Support for LAist comes from
Local and national news, NPR, things to do, food recommendations and guides to Los Angeles, Orange County and the Inland Empire
Stay Connected

Share This

Health
Your space to help you get the most out of LGBTQ+ life in Greater Los Angeles. Queer LA is a long-term project to help you figure out things big and small — with a focus on joy.

Queer LA LIVE: Watch Our Conversation On Wellness

Image reads, "Queer LA Wellness for Joy LIVE" with bright colors of pink, purple, blue strokes in the background.
(
LAist Design
)

Congress has cut federal funding for public media — a $3.4 million loss for LAist. We count on readers like you to protect our nonprofit newsroom. Become a monthly member and sustain local journalism.

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.

Support for LAist comes from

Watch the exercises and discussion

Ana Sheila Victorino

A portrait of Ana Sheila, a woman with a medium light skin tone. They're wearing a cream vest with a white shirt, smiling into the camera with curly dark hair. In the background is a colorful wall.
Ana Sheila Victorino is a queer Mexican-born wellness entrepreneur.
(
Courtesy Ana Sheila Victorino
)

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.

Support for LAist comes from

“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 portrait of Matinez, who's a person with a medium light skin tone wearing a white tank top. They're smiling into the camera wearing dark-rimmed glasses and a round hat.
Mikey Martinez, a queer, Mexican clinical psychologist, practices from an anti-racist and anti-capitalist perspective.
(
Courtesy Mikey Martinez
)
Support for LAist comes from

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.

Support for LAist comes from

Martinez was at Queer LA LIVE: Wellness For Joy to talk more about somatic wellness and guided us through a breathing exercise.

EVERYBODY

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.

Updated December 6, 2023 at 4:31 PM PST
This story was updated to reflect that the event has passed and to include the recording.

As Editor-in-Chief of our newsroom, I’m extremely proud of the work our top-notch journalists are doing here at LAist. We’re doing more hard-hitting watchdog journalism than ever before — powerful reporting on the economy, elections, climate and the homelessness crisis that is making a difference in your lives. At the same time, it’s never been more difficult to maintain a paywall-free, independent news source that informs, inspires, and engages everyone.

Simply put, we cannot do this essential work without your help. Federal funding for public media has been clawed back by Congress and that means LAist has lost $3.4 million in federal funding over the next two years. So we’re asking for your help. LAist has been there for you and we’re asking you to be here for us.

We rely on donations from readers like you to stay independent, which keeps our nonprofit newsroom strong and accountable to you.

No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, press freedom is at the core of keeping our nation free and fair. And as the landscape of free press changes, LAist will remain a voice you know and trust, but the amount of reader support we receive will help determine how strong of a newsroom we are going forward to cover the important news from our community.

Please take action today to support your trusted source for local news with a donation that makes sense for your budget.

Thank you for your generous support and believing in independent news.

Chip in now to fund your local journalism
A row of graphics payment types: Visa, MasterCard, Apple Pay and PayPal, and  below a lock with Secure Payment text to the right
(
LAist
)

Trending on LAist