I grew up outside of New York City, the daughter of immigrants navigating three different cultural identities — as a Filipina, Indian, and American. When I think back to my childhood, my parents shed much of their cultural markers and traditions in order to assimilate and belong within this new context. Yet, in the privacy of our home, like many first generation kids, I experienced and celebrated the richness of my identity through food — and my most meaningful memories center around gathering with family and friends over lechon, sinigang, and bibingka; making parathas, pani puri, and prasad with my grandmother; and storytelling and communing in ways that were deeply connective to my ancestry, heritage… and something deeper and timeless that spans generations and continents.

Fast forward to my early 30s, I experienced a number of big life transitions — career shifts, marriage, moving across the country, and becoming a mother — and through those years of instability, I began a toxic cycle of dieting, restriction, calorie-counting, juice fasting, and the over-scrutiny of my evolving physical body. In an effort to manage these changes, I mimicked a sense of stability through the hyper-focus and manipulation of my diet and my physical form. What once was a deep source of joy, culture, spirit, and connection became a tool of restriction, control, and punishment. From the outside, I looked “healthy” but my disordered eating, orthorexia, and obsession with exercise left me disconnected from my pleasure, my body, my identity, and my inner knowing.

In the Summer of 2020 — when my son was 3 years old — I went through the most challenging transition of my life… divorce. I became a single mother negotiating the complexities of co-parenting and job/financial insecurity in the height of a global pandemic. Yet, with this huge energetic shift, I was given the opportunity to reconnect with and rediscover myself — by slowing down, centering my wellbeing, healing my nervous system, celebrating my joy and pleasure, and exploring the multiplicity of my identity — through motherhood and nurturing; through sexuality, Eros, and embodiment; through yoga, dance, and mindful movement; and through adventuring around the world. This path inspired me to dive deep into holistic health and pursue my certification as an Integrative Health Coach, and gain clarity and coherence about the work I want to do in the world.

With this evolution, I started feeling a deeper connection to food again— from a both a spiritual and sensual lens — a process that has been both healing and nourishing. This shift has helped me see food not as a thing we simply consume, but as a series of beautiful relationships — with the cosmos and spirit, with the earth and its seasons, with our farmers and communities, with our cultures and ancestors, with ourselves and our loved ones. And once my relationship with food changed, everything else in my life changed too. I am in a continuous process of reconnecting with my body, deepening my self-trust and intuition, cultivating resilience in my nervous system, and developing an empowered and compassionate relationship with myself.

At 40, I feel more alive, radiant, embodied, and connected to myself than ever before. 

I believe this is because I no longer see health solely through the lens of diet and exercise, and instead from an expansive, nourishing, multidimensional perspective that honors my bio-individuality and centers joy, connection, spirit, community, celebration, rest, and of course… pleasure.

This struggle with diet culture — that so many women experience — is rooted in the broader systems of oppression that surround us — patriarchy, capitalism, racism, queerphobia — and premised on the notion of lack.  And within the narrative of health, these systems prioritize and glorify perfectionism, optimization, maximization, sacrifice, individualism, all-or-nothing mentality, and end results. Wellness, and the pursuit of “optimal health” and self-improvement, has simply become another form of labor — an unattainable end-goal we continuously strive for.

We know that these oppressive systems are disempowering by design, divorcing us from our inherent wholeness. They fuel disconnection from our bodies, our innate wisdom, and body intelligence — a state of being that our ancestors and our communities were once deeply connected to. When coupled with the dehumanizing nature of our healthcare system, it is not surprising we have a society full of dis-ease.

In contrast, my work as a Health Coach and Educator centers our inherent wholeness, self-connection, empowerment and self-trust.

My approach to health honors joy, process, flow, holisticism, and the spiritual/interconnected aspects of wellbeing.

I believe that personal and collective wellness are deeply intertwined, and that creating conscious relationships and intentional spaces for connection, community, and care can be radical, healing, and transformative.