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.

I am committed to a lifestyle of learning and growing towards rematriation for a post-colonial & post-scarcity planet where we each get to share our great responsibilities, in daily remembrance of our Mitochondrial Eve in Africa. I live for a planet where we are led and taught by indigenous ways again and native languages are protected, because at last, Palestine is Free, and everybody is housed. And here, every trans and two-spirit grandchild is seeing into their adulthood.

My therapy practice as a Death Doula, Brainspotting consultant and EMDR & Heartmath+ trained art therapist is also informed by my life studies as a Bwiti Mabundi initiate of Gabon. In service to our ancestors and in service to a dignified life to its brim, I tend with curiosity not fear, to the living and dying stories, seasons, identities and roles, abilities and capacities. I listen to their completion, and see into closures at their rhythm. I get to witness how the decay composts into possibilities and dreams. I experience the spectrum with the unseen and unheard, dreams and symbolic experiences that reveal our web of life across time, generations, beyond oceans and words. 

Each person I get to sit with is a medicine keeper. I practice with neurophysiological principles (Brainspotting, Somatic Archæology™) to attune with every person’s ecosystem built by their ancestors, that remembers and also has had to forget without a choice, gendered and shaped by non-disabled expectations, socio-political and ecological polycrises.

The Bwiti strengthens me in the weaving arts of discernment in dreams, channeling, ancestral relations and psychotherapy. I am actively engaged in my therapy, and attend trainings with my mentors every season of the year. 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.

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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