Episode 9 - Jamee Pineda: Decolonizing Medicine

Josie talks with Jamee Pineda, a hilot binabaylan, acupuncturist, and Chinese Medicine practitioner, whose practice is informed by his identity as a queer, trans, non-binary, Tagalog person living in the US. Josie and Jamee talk decolonizing food, honoring ancestry, paying reparations, and building a safer queer community as practitioners of ancient medicine.

[ID: Headshots of Josie (@intersectionalfertility) and Jamee Pineda (@jameepinedahealingarts) on a tan background. Text reads: The Intersectional Fertility Podcast Episode 09.]

Episode Transcript:

Josie:

I'm Josie Rodriguez-Bouchier, and this is the Intersectional Fertility Podcast, where ideas and identities intersect to deepen our understanding of fertility, and ultimately our whole selves. I'm talking with Jamee Pineda, who is a hilot binabaylan, acupuncturist, and Chinese medicine practitioner based in Piscataway Territory, also known as Baltimore, Maryland. His practice is informed by his identity as a trans non-binary Tagalog person, living in diaspora, with the combination of his lived experience and training. His goal is to help individuals and communities live their fullest lives by offering a decolonizing approach to medicine rooted in traditional and ancestral practices. Welcome Jamee, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Jamee:

So glad to be here.

Josie:

Will you share with us your pronouns and where you're located in the world?

Jamee:

I use he/him pronouns and I am currently located on Piscataway territory, otherwise known as Baltimore,

Josie:

I'd love to know a little bit about your background and story because I am so passionate about restoring ancient forms of medicine. And I know that you engage in a couple, at least a couple, maybe a few. So how did you arrive at wanting to study and practice Chinese medicine and later hilot? Am I saying that correctly?

Jamee:

Hilot. You're close, the O is a little different. So I came to Chinese medicine, I think the way that a lot of people have come to Chinese medicine as in, I started out as a patient. So, I, several years ago, was experiencing a lot of burnout from a job that I worked at that was really, really toxic. So at that time I didn't have a lot of health, I didn't really have health insurance at the time at all. And I also didn't have a lot of income. So for me the most accessible forms of care ended up being community acupuncture and also doing some preventative stuff on my own, as well as some other. There were some other, sliding scale therapies that were available to me. So, when I say doing my own, I meant, I mean, I'm doing a lot of food medicine for myself and trying to, starting to learn about that. And because I didn't have a lot of money at the time, what that looked like for me was trying to grow a lot of my own food. I'm not even, I'm not really a green thumb at all, but it was definitely, it was a very basic need of, I need to start growing my own food or I need to work at the co-op to get, discounted or free shit so that I could eat food that was actually nutritious.

Josie:

That's awesome. And then how did you later become, trained? I read the word on your website, but I know I'm going to butcher it. It's hilot and then, it starts with a b.

Jamee:

Hilot binabaylan. So hilot is the name of, ancestral medicine in the Philippines and the word binabaylan comes from the word babaylan. So babaylan is one of the terms used for, the ancient healing practitioners in the Philippines. So, the Philippines is very ethically, diverse and very language diverse, the different tribes, there have different names for their healers. And when we say binabaylan, it means someone who works or someone who, who is on the path of, adjacent to being a babaylan. So, I don't claim that title for myself because I don't live in that context anymore. Or I've never lived in that context. This is a very modern way to relate to the ancestral medicine. So even my teachers themselves don't claim the title babaylan because it's a very specific, cultural title.

Some of the other titles are  mombaki or, katalonan, but it really depends on, on each specific, cultural lineage. So, I came to that, well, let me back up a little bit saying that I had originally wanted to study that, but I just didn't have access to learning it. So, I couldn't find teachers, I didn't have money to go to the Philippines to learn, my ancestral medicine and, I didn't even know where to go, even if I had money at the time. So, in some ways going kind of circuitous route through Chinese medicine helps me get there. My ancestry is mostly Tagalog, but I also have some Chinoy ancestry, so that's Chinese Pinoy or Chinese Filipino ancestry. So, I felt okay learning that medicine. And that's been a conversation for myself as well, because I'm like, my parents aren't from China. I'm not, from there directly. So, it's a thing to navigate, you know?

Josie:

Totally. I struggled with that too myself. Can you talk a little bit about what hilot is, what it entails, how can it benefit folks and what do you love about it?

Jamee:

So, hilot is really, it's Chinese medicine in that it was a complete medicine. So it treated people with all, all kinds of disease and it's, I think even more holistic than, how Chinese medicine is practiced in the US today, as in, when we look at causes of disease as being in addition to, to sometimes being physical or emotional, if we always, we also look at spiritual causes, we look at social causes, we look at environmental causes. So, for example, if you are, if you're having trouble with your relationships in life, that can make you sick that, that conflict can make you sick. And it could be, your work relationships or your romantic relationships or friendships or whatever, and that has an effect on your health. And the same thing with when we're looking at environment, I mean, to me, that's a very obvious link. I think especially with a lot of, communities that have a relationship with global south, where, if our environment is sick, we get sick. If we don't have access to clean water, because our water sources are polluted, then obviously we get sick. And in the hilot, it's also a very spiritual thing. None of this stuff is actually separated. I'm talking about these in a compartmentalized way, just to make it a little bit simpler. Simpler is not the right word. Maybe more compartmentalized and accessible.

Jamee:

So, pre-colonization, the spiritual practices in the Philippines are very connected to animism. So, our environment nature around us also has a spiritual aspect as well. They have sentience. So when we were out of alignment with that, say, say, let's go back to polluted water. So, the polluted water is physically polluted, but also the entity attached to it is, has been wronged. There's been a misalignment with that relationship. Right. And so, it's about caring for all of all of those relationships and finding a balance, because we're, our health is not actually, there is not, there's not a real thing of just individual health because everything is connected to each other. So, there's a lot that I love about healing and well, I guess one of the things is the survivorship of it. I've talked about this before, I talked about it on a different podcast, but just going to give a really quick content warning about, colonial violence. So, when the Spanish came to the Philippines, they, basically tried, they tried to murder all of babaylan, all of the healing practitioners.

Jamee:

So, our healing practitioners were not only healers. They were also, they had a very multifaceted role that included being leaders in the community, being educators, being spiritual leaders, and being warriors as well. So, they were instrumental in resistance against the Spanish. So of course, the Spanish want to get rid of them, so they tried to suppress those practices. They tried to kill them off, even to the point where, they chopped up their bodies when they murdered them, because they were, they feared their power so much. They didn't want them to resurrect themselves. And so their bodies were chopped up and fed to the crocodiles. So, what we see here is a complete disruption of healthcare and spiritual practices and culture and language, and also, a disruption of how people related to gender and sexuality, because a lot of these healers were also people identified in the community as, folks who can kind of walk between worlds.

Jamee:

So, from a modern perspective and using a modern, Western lexicon, they might have been identified as non-binary or trans or gender expansive. I can't really put those words on that, on, on their folks, because I don't actually know. And the, the cultural context and the language is different, but they were people who did not conform to European ideas of gender binary. So that was, very threatening to the colonizers. So, the way that the medicine did end up surviving, because obviously it was dangerous to practice it in the open was people practiced it in secret, or they practiced it with Catholicism. And I know that this is not something that is unique to the Philippines. It's a thing that has happened to a lot of indigenous medicine. And I, I just, I have, come to appreciate how that medicine has survived and is coming back to us, it never actually left, even if it doesn't look exactly like it did before. It's still here. I personally believe that the medicine itself that body of knowledge has its own sentience and its own survival.

Josie:

Oh my gosh. I love that. That makes total sense to me. I feel too, that it does live on in your blood, in your DNA. I think that you have access to that.

Jamee:

And so much of the medicine is very based on, ancestor work. So ancestral veneration is a big part of the culture. So, they, I mean, not all of our ancestors want to be beneficial for that for us. I will say that, but there are ancestors out there who are rooting for us and who do want us to have whatever we need in life. And those ancestors whether we know their names or how to call out to them, they're there. Right. You know? And I think that that's really fucking cool.

Josie:

Cool. Totally, totally. I've been feeling that more and more in the last few years, for sure. I love that. In Chinese medicine, as our fertility is referred to as our essence or kidney essence, the more we're able to get in touch with who we really are, or our essence, the more access we have to our fertile potential and creative power. This is what I teach in my whole self fertility method, which embodies this idea of bringing our whole selves to the fertility journey, not just one part. And I really believe that connecting with and honoring our ancestry and decolonizing everything, literally everything, plays a huge role in getting in touch with our essence and our whole selves. And I know this is one of your main focuses is decolonizing medicine through food. Can you talk a little bit about that?, what does that mean to you?, and what are some ways that you're actively doing that?

Jamee:

Man, decolonizing food is such, it's such a huge topic. And I, I love talking about it and I love practicing it and there's not, I mean, to say there's not one way to practice it because colonization hasn't affected each of us the same way. So I'm going to speak, I'm going to speak from my own, experience with it. And I just want folks listening to know that, that, that my experience isn't a monolith. So the way that I approach food and maybe this is because I'm Filipinx, is that it's, the food itself is very, very sacred. And it, it has a lot of correspondences for me. So, when I'm working with food, even in a super casual way, I'm not doing a huge ceremony or anything, I'm just making breakfast, but my plate is still an altar on which I place the food. My body is an altar where the food goes. The way that my teacher taught me, Apu Adman, in the Hilot Academy of Binabaylan. He talks about how our bodies are an extension of our ancestors. And so even though they don't have corporeal form now, feeding ourselves as a way to feed our ancestors. So, it can transmit through it, the physical transmits into the more spiritual, those things are not separate. So, we can talk about that as food, you can talk about it as other ways of caring for yourself. I just find that really beautiful because a lot of our ancestors are traumatized right. For a lot of reasons. Many of us live with generational, experiences of generational violence, right.

Josie:

That's so interesting to think about having that opportunity to reach backwards and nourish those who are already gone.

Jamee:

I think that medicine and social connection and all that stuff is not linear and it's not static. It's very dynamic. So, I was thinking about this question earlier, and one of the things that has kind of kept me on track with the practice of just thinking about decolonizing my food is living a lifestyle where I can actually cook, you know. Do you have time to actually sit and cook a meal and pay attention to what you're doing? And, have a process with that. And if you don't, I don't think that's wrong, but I think that's a symptom of capitalism. So, it's more than individual choice. A lot of us don't really have the choice to sit and cook a meal and enjoy it. And really put nutrition and intention into it.

Jamee:

So that's a check for me to see, how is capitalism impacting my ability to actually take care of myself and have this meal because capitalism is part of colonization. And so, when I'm thinking about that, then I can pause and see if there are places where I have agency to change that. Sometimes I do. And sometimes I don't. And if I don't, what other ways can I do that practice where I am still honoring ancestors that are mine or ancestors of places where, I'm living? Ancestors of people who are in relationship to me, who might have less privilege. So, if I, if I can't cook for myself, can I at least patronize a business that is owned by BIPOC? Can I at least buy food that is locally grown, if possible, by people who are actually stewards of the land? So, there's no hard and fast way to practice decolonization because it really depends on a person's context. And even that changes every day and even that is not solely dependent on just what's happening in that individual's sphere. Right? it's connected to much bigger structures.

Josie:

I love that. That makes so much sense that everyone is colonized differently. And it depends on where you are. Depends on your own heritage. That makes a lot of sense. I was going to ask if you had any tips for us to start decolonizing our food now, and I think those are great tips to think about how capitalism is affecting our ability to nourish ourselves and our ancestors. And like you said, other's ancestors,

Jamee:

One thing I've suggested to folks who have asked me similar questions is just look at your food. So, if you are someone - I used this, I don't know why I liked using this example, but you are that person who gets that pumpkin spice latte, when autumn rolls around, you're buying a Starbucks or whatever. No shade to that, but think about what goes into that. You've got cinnamon and you've got cardamom, maybe cloves, and maybe there's actual, real pumpkin in it, I don't know. But coffee, all of these things are things that are not European. They're not from white cultures. Right? they're just not. And think about how that ingredient got to where you are and you can start tracing those stories because our, I mean, I'm an animus. So I think these things are also, that food has energy. Food has personality and spirituality. And it has its own essence. So, most of the spices in a pumpkin spice latte are from Southeast Asia, from Indonesia. How did that get to you? Was it trade? Was there a fair exchange for it? Was there a history of exploitation and extraction to get that? Did it go to Europe first and then come to you?

Jamee:

And this isn't to shame people for their food choices, but it is to understand how things got to us and what our relationship is, and then you have this information. So, what are you going to do? How can you, you can't un-drink or un-eat things that you eat? I mean, I guess you could vomit, but we can't just magically decolonize our relationships to things because colonization happened. It is happening. You can't. It's not a politic of purity where you can just take out the good part and leave the colonization. We have to move in a way that is in relationship to what already happening. And then how do we repair what has happened? How do we build things that are outside of that, but understand that that is still here, right?

Josie:

Because we're so disconnected from how food gets to us, or we're so disconnected from that whole process in general. So that, that seems like a good first step.

Jamee:

And, if you have had Chinese medicine training, we're always talking about root cause. Apply that to your food, apply it to how you're relating to your patients. I remember when I was in school, I worked with a patient who was having a lot of health problems and was coming in every week to get treatments and trying to take herbs with me. And then at one point I stopped, and I was like, wait a minute, what are you eating? And then she told me, and it was iceberg lettuce and ranch dressing. She had in her head that that was healthy. That's what she'd been taught. She was trying to eat differently for her own health. And then I asked her more about that and what the actual root problem was is that she had food scarcity. So someone was paying for her treatments, that was not coming out of her pocket. And then, so her actual individual access to resources, particularly food was coming from the food bank or food stamps. So, it didn't matter that I was giving the perfect formulas or doing the perfect acupuncture when the root cause is this, I can't give her food advice if she is food insecure.

Jamee:

So going to the root, seeing that and understanding oh, root cause it means something different than maybe what we're talking about, not like in my clinical training with my professors. Root cause might actually be capitalism or poverty or whatever.

Josie:

That makes so much sense. I was thinking about a professor that I had an acupuncture school. When you were saying that food has different energy or brings certain characteristics with it, what is it?

Jamee:

Animism.

Josie:

That's right. She was saying that, think of the energy of popcorn and how it's so chaotic and so all over the place and so airy and all that anxious energy. And I was eating popcorn every night for a snack. And I was like, Hmm. When she said it, I felt so seen. I was like, oh, this is not helping my anxiety. And then she brought up a couple other examples. One was soup, eating too much soup, things that were really liquid and had no boundary. There was, looking at your own boundaries in your life and seeing if you had good boundaries. That was interesting. And then the antidote that she gave me to my popcorn snacking was buffalo. To eat bison, because she was saying, when the storm comes in, most other animals run and find shelter from the storm, but buffalo turn and face the storm and just endure it. They have this incredible grounded energy. And so I started eating lots of bison when I was in acupuncture school and it really helped my anxiety.

Jamee:

That is so cool. I love Doctrine of Signatures. I think it's so neat.

Josie:

It was fascinating to me learning about all that. So, I'm wondering too, as, as a person of color who's queer, would you call yourself? I call myself queer.

Jamee:

Totally.

Josie:

I'm wondering if you have any personal practices or rituals in place that allow you to connect with your essence or your whole self? Especially as a person of color. I think it's so important for us to do that.

Jamee:

I don't know if I have a particular ritual or that, I would say that I do anything different, I do have a few different practices that I do to help me connect, but they're not quite rituals. So, it's more around boundaries around who gets access to me, who gets access to my time. Part of my connection to ancestral medicine is knowing that the healers were also the people who were more gender expansive. So, my relationship to gender is really within that context of my cultural heritage and my cultural inheritance. So, when I do rituals, that's built into it. It's not separated. It's not separated out. This is the thing because the idea of queerness I think is very interesting in that it is always in relationship to, cis-het normativity.

Jamee:

Like it, it doesn't in our modern Western culture. It doesn't really exist on its own. It's different from something else. Right. So, if I'm going back, and really tapping into my ancestors, there wasn't a different something else. It was just, there are these things that exist. There are these ideas that exist. There are these types of people that exist. One is not, what is it, one is not, what is the right word? They're not in relationship to each other, as one is and one isn't something. I don't know how to say that in a more eloquent way.

Josie:

That makes sense. I'm imagining a Venn diagram. I think in our more Western culture, it's like there has to be an overlap or there's one or the other, or, like they're in relation to each other, you were saying.

Jamee:

Right. So, I guess another way to talk about it is, there's apples and oranges and then someone brings a mango, and the mango is not apple, not orange. You could relate to it that way, because it's not an apple and it's not an orange. Or you could be like it's just a mango. And this is an apple and an orange.

Josie:

And it doesn't matter - the apples and oranges are irrelevant.

Jamee:

Right. It's just, it's its own thing. It doesn't need to be spoken of in relationship to the other objects.

Josie:

That's so important. And I love, I saw what you were saying recently on Instagram about, because we're really taught in acupuncture school to have, you were saying, to be neutral with our patients or to have good boundaries with them, according to HIPAA, we can't wave to them first if we see them out in public or, that kind of thing. And how as a person, and especially if we're working with another person or a trans patient or, I feel that, I struggle with that, where I feel like, I want to connect with this person because there are so few of us.

Jamee:

I think that's hard. There's totally a scarcity mindset. Sometimes that I've felt where I'm like, oh, I need to, I want to know everyone, but I can't be in relationship outside of what I'm doing in clinic. Or, if they see me there first and they can't be anything else in my life. And I think that the standards of being neutral, being really removed, I don't think that they're inherently bad, but it's like, nah, it's just not possible. A lot of times, especially when I first started practicing, all my clients were people, I knew they came to me because they knew me, that was, that is, especially for and trans people, that is a way that we find safety. We have to know enough about the person that we know they're going to be cool that they're not going to say something up to us and traumatizes because so many of us have a history traumatic medical histories. So, it's not always easy. It's kind of a struggle to understand because we do want to protect our patients and we want to protect ourselves and we want to, have all these good boundaries, but it just doesn't, it can't look the same in certain communities, especially when you want to work within your own community.

Josie:

Totally. And it comes back to that, you were saying that your "ritual" for connecting with your whole self is boundaries. It's like that shows up also in clinical practice of, when do you loosen up those boundaries? When do you have them in? That's interesting to think about,

Jamee:

And it's what I've come to, just because the community is so small and you can't really avoid everyone, just having as much transparency as possible. And just being like, Hey, I know that we're in community. We might run into each other. So here's my boundary. If we do, is there another boundary that you have? Because it's, I mean, it's all about informed consent. It's about ongoing consent, because that might change. Right? there have definitely been people where we worked together and it was great and we knew each other outside and then, that relationship shifted. So then we don't work with each other again as patient and practitioner. And that's where building relationships with other providers that you can refer to is really, really helpful.

Josie:

And I do think, compartmentalizing like that is such a westernized colonized way of thinking about things. And something I've noticed in the community is consent is a theme that comes up over and over again. And I think that makes so much sense to me that that would also carry over into clinical practice.

Josie:

I wanted to ask you as a non-Asian acupuncturist like myself, and I know, I know that I have a lot of non-Asian acupuncturists in my community, as do you, as we all do, what can we do to honor this medicine that we're practicing and minimize further harm to Asian communities? I know it's not possible to, not cause any harm, but to minimize it as best we can. I'm wondering just what your thoughts are on that. If you have any resources that you recommend, I know you and I were chatting through DMs a little while ago about how our main textbooks are written by Maciocia who's Italian. So this version of Chinese medicine that we're practicing in the U S is already colonized.

Jamee:

I'm again, not going to say that I speak for everyone on this topic. But I think that it's easy to get caught up on the complexities and the nuances of how to proceed with reparations around this kind of issue around Chinese medicine. And I've had a lot of people ask for resources around this, and I don't think it's - okay, I'm going to answer this in a very, maybe very annoying way. So, the times where I have answered people, white folks specifically, who have asked this nothing happened. So, I recently was on a thread where someone asked this question and the responses were, here's this article, here's this book, it was the white people book collecting, they like their book clubs, all of the people who were active on the thread were all white folks. And so, my response was, well, I'm doing de-colonizing work, I'm in the AAPI community. You can support my Patreon. You can also support Tamsin Lee. Tamsin Lee is very vocal and active and doing this kind of work. Like here's two people. We're not the only ones. [Pause] Crickets. Nothing happened around it. It's super frustrating. I'm not going to give more reading material.

Josie:

That's fair.

Jamee:

Because I feel like there are already a lot of people who were super vocal about what they need as a community. And if you're not seeing any of that, you're not receiving that information, I think you need to check who your sources are, what information are you surrounding yourself with. Because it's not that there aren't voices happening. I feel like there's actually so much information I can't keep up. It's more changing the way that people relate to that information or receive that information and then actually acting on it in a very material way. So, it’s like anything that you might have taken that isn't yours, just pay for it. In whatever way that means, in a way that someone wants to receive it. You know it's kind of like paying back rent. So in whatever you're doing, does that uplift the community that this is from in a way that they actually want to be uplifted. Money is one of the easiest, obvious ways to do that as redistributing funds. It's not the only way. It could be you are donating time. It could be that you're setting up a scholarship fund and fundraising for BIPOC acupuncturists, Asian acupuncturists to go to school. Maybe you pay for my student loans.

Jamee:

I'll be Congress, so cancel student debt. You know what are the barriers that are stopping people from accessing their own medicine as a practitioner or as a patient, because it's not only that our colleagues are mostly white in the US it's a lot of our clientele. A lot of the people who have access to Chinese medicine happen to be white as well. Well, they don't happen to be white. That is part of the structure.

Josie:

Right. That's how it's set up. I love that response. I think that makes total sense. And it's not just a one and done thing. It's an ongoing undoing of the way that everything was set up. Like you said.

Jamee:

 a lot of people will do acknowledgements of where the medicine came from, and then they kind of stop there. And I didn't hear anything from NCCAOM when folks got shot up in Atlanta. Right?

Josie:

Gosh, good point.

Jamee:

I didn't see any of them doing anything around anti-Asian violence. NCCAOM [National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine] literally still has Oriental Medicine in the name. If people are serious about actually changing things and making reparations, change the name of our professional organization, change the names of the schools that are teaching this medicine in the US. So many of them still have OM in it.

Josie:

One of the titles you can get has Oriental in it.

Jamee:

I don't like to write out the name of my degree because it's MAc. OM, which is Masters in Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. It's embarrassing.

Josie:

Right. For anyone listening, who doesn't know what the NCCAOM is, it's the board that certifies us as acupuncturists. And they need to do better.

Josie:

Well, Jamee, how can folks support you in particular and find you and respect your boundaries and support in monetary ways and all other ways.

Jamee:

So my website is www.jamee-pineda-lac.com. So on that website, you'll find my social media links. If you want to check me out there. I also have my Patreon account linked to my website and I love doing Patreon because it provides a more steady income for me. And what I do with that is actually give free services out to people. So, I'm doing a lot of, I've been doing a lot of classes, particularly for QTBIPOC that are sliding scale or free, depending on who those folks are. We do a lot of Qigong and classes. Then I also have a lot of writing on there as well, through my blog. And I'm also going to be starting a podcast very soon. I mean, I'm not actually doing the editing, but the first episode is being edited as we speak. So that should come out - The Decolonizing Medicine Podcast.

Josie:

Amazing. Oh, I'm so excited to listen. Yay. Well, thank you so much, Jamee, for being here, I admire and respect you and your work so much. And I know that my listeners have learned so much too.

Jamee:

Thanks for letting me be here.

Josie:

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Josie:

Thanks for listening to the Intersectional Fertility Podcast. You can find us online at intersectionalfertility.com and on your favorite podcast platform. If you like the show and want to hear more, tap subscribe, and please consider leaving us a review, it really truly helps. The Intersectional Fertility Podcast is hosted by me, Josie Rodriguez Bouchier with audio production by Bryce Anderson-Gregson and music by Jen Korte.

*In this episode, Josie uses the terms bison and buffalo interchangeably. They are referring to American Bison.

All content offered through The Intersectional Fertility Podcast is created for informational purposes only, it is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.