Emotion Cartography

Navigating Our Inner and Outer Worlds through Art and Conversation

Last year marked my first foray into offering workshops as part of my artistic practice. It all stemmed from my residency work in Lonsdale the year before, where I created "The Communal Poetry Machine." Using found shapes, sounds, and objects, we gathered to notice the stories and sensations living within our bodies. Within the four walls of that wash hut, people shared deeply—stories of motherhood, aging pains, and grief. Together, we assembled and disassembled found objects, reconstructing them into a soundscape layered with audio from the site. People showed up so beautifully for one another, sharing and listening generously.

Something about it tugged at a deep part of me. It felt important—something new I needed to tend to. Like a lighthouse winking through the fog, I leaned in closer. It wasn’t therapy, but it was an opening. A space where we could step outside the bustle of the everyday and, without judgment or expectation, imagine who we might be in our fullest selves.

Returning to my art practice as an adult felt like an emergency landing. That year, I was in denial about how burnt out I was—living in the wake of COVID with brain fog, a lost sense of taste, and a complicated romantic relationship ending painfully. I quit my job—or rather, I simply couldn’t continue. My new mouth guard was already cracked from the stress grinding my molars, and I didn’t see things getting any better.

Looking back now, it seems absurd that I expected another season of productivity after. But I did. I fully believed I would seamlessly transition into a personal Renaissance, effortlessly reclaiming the tactile, thriving art practice I had left behind at Emily Carr University a decade ago.

Working with a therapist through WorkBC, I began to unpack what I had actually experienced—and how my natural defense to push through the pain instilled by the work ethic of two hardworking immigrant parents wasn’t going to cut it this time.

But anyway—after months of waiting for creativity to strike, I was horrified that my brain was broken. I had ignored and betrayed the parts of me that had yearned so long to flourish that I’ve killed them like the Tamagotchi I forgot to feed. Wherever my artistry resided, had atrophied and become inhospitable.

My therapist, Nicole, amongst so many gentle offerings suggested: "Sometimes when we overthink, we are under-feeling." That idea sparked a year of experimentation—what if I let myself feel first? My default had always been thinking myself into oblivion. What if I consciously delayed judgment for as long as possible?

In those quiet meetings with myself, a strange sadness poured from my brush, then my pen. There was no heroic transformation, no montage of resilience—just me, often feeling small, broken, and fragile. I let these emotions speak to me through my art. It was painful to witness, but I allowed it. I painted a lot of seeds for a time, and a mantra emerged: "A seed is a seed is a seed." Slowly, I started to believe that, just like a seed, I would have my time in the sun. But first, I had to stop struggling against the dark.

That’s when "My Mother’s Daughter" came pouring out of me—a poem born from a late-night conversation with a friend about being a third-culture kid. We live between cultures, constantly toggling. For me, that meant immigrating from Hong Kong early on and navigating work and school in Canada differently than I did at home. That night, my friend shared a Spanish phrase that translates to "neither here nor there." We spoke about how adaptable this experience made us—but also about the costs. The sacrifices of foreign names, the dissociation from certain customs in exchange for safety. Over the years, we had helped each other name the burnout and anxiety that came with this constant emotional labor, the harsh inner critic we had internalized.

Later, reflecting on my surprise at the sadness in my work, I realized that having company in this process had helped me meet a part of myself I often buried.

I started reading about somatics—Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, Gabor Maté’s When the Body Says No, and Vancouver-based therapist Hilary McBride’s The Wisdom of the Body. McBride writes about the myth of "body hierarchy"—how our culture frames the body as something to overcome. We are unconsciously ranked by youth, skin color, gender, ability. To survive, we often dissociate—from pain, from oppression, from hunger, from exhaustion.

But the same walls that protect us from pain also keep us from joy. This fear-based paradigm helps us survive, but it cannot help us flourish. I became deeply interested in how somatic traditions from around the world offer alternative ways of knowing—ways that honor the full range of human experiences, neurodivergence, and embodiment. I wanted to experiment with how we might co-create this knowledge, using art to map and research both our unique and shared experiences.

That curiosity led me here. Two years later, after one thing led to another, I’m now preparing to launch my first cohort: Emotion Cartography – Navigating Our Inner and Outer Worlds Through Art and Conversation. This 5-week series, starting March 15th, will be a space where we gather every Saturday to explore, collaborate, and snack.

In this series, we’ll explore:

• Emotional regulation skills

• Emotional literacy

• Data visualization

• The mind-body connection

• Active listening

• Empathy for self and others

Some of the tools we’ll use include:

• Data Collectors – guiding us to explore our senses, helping us notice where we feel rooted, connected, and even where we feel discomfort.

• A Collective Map – a large, evolving map where we layer emotions and shared experiences over time.

• Somatic Body Mapping – a tool to connect our experiences with our physical expressions, allowing us to see patterns in our emotional landscapes.

I’m so curious about where this adventure will take us—how we might expand on the ways we describe our feelings in relation to our bodies. We already say things like "My heart hurts," "I have butterflies in my stomach," or "It feels like my chest is going to burst!"

In a study called Bodily Maps of Emotions, over 700 people were asked to color where they felt emotions on a blank body outline. The results were fascinating—people reported feeling emotions in similar places across the body. This, along with research on the mind-body connection, shows how emotions, thoughts, and physical sensations are deeply linked. What we feel emotionally impacts our bodies, and our physical states influence our thoughts and emotions in turn.

If you live in Vancouver and want to explore this together, there are 15 first come first serve spots in the cohort! You can get more details and sign up here: https://www.hellochowder.com/new-events/emotion-cartography