Kaori Wander かおり
LCPC BSP EMDR CYT

Granddaughter she, they
Brainspotting consultant | Art therapist

BWITI Initiate: Student of Iboga
Death care & dream work medium
Yoga student & teacher

I enjoy sound, forest bathing, humming, reading, collecting rocks and also decluttering, jumping and trees. I love animals and moss. I am a painter, a foodie, a skydiver, and a lover of all things miniature! I love elves. I am from Japan, and raised in the Philippines. English is my 2nd, and now primary language.

My lifestyle centers learning and growing towards rematriation for a post-colonial & post-scarcity planet where we each get to share our great responsibilities, because our healing, liberation and wellbeing are bound to each other. This is what brings me to art, books and therapy session everyday.

My therapy practice as a Death Doula, Brainspotting consultant, EMDR & Heartmath+ trained art therapist is also shaped by my life studies as a Bwiti initiate of Gabon.
I am in service to our ancestors, and in service to a dignified life to its fullest brim! I accompany with curiosity not fear, to the living and dying identities, seasons, stories and roles, abilities and capacities. I want to listen until completion, see into their closures at nature’s rhythm.

Each person I get to sit with is a medicine keeper. In this journey, I get to witness how the decay composts into possibilities and dreams. I learn everyday with the unseen and unheard “ghosts", mystical or unconscious. They reveal to us the interconnecting webs of realities across time, generations, beyond oceans and words.

My teachers of the Bwiti guide me in the weaving arts of dreams, witnessing and *see*ing, ancestral relations and evidence-based psychotherapy. In addition to my life mentors, I am neuro-experiential trained to attune with one's ecosystem— one shaped by their ancestors, remembering while also having been forged without choice through socio-political and ecological polycrises and evolutions, gendered and conditioned into non-disabled expectations each day.

For Self Care, I ritualize with reiki, post-session artmaking, hot yoga for lunch, and the ordinary (like petting my neighbor’s dog in the morning) to tend to the quality of my care work. I am actively engaged in my therapy, attend trainings, sit with my mentors every season of the year.

My role is not a job. This is a practice and way of life passed down to me through the Love of my Grandparents, and therefore I hold my work+life integration very close to my heart.

This is our walk home.

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