How do you keep yourself well? With so much stress in the world, guarding your mental, physical and spiritual peace often feels harder than it seems.
Work is never-ending. Therapy can be hard to navigate. And sometimes, life just throws one curveball after another.
That’s why on a recent Thursday, Queer LA explored the idea of queer joy in wellness spaces at the Crawford, our events space in Pasadena. We did some gentle movement and guided meditation together, and got deep in discussion about why wellness matters.
Below, watch the recording from that night and learn more about the people behind these performances. Want more? Check out our next Queer LA LIVE event, Joyful Music, on Jan. 30.
Ana Sheila Victorino is co-host of the Latine podcast Tamarindo and co-founder of Bask and Being, a coaching company that aims to make stress suck less in workplaces.
“I want, through my work and projects, to help people feel as free, as well as possible, and as fulfilled as possible,” Victorino said, adding that they know what it’s like to live without those feelings.
Victorino is a queer woman and immigrant, originally from Mexico City. They grew up in Little Village, a Mexican and Puerto Rican neighborhood in Chicago, where their interest in community involvement and activism began. But they also grew up with pressure to perform, to prove that they deserved to be here.
“I was the oldest child, and I got an early taste of doing well in school. I started to associate my worth to the praise that I got,” Victorino said. “I'm a recovering sort of gold star chaser.”
A head injury forced Victorino to rethink their traditional career path. They couldn’t move, turn or sit up for a week to allow it to heal. It ended up being a period of deep reflection about happiness and how they wanted to contribute to a capitalist society.
After that, Victorio left a corporate job to pursue what’s important to them: helping people feel better in their work and challenging systems like “toxic” achievement culture.
“Not prioritizing the well-being of your folks — whether it’s in an actual business, your family, whatever — you not caring about it is harmful to the ecosystem that you live in,” Victorino said.
“We obviously come to it from a very human-centered and heart-centered place … we can imagine this world where all these things are different, but how can we actually, right now, make it better than it is?”
That’s where Bask and Being comes in to help spaces navigate physical and emotional well-being, burnout, and other points like psychological safety and productivity. Victorino was at Queer LA LIVE: Wellness For Joy to talk more about inclusive wellness in the workplace and walked us through the Reset Deck.
Mikey Martinez, a psychologist at APLA Health in Long Beach, says the pandemic changed how they approach wellness.
They were trained in the perspective of Western psychology. Martinez says it was a lot of focus on thoughts and feelings — cognitive behavioral therapy and humanistic theory — with a view to helping people change how they think to better navigate life.
“I actually had a client sit down and call me out and be like, ‘that doesn't make me feel good. That theory that you're using doesn't really capture who I am,’” Martinez recalled. “It really challenged me to change my perspective and try something new.”
Now, Martinez practices somatic psychology, which relates to the body. They’ll walk clients through things like breathing exercises to get people in touch with their physical health.
That also means looking at how environments affect mental health, something that became especially clear to Martinez during the heights of the pandemic.
“That way we can instill compassion and have them understand that not everything falls on them,” Martinez said.
Martinez works often with LGBTQ+ communities because they’re interested in giving back to people who have supported them. Their dream is to open up a wellness clinic that has different forms of care and healing services, like a medical doctor for physical needs or a psychic for spiritual ones.
Martinez was at Queer LA LIVE: Wellness For Joy to talk more about somatic wellness and guided us through a breathing exercise.
EVERYBODY, a gym in Los Angeles, has made waves for its inclusive approach to exercise. It was founded in 2017 by Sam Rypinski and Lake Sharp after the pair met at a business class at the Feminist Center for Creative Work.
Rypinski recalled that day, saying that folks went around the room sharing their ideas. Most were about goods and handmade things, but his was different.
“I wanted to make a gym happen here in Los Angeles and include everyone, especially people across the gender spectrum and all the other folks who are so left out of mainstream gym culture,” he said.
After that day, he and Sharp built EVERYBODY to try and address those problems. But it’s not about checking a box, Rypinski says. It’s a daily effort to uphold their values, to ensure they’re not doing empty virtue signaling.
EVERYBODY has a zero-tolerance policy against racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, fatphobia and transphobia. Anyone who uses the gym agrees to a social contract. Locker rooms are shared, gender-neutral spaces. People with disabilities get priority access to cardio machines, and the gym has an advisory committee that helps navigate diversity and inclusion opportunities.
“It's the gym of my dreams. Every time I walk in, I have an experience with someone where they say, ‘Oh my God. Thank you. Like, this is my home,’” Rypinski said.
Rypinski and EVERYBODY yoga teacher Puja Titchkosky were at Queer LA LIVE: Wellness For Joy to explore more about what inclusive wellness spaces means to them. Titchkosky also guided us through gentle and accessible movement.
