culture

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Scenic view of hills and cityscape in the distance, with a makeshift outdoor setup including a paper with brush strokes, a pen, and a container on a flat surface, in black and white.

MAKE CONSCIOUS art and design processes are expressions and applications of AAPI cultural practices known as gong fu 功夫 in Chinese, and sadhana in Sanskrit/Tibetan. (साधना/ སྒྲུབ་ཐབས་) In their original forms, they were not separate since a master of one is the master of all due to the unification of qi or prana. What appears to be multidisciplinary to the current product-driven Western industrial complex is from an Ancient Wisdom process-perspective simply a joyful expression of a unified consciousness working in harmony with nature.

Gong fu is the ancient Chinese cultural practice of applying concentration and qi to the inner and outer landscapes, thereby making the invisible visible and unifying heaven, earth, and humanity (天人合一). Gong fu transcends any one religion of China and applies to Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian practices. Gong fu has become popularized as martial arts or kung fu, but includes diverse creative practices and rites such as calligraphy, tea, painting, landscape, writing, meditation, and many more forms.

Sadhana in Sanskrit means a spiritual practice/path. Sadhana-based practices are indigenous to the Himalayan region and include the Yogic traditions of India and the Tantric Buddhist lineages of Tibet.

Make Conscious celebrates and integrates AAPI ancestral paradigms of transformation into contemporary design process from a place of sincere daily practice and ancestral healing. Many of our ancestral lineages have been destroyed through colonization and by embracing ancestral and shamanic processes of analysis, listening, divination, and ritual we are able to celebrate our shared global cultural heritage not from an anthropological standpoint or from a historic preservation standpoint but from a practical, embodied, and Asia Futurist perspective.

Finally, though we are lineage practitioners who have over 20 years of deep study, we do not operate within the guru paradigm of transmission. Wisdom is universally accessible and non-dogmatic. The collective consciousness is the teacher.

image: mapping the dragon lines in Hollywood with Jessica Kung.

Black and white photo of the Hollywood Sign on a hillside with mountains in the background.
View of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco with plants and trees in the foreground, and hills in the background under a clear blue sky.

land

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Make Conscious collaborates with the genius loci (spirit of place). Our listening and healing work brings us into spaces of connection and listening on the ancestral lands of Indigenous peoples all around the world. We honor and acknowledge the ancestral lands that we live upon and are in the ongoing process of decolonizing all levels of consciousness. We are based in California but our work takes us all over the world. Below is an ever expanding list of the ancestral provenance of the land we collaborate with.

We stand in solidarity with Indigenous land protection and sovereignty movements around the world and acknowledge the deep levels of compounded BIPOC trauma embedded and woven into Indigenous genocide and trauma. Our work is committed to addressing intergenerational land-based trauma and addressing environmental and social justice initiatives.

STOP ASIAN HATE ON STOLEN LAND

A black-and-white photo of two birds soaring in the sky above an ancient rock with petroglyphs and carvings.