization Process, and the value of incorporating a Family Systems lens, my wish for you is to help you find safety with several dimensions of your life and to help you disentangle from your personal trauma and feel into your authentic nature and ultimately feel at home with yourself. One of my specialities includes healing racialized trauma with Communities of Color. Using The GINA Method offers a framework for us to collaborate and for you to experience your true nature.
What a Therapy Session Might Look Like Using The GINA Method
In a therapy session, we begin by first understanding your biology, namely your nervous system, using the Polyvagal Theory (description below) as the main framework to understand the reasons you might be feeling, thinking, and behaving the way you do. By honoring your nervous system and getting to know your different nervous system states (depressed, shutdown, collapsed, anxious, angry, critical, loving, connected, engaged) we explore together in a co-regulating and safe way all the various triggers that get activated based on your past experiences. These experiences are often related to your survival or protective patterns from either previous traumas or maybe your childhood. Through befriending your own nervous system, it will become easier for you to connect and find safety inside your own body, outside in the environment, with other people, and with Spirit.
The benefit for you? You get to learn, deepen, and map your own unique nervous system.
Once you have a good understanding of your own nervous system, the next step, using my work as a Realization Process teacher, is to invite you to experience a series of guided exercises and meditations to help you become comfortable with living in your own body and to help you realize and uncover the deepest dimension of your being – your authentic self. My inspiration for doing this work with you is to help you realize a dimension within yourself that is already well and has always been well. I will assist you in disentangling your held emotional or physical constrictions or tensions within the body due to possibly protective patterns that were created in relation to your environment when you were a child. Through guided meditation practices, you will experience self-agency and reclaim sovereignty in your own body, and return to a calmer nervous system in a gentle and safe way.
The benefit for you? You get to learn skills to safely inhabit your own body and feel the safety and stillness from within.
As we begin to notice patterns in your experience, you might also see generational or multigenerational patterns in your family system that you might be entangled with. Using a Family & Natural Systems Constellation Approach (working with intergenerational trauma and ancestral healing), I invite you to explore your family system and discover held loyalties or burdens that you are carrying that are not yours and that you can let go of. Honoring where you have come from, your birth location, the land you currently dwell on, your family, and your beloved ancestors are some of the beautiful ways you might begin to see yourself in your wholeness.
The benefit for you? You get to learn about your own unique family system.
For the BIPOC Community
My hope is if you choose to work with me and you are housed in a Body of Color and have experiences of trauma based on the pigment or color of your skin, we can journey together by taking steps into healing your historical and racialized trauma experience that is carried in the blueprint of your body, mind, and soul. My clients recognize how their stories regarding their relationships with family, partners, friends, or at work have been shaped to some degree by their experiences having been historically excluded or marginalized based on their race, nationality, or culture. Together we can safely explore many of the questions regarding race, oppression, colonialism, and marginalization, and how multiple intersections such as genderism, sexism, ableism, and other isms overlap for you as a Body of Color.
The benefit for you? You get to learn how to celebrate your ethnicity and culture and reclaim wholeness in your own racial body.
Using The GINA Method, you will be seen and heard and most of all validated as a human being in your sessions with me.
Polyvagal Theory Guided Therapy
The Polyvagal Theory created by Dr. Stephen Porges and brought into clinical application by Deb Dana will help you learn more about the different states in your nervous system and how your body and mind work together. When you are regulated and connected, your capacity to be with yourself, others and your own life experiences can flow with ease.
I have always been interested in how the mind and body interact together and enjoy, learning and reading about brain research and neuroscience. I was inspired to learn more about the brain and the nervous system when in my twenties several big transitions in my life such as getting married, going back to school, becoming a mother, and questioning my faith affected my own “rhythm of regulation”, a term coined by Deb Dana the creator of the Rhythm of Regulation series.
Now in my fifties, I have deepened my understanding of my own nervous system and am now honored to be assisting Deb Dana as a trainer in her Rhythm of Regulation Foundations Trainings series. I have also assisted in the role as a Polyvagal Consultant in Calgary, Canada, the Netherlands, and in California, USA. In addition, my social justice work with the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) community has given me opportunities to share Polyvagal-informed education to support those individuals who have been affected by racialized trauma or marginalized oppression.
I appreciate the value of working with eclectic and holistic therapies that integrate body/mind/spirit to help others find safety with several dimensions in their life. Using a Polyvagal-guided approach as a foundational platform to understand more deeply my lived experiences, I was able to see how understanding the vagus nerve and using Polyvagal Theory in therapy could benefit all humanity.
I invite you to join me in learning and attuning to your own autonomic nervous system. Together in a gentle and respectful way, you will learn how to map your own states in your system and gain clarity and understanding as your body responds in states of protection, safety, and connection.
To find out more about the Polyvagal Theory, here is a resource:
https://ginakiem-goldcounsel.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/897c0-debdana27sbeginner27sguide.pdf
Realization Process
“To heal means to become whole.” Judith Blackstone, Realization Process®
The Realization Process, developed by Dr. Judith Blackstone, is an embodied meditation approach to spiritual awakening and psychological healing, a particular kind of spiritual awakening called non-dual realization.
The Realization Process is a series of gently guided, precise, body-oriented meditative attunement exercises to help disentangle constrictions or tensions within the fascia to help foster a deep sense of wholeness and presence. It is a series of attunement practices for uncovering a very subtle dimension of our being, a subtle dimension of consciousness. Judith calls this Fundamental Consciousness, because it is the foundational level of our Being and of everything around us (or that is how it is experienced).
The attunement practices invite us to inhabit the internal space of the body and through making this deep internal contact within the body, we can begin to fully realize ourselves as fundamental consciousness, and we can experience this fine unified dimension of consciousness not only within our own individual bodies, but with everything around us at the same time.
It is the experience of oneness. This can often be difficult for my trauma clients- but with gently journeying together through guided meditation practices – clients have greater fluidity with their, emotional responsiveness, and have greater capacity and access to their innate qualities of their being, such as their love, power, voice, intelligence, understanding, gender, and sexuality. These qualities of being seem to arise in us naturally as we inhabit our bodies in this very subtle way.
Through these practices, you can find stability and stay rooted in your body in your everyday life, your personal situations, and with others. The practices will help you feel more at home in your body, more substantial (you feel your own existence, your own true boundaries), feel more balanced mentally, physical, and emotionally, have greater capacity and resiliency to live in the world from the depth of your core, all profoundly supported by this unchanging Healing Ground.
The exercises and practices are a wonderful doorway to help unwind and disentangle habitual and fixed patterns of response that limit you from experiencing your true nature. We all have psychological holding patterns which are adaptive and protective in nature. By integrating these gentle yet powerful meditation and embodiment exercises with techniques for working with trauma-based holding patterns, the Realization Process helps us to get to the root of our various defenses and create the opportunity for lasting transformation.
This work is especially important for spiritually gifted and sensitive people who often feel socially anxious, or feel they are often the object of other people’s opinions and perceptions. (If this speaks to you, then Realization Process practices will be a wonderful resource for you to explore with me!)
I have full certification as a Realization Process teacher and have completed all three training courses: Nondual Meditation, Embodiment, and Healing Ground of the Realization Process.
Visit realizationprocess.org for more about Realization Process.
Family and Systemic Constellations
The goal of Constellations work is to identify the hidden dynamics that influence a particular system, and can be used to investigate ancestral, familial, interpersonal, and organizational dynamics. This unique approach offers practical and sustainable solutions for long-term change. Family and Systemic Constellation work is a highly effective method that offers clarity and resolution to personal, professional, and health-related issues.
I am a trained Family and Systems Constellations Facilitator which is a complementary therapy to help decrease the conflict and increase the flow of love within a family or any system impacted by intergenerational trauma.
I have found that when working with a client who has been suffering and struggling with an issue particularly with one’s family for many years, that by bringing in the lens of Family and Systemic Constellations work, deep psychological and energetic changes frequently take place allowing my clients to feel liberated and at peace.
I was honored to be trained by Francesca Mason-Boring, a bicultural woman enrolled with the Western Shoshone Tribe. She gifted me with her understanding of working with “universal indigenous fields in family constellations and the incorporation of ancient healing wisdom traditions”.
Racialized Trauma work and Healing for Communities of Color
I was born in Jakarta, Indonesia and am ethnically Chinese, and currently live in in Canada. I live in an Asian body and identify as an Asian Canadian. I have lived in Canada for most of my life and have traveled and lived in different parts of the world appreciating the ethnic and cultural diversity everywhere I went.
I have recently returned home to Canada after having spent 7.5 years in the United States, where I opened my private practice. During my time in the US, I worked and continue to work with beautiful clients of all colors, but I also am working more and more with persons of color or bodies of culture as Resmaa Menakem refers to “people who are not housed in a white body”.
My journey with working with clients who had experienced or continue to experience racialized trauma stemmed from my own circumstances as an Asian woman living in Canada and having had many contexts where I had felt in my own body that something felt different when I was in all white spaces. In my early twenties, I began the journey of deconstructing the social constructions of race and feeling “othered”. As with all trauma work, it started with me learning about my own nervous system first, and developing an embodied understanding of how my nervous system had been shaped historically, intergenerationally, systemically, and personally, and the impact of the persistent and pervasive nature of racism, colonialism (and other forms of oppression) that operated in my nervous system.
The path towards uncovering my own wholeness relied on finding other people who shared my understanding and awareness of having been racially traumatized. Having a safe container with other Bodies of Culture was a co-regulating and confirming experience for me. I completed Resmaa Menakem’s nine-month Communal Consultations in Somatic Abolitionism for All Bodies of Culture (BOC). Resmaa Menakem (https://resmaa.com/) is a therapist and trauma specialist and creator of Somatic Abolitionism. This course was open to anyone who identified as Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latine, brown or any other Body of Culture. The group was also open to women, queer, trans, men, and non-binary BOC, where it was an inclusive space. I also participated in the Foundations in Somatic Abolitionism (FSA) workshop facilitated by Resmaa. Once I had the opportunity to hear the stories of many of the participants in this Community of Color, I had confirmation and an embodied response that I had experienced racialized trauma to various degrees in my life, and that my nervous system knew this.
I wasn’t defective, I was whole.
Walk and Talk Therapy
Walk-and-talk therapy takes your sessions outdoors to help integrate the benefits of fresh air and movement into the therapy sessions. For some clients, a leisurely walk or a brisk hike, can make it easier for them to discuss their feelings and can help a client get “unstuck” when facing difficult issues. Movement and taking the conversation outside can sometimes help relieve some of the pressure compared to traditional therapy settings or teletherapy.
I am an avid lover of nature and love to walk. I believe that being in nature has many healing benefits. Nature not only has calming effects on the mind, and the nervous system, but the beauty of nature can create a sense of peace which can help to reduce everyday stress and mental and emotional fatigue. Nature’s rejuvenating effects can help to relieve depression and improve sleep and can help put you in a positive frame of mind.
Depending on the weather and your availability, the choice for us to work together to meet your therapeutic goals can be by taking a socially distancing walk and to meet for tele-health therapy. I am open to both options, and do not feel one option is better. I am flexible working with clients indoors over tele-health and some outdoors in nature at a local park.
I’m looking forward to starting you on your journey to peace and wholeness. Please click below to book an initial consultation with me.
Reconnect With Your True Nature 