wellnesswithkini, Oakland, CA (2025)

11/11/2025

As part of our offering to community mental health professional development series to apprising and current clinicians/ practitioners in the field, we welcome you to join this month’s workshop.

🍃 Substance Abuse Recovery Through Indigenous Practices and Community-Based Approaches

🗣️ CMH Guest Presenter: Adilia Torres, LMFT

About this event:
Substance Abuse Recovery Through Indigenous Practices explores the intersection of community counseling, cultural healing, and recovery. This presentation invites students to learn how Indigenous knowledge, ceremony, and spirituality inform pathways to wellness, balance, and transformation in the context of substance use recovery.

About the presenter:
Adilia is a q***r Indigenous Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist based in the Bay Area. Born in Mexico and raised in Los Angeles after migrating to the U.S. at age seven, she is a Q***r Chicana-Indígena, descended from the Yoreme people of Sinaloa and the Nayeri (Cora) of Nayarit. A graduate of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), her work is rooted in liberation psychology, Indigenous knowledge in mental health, and traditional medicine practices.

Adilia currently works with Native American communities focusing on substance use, trauma, and community wellness. She provides therapy for children, youth, adults, and families impacted by (im)migration, displacement, and systemic oppression, including LGBTQ+ and Two-Spirit communities. She is also the founder of La Botanica Azul, a community mental health practice grounded in social justice that centers cultural and spiritual healing, integrating the wisdom of Indigenous, q***r and trans, Black, and people of color healers.

Learning Objectives:
🌟Identify historical and social factors contributing to substance use and mental health disparities among Indigenous and marginalized communities.

🌟Describe core principles of Indigenous worldviews related to healing, balance, and relationality.

🌟Recognize how traditional Indigenous healing practices can support recovery from substance abuse.

🌟Compare and integrate Indigenous healing modalities with Evidence-Based clinical approaches in culturally responsive counseling practice.

🌟Reflect on their own positionality, cultural humility, and the ethical responsibilities of working with Indigenous clients or communities affected by substance use.

Event Details:
Saturday, November 22nd, 2025
1:00-3:00 pm PT
Zoom Registration Link:
https://ciis.zoom.us/meeting/register/kUCuq-pgSDi-lxTeBmYpCA

10/21/2025

🔗LINK IN BIO

Kini Chang has a clear vision: mental health care shouldn’t wait for people to find their way to a therapist’s office. As Chair of the Community Mental Health program at California Institute of Integral Studies, she’s training a new generation of clinicians who bring therapy directly to the communities that need it most. This can mean setting up in a mobile mental health van, meeting clients on the street, or showing up wherever people are in their healing journey.

Growing up as a first-generation Chinese American in San Francisco, Chang’s roots run deep in the city she still calls home. She brings that lived experience of community into her work, understanding firsthand how neighborhoods, culture, and systemic forces shape who we are and how we heal.

In this conversation, Chang opens up about what draws students to community mental health work. These students are often already activists and changemakers embedded in their communities. She talks candidly about the realities of working with people experiencing homelessness, navigating substance use recovery, or dealing with the compounded trauma of systemic oppression. This isn’t therapy as usual, and the program doesn’t pretend it is.

What comes through most powerfully is Chang’s attention to both her students and the communities they’ll serve. She describes watching students gain confidence semester by semester, connecting the dots between individual struggle and larger systems of oppression. And she’s deeply invested in something often overlooked in graduate programs: making sure her students don’t burn out. Because community mental health work, as she puts it, can be emotionally grueling, we need to ensure reciprocity and self sustainability in the praxis to ensure CMH clinicians are prioritized and stay in the field.

Chang’s definition of community itself is worth the read: a container for authentic belonging, a space where we can show up as ourselves, and ultimately, where collective healing happens.

10/12/2025

This so deeply resonates and coincides with my continued work and passion to heal intergenerational trauma and build resilience and collective healing. We are powerful and capable. We have have always been. Now more than ever, let’s break the patterns of conditioned survival.

This journey invites us to return to our ancestral roots and awaken our intuitive wisdom, remembering that healing is not only personal, but deeply communal. By reconnecting to what was once forgotten, we cultivate the strength to transform inherited pain into embodied wholeness. We are a living testament to our capacity to heal, together. ✨on

・・・
Here, we learn how to feel, speak, and reclaim ourselves because our ancestors didn’t have the privilege, but we do 🔥

10/10/2025

Building Spiritual into Clinical Practice
Sunday, October 26, 2025
1:00-3:00 pm PT
(Register via zoom below)

Complimentary workshop for therapists and therapists in training.

This project will be an overview of a training designed for therapists, clinicians and healing practitioners who are committed to deepening their clinical work by incorporating spirituality, ritual, and holistic ways of knowing. It is ideal for those seeking to move beyond Western, individualistic frameworks and embrace a decolonial, liberatory, and feminist approach to healing.

About the presenter:
Dr. Mae Casanova is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist with over 15 years in the mental health field. She is the owner of GrowGood Psychology, a Liberatory trauma specialty therapy practice in San Diego, California. She believes that therapy is political and that social justice & systemic issues belong in the therapy space. She received her Bachelors (BA) in Marketing, minor in Psychology, as well as Master’s (MS) in Clinical Psychology from California Lutheran University, her Doctoral (PsyD) degree in Clinical Psychology from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and just recently completed a Master’s (MA) in Gender, Spirituality and Social Justice from the California Institute of Integral Studies.

She believes that therapy is political and that social justice & systemic issues belong in the therapy space. She takes her role as a clinical supervisor and mentor seriously, making sure that her associates and team members understand the intricate interplay between psychology, systemic structures, and the mind-body connection. She understands that by honoring the complexity of human experience and embracing a holistic perspective that focuses on people over symptoms, we can create a more just and equitable world for all.

Event Details
Sunday, October 26, 2025
1:00-3:00 pm PT
Zoom Registration Link:

https://ciis.zoom.us/meeting/register/MnwqnTRpRKuOr3vE7n1hVg

10/10/2025

Honoring Indigenous Peoples’ Day

As we enter the next few days, let’s pause to reflect and honor Indigenous Peoples’ Day—a time to recognize and celebrate the original stewards of this land, whose deep connection to the earth, rich traditions, and enduring resilience continue to shape the spirit and story of our communities.

This day invites us to reflect on the true history of this land—to acknowledge the profound suffering and injustices endured by Indigenous peoples through colonization, displacement, and cultural erasure. It also calls us to celebrate the strength, wisdom, and vitality of Indigenous cultures, languages, and ceremonies that have survived and thrived despite centuries of adversity.

We give deep respect and gratitude to the Indigenous nations whose ancestral lands we inhabit, and to all Indigenous peoples who continue to preserve and share their ways of knowing, being, and healing. Their contributions remind us of the importance of reciprocity, community, and care for the earth.

May Monday be not only a celebration, but also a commitment to listening, learning, and honoring Indigenous voices—past, present, and future.

09/26/2025

・・・
It’s been a rough couple of weeks…
…couple of months…
…couple of years…
…decades…

And if you’re anything like me, you have the following thoughts keeping you up at night:
- is this it for our world?
- will this ever get better?
- are we doomed to live in a world full of hate, forever?
- how much worse can this get?

Lately, I feel every emotion taking turns bombarding my spirit: fear, anger, grief, hope, repeat.

Trying to survive political, societal, and cultural climates like the one we are in is exhausting at best, soul crushing at worst. (Let’s be real—it’s always the soul crushing. I’d take “just exhausting” atp.)

It is taking everything in me to not melt into a puddle of despair and hopelessness—allowing the hatred of this world to have its way with me.

This is why it is imperative to have a strategy for surviving these times and keeping yourself fueled for this continued fight.

When you feel helpless, hopeless, and like nothing you do matters because hatred (and white supremacy) will continue to have its way, refer back to this post. (Save it now!) Remind yourself if the power you do have—not only in how you care for yourself, but how you show up in community.

The power remains in us. Every day we show up committed to community, joy, rest, and activism is resistance. We must believe that resistance WILL lead us to victory someday—even if we aren’t here to see it.

My book, We’ll All Be Free, helps with this, too. If you’re looking for practical, tangible ways to break up with this toxic society personally AND collectively, this book will equip you to do just that. (Available wherever books are sold.)

At the very least, save this post, share with your community, and comment more strategies and encouragements below. We will get through this.

09/17/2025

YESSSSS to all of this!! And the absolute necessity to share this information that is not talked about enough.

・・・
🧬 Epigenetics is Ancestral Science
What Western researchers now call epigenetics…the way trauma and resilience are carried in our DNA our ancestors already knew as blood memory.

✍🏾:
🎨:

09/04/2025

・・・
Simple, powerful, & true🫶🏼

08/29/2025

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It’s okay if you don’t always know what you need; that’s part of being human.

When you’re overwhelmed, your brain can go blank. These questions help you gently reconnect to yourself and figure out where to start.

Clarity doesn’t always come right away, but small moments of self-compassion often point you in the right direction.
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Follow for more insights, mental health tips, and, of course, humor.
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Follow our practice for more healing, growth & renewal.
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If you’re looking for a therapist in Philadelphia, West Chester, or semi-nationally via virtual sessions, we’re here to support you. Head to thetherapygroup.com to meet our compassionate team of clinicians and start your therapy journey today.
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08/26/2025

.maalouf
・・・
The DSM is often treated like the ultimate authority on mental health. But it is not neutral. It reflects Western, white, and capitalist values, and that makes it deeply flawed.
• Built on research with white men as the “default”
• Excludes cultural healing because it is not funded or “approved”
• Labels coping and grief traditions in non-Western cultures as “disorders”
• Focuses on getting people “functional” for capitalism instead of addressing systemic harm
• Erases colonial and collective trauma by focusing only on individuals

The DSM can be a tool, but it is not the truth.
Real healing must also include:
• Cultural wisdom
• Collective care
• Systemic awareness
• Practices beyond Western frameworks

Save and share if you know mental health cannot be defined by just one cultural lens.

08/20/2025

I am honored to be this year’s Washington Marriage and Family Therapy Conference Keynote in Seattle 9/19-9/20.

This year’s theme is: Systemic Futures: Creative Approaches to Dialogue and Healing
Conference Workshop Tracks (50-minute sessions)
1. Expanding Systemic Therapy
2. Healing the Healers: Self-Care, Resilience, and Growth
3. Advocacy, Justice, and Systemic Change

Get a sense of what to expect at this years conference from the keynote speakers: https://lnkd.in/gvqWD6DM

08/18/2025

❤️ A heartfelt thank you and appreciation to CMH core faculty and Academic Administrative support team for their presence, connection, contribution to our annual CMH retreat and new student orientation in the Santa Cruz Mountains!

💎 Our students were able to lean in, reflect, release, and allow nature to hold them in care and respite. There were so many gems from the weekend- beautiful story telling, gentle moments of acknowledgment, individual bonding moments with one another, laughter and joy, and uplifting lightness. And most importantly a container of reciprocity that facilitated compassionate learning and listening. I was very moved by the way cohort 19 showed up with cohesion and care for one another.

📕 As we moved into Sunday afternoon, we welcomed our INCOMING FALL 2025 COHORT 20!! The day consisted of a cross-cohort luncheon mixer, faculty and student community builder, and new student orientation essentials. I was impressed by cohort 20 right off the bat! They were insightful, collaborative, engaged, eager to learn, and asked great questions!!

💖 In addition we had some alumni attend through work exchange. The purpose is for alumni to be able to receive the benefits from the retreat while in service.
Victoria(cohort 15) and Ehlan(cohort 15), our alumni were incredible! Both ran beautiful and resonate workshops on Saturday. Dani(cohort 9), came for work exchange to help with meals and necessary tasks. Dani expressed that she really needed this and was feeling more relaxed and ready to go back and tackle her work in community mental health.

I hope all will be able to get some rest this next week as we ease into a beautiful start to the semester!!!! ♥️🌲✨

wellnesswithkini

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