THE ART OF INTENTION ✿ Field Notes from Japan

SO, WHY JAPAN?

A few people have asked me why I’m in Japan. Some assumed it was for a family vacation, others knew I was traveling for work but weren’t quite sure what that meant. The truth is that it’s both. (and also something a little harder for me to name.)

Last year we came to Japan and fell in love with the slowness. My girls found comfort and creativity in Japanese culture and I wanted to cultivate that while also giving my parents an experience they probably never saw coming in their life. Japan feels like a very big deal to us, we’re simple people that grew up in East LA and I think a lot of my parents life was survival (more on this later, maybe.) When we got home from Japan last year I experienced two solid weeks of ‘reverse culture shock’ and immediately began planning our trip back. I hear Japan does that to you.

This time, for this trip, I felt confident in navigating the country and customs and so this felt like a way to reintegrate the experience and adding more intentionality into our days. Last year felt like a discovery and sourcing of skincare products (most of which broke me out) and tourism, while this year feels like spirituality and connection with the land.

…but I’m also here as a student this time.

I’m taking a couple facial massage courses while I’m here, continuing to deepen the work I’ve already spent years studying through sculptural massage, lymphatic work, fascia and intentional touch. Later in the trip, I’ll also travel to Mount Kurama as part of my continuing Reiki practice and my path toward master attunement.

I suppose those are the tangible reasons.

But there’s another reason underneath them and I think that reason has actually been developing for years.

I’M BECOMING MORE INTERESTED IN THE CULTURE OF CARE

The longer I work with people’s faces and bodies, the less interested I become in beauty as correction.

Fix this.

Shrink this.

Erase this.

Reverse this.

Buy this.

Do it faster.

Do it younger.

Do MORE.

There is an enormous industry built around convincing us that the human body is perpetually behind annd increasingly, my work seems to be pulling me in the opposite direction and toward practices that ask a person to inhabit their body rather than constantly ‘improving’ it. That’s what I mean when I speak about slow beauty. It isn’t really an aesthetic to me, it’s a philosophy of care.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN BEAUTY ISN’T RUSHED?

When you slow beauty down, very ordinary things begin to matter. The way a towel is warmed and with what type of water, the pressure of a hand against the lateral cheek and how that pressure changes when it approaches the temples, how long something is allowed to steep, the material an object is made from and the hands used to make it, the season you’re in and the people who hold you through it. None of those things photograph quite as dramatically as a before-and-after but that’s exactly why I’m interested in them.

They require participation.

They require attention.

Attention may be one of the rarest forms of care in a culture obsessed with efficiency.

THERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT CANNOT BE OPTIMIZED

I’ve been thinking a lot about this while traveling. Capitalism has an incredible ability to turn almost anything into a product, even the things we reach for as an escape from it. Rest becomes something to optimize through tracked sleep scores, while wellness asks us for another supplement and the perfectly curated morning routine. Our health is slowly shifting from something we practice to something we consume.

I feel it heavily in my industry. Skin care reps will quite literally show up at my door with another device to get maximum results with minimal effort. A new serum, gifts with purchase, another part of the body we hadn’t realized needed fixing because heaven forbid our neck has lines.

Even spirituality has made me tired lately. Practices that once asked for repetition and devotion or even silence and years of study can become weekend certifications and something to acquire rather than something to live. Wellness becomes a product, slowness gets sold to us through the next retreat, the digital detox, the carefully branded experience promising permission to finally stop.

None of these things are inherently empty and all of which I’ve most definitely participated in myself. A retreat can genuinely change someone, a deck can genuinely support the practice, I guess what interests me most is the contradiction. We have built a culture so hostile to rest and presence that we increasingly need to purchase access to them.

I think that’s why I keep Becoming more interested in the things that resist being turned into efficiencies at all. A plant still needs time to steep and increasing the waters temperature doesn’t extract in the same way. There is something quietly radical about care that cannot be optimized. This is not to say every old practice is inherently better and modernity is inherently bad. But efficiency is only one value and I’m interested in remembering the others.

Presence.

Craft.

Reciprocity.

Patience.

Relationship.

Reverence.

MEXICO CITY STARTED ASKING ME THE SAME QUESTIONS

This is part of why my time in Mexico has become so meaningful to me. I’ve found myself drawn again and again to makers, markets, botanical preparations, handmade objects, plant traditions and ways of caring for the body that don’t feel separated from everyday life. Now, in Japan, I find myself following some of those same questions. Don’t get me wrong, Mexico and Japan are entirely distinct places with distinct histories, religions, medical traditions and cultural practices. I ‘m not interested in flattening them into some vague idea of “ancient wisdom.” What connects them for me is not that they are the same, but more so the question I’m bringing with me.

What forms of knowledge remain visible when modern life arrives?

What survives?

What gets passed down?

What gets protected?

What gets commercialized?

What disappears?

What changes?

AND what might those things teach me about the way I want to practice?

WHY FACIAL MASSAGE?

Facial massage sits in such an interesting place between beauty and care. On the surface, yes, there are aesthetic changes. But anyone who has received slow, intentional facial massage knows that something else happens too. The face is incredibly intimate territory.

Our expressions live there.

Our guarding lives there.

We clench our jaws there.

We furrow our brows there.

We hold our breath there.

We present ourselves to the world there.

So when touch becomes slower and more attentive, the treatment stops feeling like something being performed on the face and begins to feel like communication with the person underneath it. Technique matters enormously but practitioner presence changes technique.

SO, WHY REIKI? WHY KURAMA?

Reiki has been woven into my work for years and as I continue toward master-level practice, being in Japan has made me want to approach that progression with more intention. Mount Kurama holds an important place within Reiki tradition and spending time there feels less like checking off a spiritual destination and more like creating space to listen where silence and slowness is still revered.

I don’t expect a mountain to hand me enlightenment.

I don’t want another credential simply for the sake of adding another title.

I want practice.

I want humility.

I want to understand what changes when I stop asking, “What else can I learn?” and begin asking, “How deeply am I willing to practice what I already know?”

TRAVEL IS MY FAVORITE FORM OF STUDY

When I travel, I don’t want to move through a place simply collecting things from it. I want to notice what being somewhere else reveals about the assumptions I carry from home. We tend to think the way we live is simply the way life works until we go somewhere where people organize ordinary life differently, then suddenly the invisible becomes visible. You notice your own speed, your own expectations, your relationship with convenience, with food, with aging, with public space, with silence, with service, with ritual, with consumption.

I dont intend for our travels to automatically make my children or myself wiser, but I’m consistently seeing how it can make our own culture strange enough that we finally see it.

WHAT I WANT TO BRING HOME

Of course I’m bringing things home, it’s me!!! Japanese tools, skin care, towels, brushes, things I’m curious about, things I want YOU to experience. That’s the fun part. But this time I’m much more interested in bringing home ways of thinking, more patience in my hands, more intention in the details. A deeper understanding of ritual, more curiosity about plant medicine, greater respect for lineage, a willingness to let a treatment breathe.

AND A REFUSAL TO TURN EVERY BEAUTIFUL THING INTO ANOTHER ITEM ON A SERVICE MENU.

Allowing this experience to change the practitioner before it ever changes the practice.

WHAT SACRED SKIN ALCHEMY IS BECOMING

Sacred Skin Alchemy is changing because I am changing. The deeper I move into this work, the less interested I am in building a traditional skincare business.

I want my treatment room to exist somewhere between skin practice, bodywork, ritual, sensory experience and sanctuary.

I want the things I teach someday to come from years of touching bodies and paying attention, not simply from learning a technique quickly enough to turn around and sell it. I want travel to inform the work without becoming extraction. I want to remain a student and I want the business to grow without losing the slowness that made me love this work in the first place.

Maybe that’s the contradiction I’m trying to figure out?

How do you grow something without endlessly accelerating it?

How do you build a successful business that still values things capitalism doesn’t measure particularly well? I don’t have a finished answer.

Maybe that’s why I keep traveling.

SO, WHY JAPAN?

For facial massage!

For Reiki!

For my family!

For beauty!

For curiosity!

For the privilege of becoming a studentmotherdaughter again!

And because right now, the question guiding so much of my work is very simple:

What is worth doing slowly?