Solar Herbalism: TCM Foot Soak, Moxibustion & Congee-Core Rituals
May 16 falls during the 立夏 lìxià “Start of Summer” Chinese seasonal point. Come celebrate the beginning of summer with practical and seasonally appropriate Eastern wellness rituals that merge food therapy, plant medicine, and ceremony.
You’ll be introduced to a beloved Sichuan and Chinese pastime: 泡脚 pàojiǎo herbal foot soaking (for health, vitality, and relaxation), plus moxibustion (aka mugwort heat therapy) offered by Taiwanese American folk herbalist Kimberly Chou Tsun An.
We will discuss plant medicine in everyday life while sharing a traditional Lixia 七家粥 (qījiāzhōu) congee and tea service, with rice sourced from Ever-Growing Family Farm (a Gambian family growing heritage Japanese rice varietals in the Hudson Valley) and tea brought back from Sichuan’s Tibetan regions.
Participants will take home a complimentary soaking basin and learn how to incorporate foot soaks and plant medicine into their life for years to come.
This is the third and final part of Wèi 味 Collective's yearlong programming series with telos.haus introducing Sichuan foodways and life lessons from a gastronomic motherland rooted in the deep earth. Part one (Ferments x Forages) covered the basics of Sichuan paocai and contextualized the importance of local, organic food supply chains. Part two (Winter Cure Workshop) invited participants to recreate the economies of scale for traditional communal curing, ft. three types of Chinese winter preservation techniques.
Kimberly Chou Tsun An is an artist, community organizer and cultural worker based in Brooklyn, NY, with roots in Taipei, Taiwan and Detroit, MI.
She practices folk herbalism inspired by traditional Chinese medicine and other Asian healing traditions, interwoven with popular Western herbalism and plant wisdom indigenous to Lenapehoking New York the Northeast — an evolving, adaptive form of “Asian American herbalism,” to lovingly borrow language from herbalist and teacher Erin Masako Wilkins.
Her work involves engaging community — whether old friends and comrades, or new neighbors and collaborators — through hands-on plant and herb workshops, collective altar-building, zine-making and more, tailored to the desires and needs of each place. This cross-cultural, cross-community work explores of how we humans can better be in right relationship with each other, other beings, plants and land in the present moment, but with a longview grounding — looking forward into the future, while connecting with ancestors and channeling the past.
She is an acudetox specialist, trained in the five-point ear acupuncture protocol first developed in the 1970s by members of the Young Lords and Black Panthers as a form of radical community care.
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Wèi 味 Collective (味·集社) is on a mission to amplify Sichuan’s ancestral and contemporary foodways.
We are the first cross-cultural, Sichuan-run central platform bridging the province’s mainland and diasporic producers, businesses, writers, restaurateurs, and especially farmers, growers, and foragers—the heart of Sichuan’s agricultural heritage.
Launched in August 2025 by Kathy Yuan, Wèi Collective’s community building initiatives will include online resource mapping & knowledge shares; bilingual career development opportunities for Sichuan/English speakers; in-person programming & small biz partnerships in collaboration with @thinkchinatown (NYC); land-to-table/mountain-to-basin tours (Sichuan); and more to come.
味 (wèi) is a Chinese character for taste, aroma, flavor. Wèi 味 Collective was founded to create a community centering Sichuan voices: our tastemakers, especially from the mainland. In the West, Sichuan food has never been more popular or reductive. We want the world to know there’s more.