Kim M. U-Ming, Vancouver, BC (2025)

Kim U-Ming is a coach, integrative energy medicine therapist, and skilled teacher in executive coaching and holistic therapy. She is of Portuguese, Chinese, South Asian, and Caribbean ancestry. Her family immigrated from England to Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1970. She was born in Vancouver in the years that followed. From early childhood she demonstrated perceptual and energetic capacities that deepened through adolescence, when she began conducting sessions that closely resembled her later professional work. This foundation continues to shape her approach. Formal professional practice commenced long ago and has since expanded to include coaching, psychotherapy, and integrative approaches. She has completed extensive and rigorous training in coaching, psychotherapeutic methods, and the healing arts, spanning both Western and holistic disciplines. Her formal training began during a period when therapeutic approaches such as somatic therapy, trauma-informed care, and integrative energy healing were still emerging and largely unknown in mainstream practice. These highly specialised, advanced programmes integrated body, energy, mind, and spirit with psychotherapeutic principles, offering an unparalleled richness and depth often diluted in contemporary adaptations. This foundation enabled her to cultivate a nuanced understanding of human transformation, preserving the integrity of these original methods while thoughtfully adapting them to address the unique complexities of each client’s journey. Kim’s commitment to her craft is both rigorous and reflective. She continuously engages with developments in her field, not merely adopting modern advancements but critically examining their evolution. This allows her to incorporate fresh insights while ensuring her practice remains grounded in the timeless principles that underscore transformative growth. Her work, at its core, is a dialogue between the enduring wisdom of foundational practices and evolving methodologies that meet contemporary challenges. Being naturally intuitive, Kim’s education in meditation began in her childhood and progressed into formal meditation as a teen, with explorations in Buddhism and Advaita. Following years of study, Kim became an ordained Buddhist in ceremony through His Eminence Tai Situ Rinpoche. She has since been fortunate to have received personal instruction from some of the most respected teachers in Buddhism. Her Dharma name is Pema Yangchen. Kim’s traditional Christian background has been enhanced through the addition of the Kagyü Buddhist teachings. In addition to her formal training, Kim has engaged in a broad range of global meditation activities: Vipassana retreats, time in monasteries in the Himalayas, retreats in Indian ashrams, teachings with the Dalai Lama, Thrangu Rinpoche, and other masters in the Tibetan Buddhist Kagyü lineage. She has visited pilgrimage sites around the globe, including Muktinath, Prasanthi Nilayam, and the biblical sites of Turkey. Alongside her Buddhist education, Kim began practicing qigong, an ancient Chinese health system of healing and energy medicine used to cultivate health and mindfulness. She has studied with Grandmaster Liang and Master Lin. Early in her training, Master Lin invited her to take over her ancient qigong lineage. Kim is thankful to have had the privilege of learning from many master teachers of mindfulness and enlightenment. In her work, Kim draws on these complementary channels of therapeutic and meditative training, along with her education in religious studies from Harvard Divinity School, which supports her ability to work across and in combination with various traditions. She offers a non-traditional, non-judgmental, holistic approach to success and well-being. She has cherished the privilege of working with a diverse range of clients, including artists, physicians, educators, business magnates, athletes, celebrities, and wellness teams. She has specifically been sought out to help address issues in the fields of spiritual crisis and awakening, meditation, altered states, and supporting gifted and highly sensitive individuals, as well as trauma recovery, intense synchronicity, and more day-to-day concerns in the business, interpersonal, and intrapersonal realms. In her spare time, Kim may be found sharing quality time with loved ones, engaging in one of her many hobbies, enjoying the outdoors, or curled up with a good book and her dog, Augustus. These moments of reflection and connection inspire her work, as she remains deeply committed to helping others achieve their fullest potential with compassion, precision, and care.

09/14/2025

☕“Coffee in bed” sounds trivial. In an ashram, it becomes something else entirely.

📿 New post: No Coffee in Bed: The Subtle Trials of Ashram Discipline.

Full text below.
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In a discourse delivered to Western visitors in the early 1990s at Prashanthi Nilayam, his ashram in the searing climate of South India, Swami Sathya Sai Baba remarked that adaptation itself is spiritual growth. He was not referring to heroic renunciations but to the ordinary adjustments imposed by ashram life: cramped quarters, rising before dawn, sattvic food, and the absence of indulgences such as coffee in bed. What to many appeared as petty inconveniences, he numbered amongst the crucibles of transformation.

The observation may appear disproportionate. How could the discomfort of four to a room or the loss of morning comforts matter for spiritual life? Yet to dismiss such conditions as trifles is to miss their function. They operate as subtle trials of the ego, exposing its reliance on habit, preference, and entitlement. For Swami Sathya Sai Baba, as for ascetic traditions across Asia, the capacity to adapt without resentment or complaint was not incidental to practice but integral to it.

🔍 Ashram Reality vs. Western Fantasy

Accounts of traditional ashram life frequently disappoint those who arrive with Western expectations. A newcomer to Prashanthi Nilayam did not encounter a palm-fringed retreat with restorative amenities but a highly regimented environment. Lights extinguished early, chanting before dawn, collective schedules that erased individual preference. Three or more people to a small room, limited personal space, and meals served without fanfare.

These conditions were not contrived as artificial obstacles. They reflected the manner in which many people in India lived: modest housing, communal quarters, simple food, and routines shaped by collective rather than individual choice. What appeared to a Westerner as deprivation was, within the local context, ordinary life.

It was precisely the contrast that rendered adaptation potent. Visitors arriving from spacious homes, private routines, and the expectation of personalised comfort, even luxuries such as coffee served in bed, suddenly had to surrender those assumptions. What was unremarkable in India became, for them, an adjustment that revealed the hidden tenacity of habit and entitlement. The adjustment itself was the lesson.

This reality stands in stark opposition to the Western fantasy of the ashram as a tropical refuge, a sanctuary of personal restoration. The very word has been absorbed into the marketing of retreats in North America and Europe, where it often connotes wellness tourism rather than rigorous discipline. Rooms are private, food is organic, schedules are flexible, and discomfort is treated as a design flaw.

This is not harmless confusion. It is distortion. A distortion that comforts the consumer while hollowing out the tradition.

🔍 Adaptation as Pedagogy

In Swami Sathya Sai Baba’s remark, adaptation was not endurance but pedagogy. Each small trial functioned as an instructional device, designed to expose hidden attachments. Rising at three in the morning, one unaccustomed may meet fatigue and protest. Sharing a room, one might encounter irritation at noise or the loss of privacy. Being denied coffee in bed, one confronts craving disguised as routine.

In my first stay at one of his ashrams, the mind circled obsessively around images of North American KitKats. The absurdity was itself instructive. Attachment disclosed its tenacity not in some grand temptation but in something as trivial as confectionery withdrawal. What matters is not the inconvenience but the revolt of the ego. To sit quietly and observe the orbit of that revolt is one of the real tasks of training.

The body adapts swiftly, but the ego lingers, resentful. To persist through such conditions is to discover that identity need not be anchored to preference.

This insight was not unique to Swami Sathya Sai Baba. In the Yoga Sutra of Patañjali, austerity (tapas) is enumerated as a central discipline precisely because it grates against the comfort-seeking mind. In the Buddhist Vinaya codes, simplicity of lodging and diet was prescribed not only for ethical purity but as deliberate friction against preference. Adaptation was framed as a direct means of loosening the compulsions of the ego.

🔍 Comparative Traditions of Austerity

The same pedagogical structure can be traced across traditions, though its form differs. S. N. Goenka’s Vipassanā centres, spread across the world, impose silence, rigid timetables, plain food, and ten-hour days of meditation. Here austerity is deliberate, codified into the design of the retreat. The practitioner’s threshold of comfort is tested until it gives way, revealing that craving and aversion can be observed rather than obeyed.

In the Tibetan tradition, Milarepa’s Hundred Thousand Songs describe long retreats in mountain caves, living on nettles until his skin turned green. Hunger and cold, he wrote, were not obstacles but teachers.

Christian monasticism codified similar principles. The Rule of St Benedict, written in the sixth century, required common dormitories, modest food, early rising, and shared labour. These were not lifestyle enhancements but disciplines intended to break the sovereignty of preference.

The Stoics of antiquity articulated the same insight in secular form. Seneca urged his students in the Letters to Lucilius to spend days eating the coarsest food and sleeping on the ground, asking themselves: “Is this what I feared?” The point was not the glorification of deprivation but the cultivation of freedom from dependence.

Across these examples, the pattern holds. In the ashram, discomfort emerged from cultural normality that confronted Western expectation. In monastic and meditative systems, it was intentionally codified as part of training. In both cases, adaptation was the hinge by which the ego was exposed and growth became possible.

🔍 The Micro-Attachments of Ego

It is tempting to assume that spiritual work lies chiefly in confronting dramatic attachments such as wealth, ambition, or status. Yet the ego often hides more effectively in the micro-attachments: the morning ritual, the preference for space, the small comforts that stabilise one’s sense of self. These are harder to discern precisely because they appear trivial.

Triviality is one of the disguises under which ego conceals itself most effectively. This is where the ego hides in plain sight.

No coffee in bed stands as shorthand for this level of trial. It is not about caffeine but about the ego’s tacit conviction that such minor comforts are its entitlement. To adapt to their absence is to expose and undo the silent contracts the self forges with its surroundings. Each micro-attachment loosened is a knot of identity released, even if the tightening soon returns. Spiritual growth, in this frame, does not unfold through spectacular feats but through the cumulative labour of adaptation, thousands of small surrenders to conditions exactly as they are.

🔍 The Modern Stakes

If comfort is allowed to redefine the tradition, then the practice has already failed.

The stakes of this distinction are not merely personal but cultural. As traditions continue to be extracted from the East and transplanted into Western settings, they are reshaped by market logics that privilege comfort. The danger is not simply appropriation in the sense of borrowing forms, but appropriation in the sense of amputating functions. What once disrupted ego’s hold has been inverted into rituals of reassurance, stripped of the very friction that gave them force.

Comfort has its role. It enables some to begin who might otherwise never approach practice at all. Yet when comfort becomes the organising principle, the transformative edge is blunted. Adaptation gives way to accommodation, and the discipline that shaped practitioners for centuries is dissolved.

This is why adaptation, so unglamorous and so uncomfortable, might be pivotal to certain outcomes. It marks the threshold where the integrity of the tradition is either preserved or erased. Without adaptation when needed, spiritual practice can collapse into lifestyle management. With it, the possibility of transformation remains intact.

🔍 The Trial of No Coffee in Bed

The absence of coffee in bed, the cramped quarters, the early rising, the silence: all these may appear as inconveniences, trivial in themselves. Yet they stand amongst the crucibles of practice. They strip away habit, confront entitlement, and disclose the extent to which peace is ordinarily hostage to circumstance. Swami Sathya Sai Baba’s observation, that adaptation itself is growth, was neither rhetorical nor ornamental. It named the discipline at work in such details.

Modern retreat culture, by contrast, constructs comfort as insulation. The conditions that once exposed ego are remodelled as amenities that protect it. The result is a spirituality of ease: calm without transformation, wellness without liberation. The rigorous ashram insists otherwise. It refuses comfort as principle and makes adaptation the medium of pedagogy.

No coffee in bed is not deprivation. It is instruction. It signals the point at which ego loosens, preference falters, and a different register of freedom comes into view.

Anyone can be calm in comfort. The trial is whether one can turn discomfort into practice.

© Kim U-Ming, 2025. Originally published on Medium and Substack. This work is part of a larger body of thought. Please do not excerpt, reframe, or republish without express written permission.

09/05/2025

"We don't make mistakes; we just have happy accidents." — Bob Ross, The Joy of Painting

09/04/2025

“GK Chesterton once said that to criticise religion because it leads people to kill each other is like criticising love because it has the same effect. All the best things we have, when abused, will cause bad things to happen. The need for sacrifice, to obey, to make a gift of your life is in all of us and it’s a deep thing. We’d say that sense of sacrifice is good but only if you’re sacrificing your own life; once you sacrifice another’s life you’ve overstepped the mark.” —Roger Scruton

08/19/2025

🌿 Conversations about psychedelics often stop at the question of effectiveness. The harder question is what happens once their use is absorbed into medical and legal systems.

Full article below.
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🌿 Institutional Risks in the Medicalisation of Psychedelics

Psychedelics are re-entering Canadian medicine quickly. Esketamine has been authorised for treatment-resistant depression. Intravenous ketamine is now sold as a private service in many Canadian cities. Psilocybin and M**A have begun to circulate through Health Canada’s Special Access Program. At the same time, private clinics place ketamine for depression on the same menus as Botox injections, platelet-rich plasma, and vitamin drips. Whether marketed with the same elective polish as other menu-based services, whether for pain, fatigue, or muscle tension, the effect is similar: a psychoactive intervention is framed in the same elective style as other private-pay procedures.

This marketing surface narrows the public conversation. For many, the only question becomes “does it work?” Yet psychedelics are not merely molecules; their effects unfold in time, within relationships, and within settings that shape their meaning. For centuries, psychedelics have been carried through ceremonial and spiritual traditions that stress preparation, safety, and integration. Indigenous and traditional knowledge predates modern science and remains valid today, precisely because it attends to context, vulnerability, and the long arc of healing. To omit such frameworks is not a neutral act; it erases the very practices that historically mitigated risk. There are groups and practitioners in Canada working to preserve ceremonial, relational, and integration practices under the umbrella that is now called psychedelic therapy. But these remain exceptions. The dominant trend in medicalisation strips psychedelics of their cultural lineages and recasts them as technical interventions inside psychiatric frameworks.

Within medicalisation, ceremonial and communal traditions are displaced by the technical logic of psychiatry. Patients are channelled into diagnostic categories, assigned standardised doses, and observed under rigid protocols. Each encounter generates documentation: billing codes, chart notes, diagnostic labels. Investor capital presses clinics to scale rapidly, privileging throughput over the slower and less profitable work of integration. The timelines of healing and the timelines of venture capital are not the same. Innovation is the language, but efficiency is the driver. Some clinics and facilitators push back against this model, striving to slow the process and hold space for integration. Yet these efforts are fragile and often exist in tension with financial and institutional demands.

Not all substances enter medicalisation in the same way. Psilocybin and ayahuasca arrive with ceremonial and spiritual lineages that are often erased when reframed as psychiatric tools. Ketamine, by contrast, has no traditional history of use. It was developed as an anaesthetic and only later repurposed for psychiatry. Its dissociative properties can interrupt entrenched patterns, but repeated administration often produces consequences distinct from those associated with psilocybin or other plant-based psychedelics. What these cases share, however, is that once drawn into the medical system they are subjected to the same forces of diagnosis, billing, and institutional control.

In Vancouver, these tensions have appeared in concrete and tragic ways. The city has hosted supervised ayahuasca ceremonies, one of which ended in the death of a nineteen-year-old who had recently undergone opioid withdrawal and collapsed from cardiac arrest. His mother had trusted he would be safe. Because of liability waivers, responsibility was minimised, and the event was treated as an isolated misfortune rather than a systemic failure. The case illustrates how institutional framings shift accountability away from structures and back onto patients and their families.

The risks are not abstract. Once psychedelics are absorbed into institutional psychiatry, they are pulled into the same forces that have long defined mental health care. A person’s words may be reinterpreted through liability language. Records can follow them for years, shaping how insurers, courts, and even border guards view them. The drug itself may leave the bloodstream in hours. The record, once created, can follow for life.

🌿Attributional Ambiguity: When Meaning is Reassigned

The most immediate risk of medicalised psychedelics is not pharmacological but interpretive. Once a patient ingests a psychoactive compound in a clinical setting, their words and behaviours may be reassigned new meanings. A statement of despair can be entered into the chart as evidence of depressive illness. Confusion may be classified as psychosis. If a patient expresses doubt, hesitation, or refusal during the process, this can be documented as noncompliance or opposition, recast as evidence of pathology rather than as a legitimate response. In such circumstances, the patient’s testimony no longer remains fully their own; it is filtered through the institutional language of diagnosis.

Consent forms extend this process. Patients are routinely asked to sign documents acknowledging that destabilisation is possible and that unusual reactions are to be expected. This allows clinics to claim, in advance, that almost any outcome was foreseeable. The result is a permanent legal defence: whatever emerges during or after treatment can be labelled “within expectation,” which neutralises the patient’s ability to contest what happened. The waiver protects the institution while constraining the patient’s voice.

This pattern has long precedents in psychiatry. Benzodiazepines, for example, are officially indicated only for short-term use, usually two to four weeks. In practice, however, they are often prescribed off-label for much longer periods. This extended prescribing frequently creates dependence, and when patients attempt to stop, they may experience withdrawal symptoms such as agitation, tremor, severe insomnia, or panic. Rather than recognising these as drug withdrawal, clinicians often describe them as the “return” of the patient’s original anxiety disorder, thereby justifying continued prescribing.

A similar pattern is seen with antidepressants. When patients discontinue selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, they may develop electric-shock sensations, dizziness, or profound anxiety. These symptoms are specific to the drug itself, yet they are frequently described in clinical notes as relapse of depression rather than as discontinuation effects. Even in electroconvulsive therapy, patients who report persistent memory loss are often told that the impairment is temporary or that it is a sign that the treatment has been effective.

The underlying dynamic is consistent: adverse effects of treatment are reframed as confirmation of the patient’s pre-existing illness. In this way, the intervention is insulated from critique while the burden is placed back on the individual. Psychedelics heighten this risk because their acute effects, including visions, perceptual changes, and emotional volatility, so closely mirror the symptoms that psychiatry claims authority to define and diagnose. What might otherwise be recognised as drug effects or meaningful psychological processes can instead be pathologised, thereby strengthening institutional control while silencing the patient’s own account.

🌿Consumer Marketing and the Disguise of Risk

In Canadian cities, ketamine for depression is listed on private-clinic menus alongside other non-insured services. The shared placement encourages people to view ketamine as another elective option, routine and interchangeable with other menu-based treatments.

What this presentation conceals is the permanence of its record. Unlike a vitamin infusion, which leaves no institutional record, a ketamine session generates documentation. If dispensed by a pharmacy, the entry is captured in PharmaNet. If administered from a clinic’s supply, the encounter still produces chart notes, diagnostic codes, and receipts. What begins as a consumer choice quietly becomes part of a permanent file.

The financial structures further intensify this process. Because ketamine therapy is not covered by public insurance, clinics can set their own fees, market bundled “packages,” and encourage repeat infusions. Physician assessments may be billed to the public system, while the infusions remain private-pay. The business model rewards frequency and volume, even when clinical need is uncertain. A decision framed as lifestyle or choice can later resurface as durable evidence in insurance ledgers, legal proceedings, or cross-border scrutiny.

It should be noted that some facilitators resist this trend, striving to slow the process and create space for integration and meaning-making. Yet such practices remain exceptions, often precarious in a system where financial and institutional incentives favour throughput and documentation.

🌿Systemic Consequences Beyond the Clinic

The records generated by psychedelic therapy rarely remain confined to the therapy room. Once created, they circulate through institutions where patients have little control over how they are interpreted.

Insurance underwriters increasingly treat a record of psychedelic therapy as evidence of psychiatric instability. Even a single entry in a health record can justify exclusions, premium surcharges, or outright refusals. In the language of insurance, what once felt like healing can later be reclassified as liability.

Driving and safety regimes create further exposure. In British Columbia, physicians are legally required to report concerns about unsafe drivers. If a patient demonstrates lingering dissociation or perceptual disturbance after a session, that observation alone may be sufficient to trigger a licence suspension. In the event of a collision, the provincial insurer may argue that psychedelic use undermines coverage. What begins as treatment can reappear later as lost mobility or contested claims.

Under the Mental Health Act, an adverse reaction can also justify involuntary admission. Once certified, an individual may be detained, medicated, or restrained against their will. A prior record of psychedelic therapy can make such certification easier to defend, even if the original treatment was entirely voluntary.

Civil litigation and family law introduce yet another layer of risk. In custody disputes or personal injury cases, courts can compel the disclosure of medical files. A history of psychedelic therapy may then be used to question judgment or stability, regardless of whether the treatment proved beneficial.

International travel brings its own complications. At the United States border, federal law applies irrespective of Canadian legality. Prescriptions, clinical notes, or disclosure of psychedelic therapy can be treated as grounds for inadmissibility. A treatment lawful in Canada can quietly close international doors.

Clinicians who use psychedelics themselves often avoid such consequences because their professional knowledge enables them to control how records are created, coded, or omitted. Members of the general public do not have this protection. Once entered, records cannot be erased, and bureaucracies have long memories.

The pattern is consistent. The immediate effects of the drug may fade within hours, but the documentation it generates can shape insurance eligibility, legal standing, and international mobility for years. In many cases, the record proves more enduring than the relief.

🌿Commodification and Cultural Loss

The systemic risks of medicalised psychedelics are mirrored by cultural losses. A study by Emilia Sanabria and Luís Fernando Tófoli, published in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies, warns that Western psychology has systematically removed psychedelics from their relational and communal contexts. In this process, they are recast as individualised consumer products.

Where collective rituals once emphasised preparation, safety, and shared meaning-making, the Global North increasingly promotes the image of the isolated patient on a “hero’s journey.” Integration, once a community practice, is reframed as an additional service that can be packaged, priced, and sold.

This pattern is evident in Canada. Substances that were historically embedded within community and relationship are reintroduced as industrial treatment technologies. The communal is reduced to the individual. The sacred is reduced to the billable.

🌿Acknowledging Value Without Ignoring Danger

None of this is to deny that the use of psychedelics, when held in the right context, may serve as powerful agents of healing. In hospice care, they may ease the fear of death. In settings of reverence, they may support the restoration of a sense of connection to self, to others, and to nature. Properly facilitated, they can help individuals loosen rigid ego patterns and perceive their lives with renewed clarity.

This discussion is not an endorsement of psychedelic use, but a caution that if such substances are engaged, they must be approached only with safeguards proportionate to their risks and depth. My concern lies less in expanding access than in ensuring that individuals are not exposed to avoidable harms through medicalisation, over-commercialisation, or inadequate safeguards.

The ability to step beyond the ego, however, is not dependent on drugs. To assume otherwise is to diminish the broader range of human capacities. For many people, practices such as meditation, prayer, contemplation, artistic creation, or immersion in nature provide safer and more sustainable means of reaching comparable states. These paths require discipline and patience, but they cultivate resilience without generating medical records, exposing individuals to institutional scrutiny, or carrying the potential for destabilisation such as psychosis.

Psychedelics may hold their greatest therapeutic value when non-drug pathways have been exhausted or obstructed, as in cases of entrenched addiction or profound psychological impasse, where a compound such as ibogaine may create an opening. Even in these circumstances, the medicine is best understood as a catalyst rather than a substitute for ongoing practice. When used without discernment, psychedelics can unsettle the nervous system or encourage reliance on repeated chemical interventions instead of supporting the development of durable inner capacities.

The surrounding conditions are crucial. These experiences are safest and most meaningful when guided with care through ceremonial, spiritual, or community frameworks that respect their depth, and when facilitated by individuals who understand the difference between guidance and coercion. Indigenous and traditional lineages remind us that psychedelics are not inventions of modern psychiatry. The use of psychedelics is embedded in practices with histories, wisdom traditions, and safeguards that predate and exceed scientific validation.

The Canadian model diverges in important ways. In this context, psychedelics are incorporated into the pathology-driven frameworks of conventional medicine. Access is mediated through psychiatric diagnosis, which functions as the justification for prescriptions or treatment. Outcomes are typically assessed with narrow clinical scales that prioritise symptom reduction over relational, existential, or spiritual dimensions of healing. Providers and institutions are incentivised to demonstrate measurable improvements in order to satisfy regulators, insurers, and investors. What might once have been understood as a tool for connection or transformation is increasingly redefined as another intervention to manage symptoms within restrictive diagnostic categories.

🌿From Liberation to Capture

In the right context, psychedelic use may ease suffering and support the restoration of connection to self, others, and the world. In settings of reverence, these substances have been reported to help individuals face death, break rigid patterns, and recover meaning. The depth of such encounters often extends beyond what clinical outcome measures can capture.

Once absorbed into industrial psychiatry, however, their significance is transformed. The communal is recast as individual, the sacred as commodified, testimony as data, and healing as liability. What begins as liberation can end as another instrument of control.

The central question is not whether psychedelics “work,” but whether the institutions that deliver them can be trusted to honour the depth of these experiences. Without safeguards that prioritise cultural wisdom, spiritual integrity, and careful facilitation, the promise of healing risks being translated into surveillance and containment. Psychedelics may open doors, but institutions decide where those doors lead. The effects may pass within hours; the record can remain for decades.

© Kim U-Ming, 2025. Originally published on Medium and Substack. This work is part of a larger body of thought. Please do not excerpt, reframe, or republish without express written permission.

08/12/2025

💡In every creative field, influence is inevitable. 📚What is not inevitable is how we treat the work we inherit. Too often, a celebrated phrase such as Steal Like an Artist is taken as an alibi for erasing origins, hollowing traditions, and selling the surface without the substance. The cost is cultural, and it is borne by all of us, whether we notice it or not.

Full article below.
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🎨Steal Like an Artist but Live With What You Have Taken: How Repackaging Eclipses Originators and Hollows Traditions🖋️

It is one of the most repeated pieces of creative advice in circulation. You will hear it in art schools, writing workshops, entrepreneurial mentoring programmes, and in the informal exchanges of conference green rooms. Steal Like an Artist has become a kind of cultural shorthand, repeated with an air of inevitability, as though its meaning were self-evident and its application beyond question. In Austin Kleon’s original framing, it was intended as a prompt toward influence that is acknowledged, transformation that is substantive, and an active relationship with one’s lineage. It was never conceived as permission to strip an idea of its provenance and reintroduce it as one’s own.

In practice, however, the phrase now often operates as a kind of moral solvent. Once invoked, it dissolves the question of where a work originated and who might merit recognition for its creation. A reflection on the inevitability of influence has, in many circles, become a ready-made alibi for extraction. The pattern is predictable: take what is effective, remove or obscure its markers of origin, and present it in the most market-ready form possible. This transformation is not about deepening or extending the original work; it is about repackaging it for visibility and sale.

The recurrence of this pattern is visible across multiple industries. In one West Coast city, a well-established artist’s exhibitions have repeatedly contained works that bear striking conceptual, formal, and temporal similarities to those of under-recognised peers. Within the wellness sector, a bestselling “energy” programme closely mirrors the movement sequences of long-standing Qigong forms, yet omits the Taoist philosophy, ethical structure, and cultural context that originally gave those sequences coherence and meaning. In psychotherapy, entire modalities have been adapted from Eastern contemplative traditions: Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, developed by a practising Zen Buddhist, mindfulness-based interventions drawn from Buddhist meditation practices, and other methods whose philosophical architecture is acknowledged at origin yet routinely excised in wider translation. In the personal development market, the same logic applies to language itself, with public figures presenting centuries-old aphorisms as their own, modifying only the punctuation before signing their name beneath it.

For the most visible figures, the cost of this form of appropriation is often negligible. They retain their platforms, commissions, audiences, and the aura of originality in the public imagination. The real cost is borne elsewhere. It is borne by the originator, who loses attribution, bargaining power, and the ability to control how their work is represented. It is borne by the cultural lineage, which is stripped of context, philosophical depth, and ethical integrity. It is borne by the audience, whose experience is reduced to a derivative, decontextualised product that can never match the richness of the original.

This loss is neither abstract nor cosmetic; it has material, intellectual, and cultural consequences. What reaches the public is frequently a diminished facsimile, lacking the intricate relationships, symbols, and internal logic that gave the original its resonance. In its source context, an artistic form may be embedded within a network of references and commitments; a movement sequence may be integrated into a cosmology; a therapeutic approach may rest upon an entire system of thought. Removed from that environment, a practice becomes mere choreography, a method is reduced to a mechanical exercise, and an artwork becomes a surface gesture. The audience is sold innovation but receives only a précis, polished in presentation yet hollow in substance.

When audiences absorb these altered forms without question, they become participants in the erasure. Every purchase, repost, endorsement, and unexamined repetition strengthens the association between the repackager and the work. Each act of uncritical support further weakens the public link to the originator and reinforces the cultural habit of valuing recognisability over provenance. As this dynamic compounds, the cultural field contracts, its breadth reduced by the loss of distinctive lineages, the convergence of forms into market-approved templates, and the steady erosion of the conditions that foster genuine innovation.

Appropriators succeed because the surrounding conditions are exceptionally permissive. Institutions such as galleries, publishers, and digital platforms profit from attaching work to a name that already commands attention, regardless of its true source. Audiences gravitate toward the familiar, rewarding replication over originality. In most legal systems, ideas, techniques, and stylistic signatures receive little or no formal protection, making uncredited adaptation difficult to contest. Within elite professional circles, appropriation is often reframed as creative resourcefulness, adding another layer of protection. This predation upon under-recognised originators is frequently softened through diminutives or pet designations such as “my muse,” “my protégé,” or “my collaborator,” recasting unilateral extraction as intimacy or mentorship, a rhetorical strategy that makes it socially awkward to question the imbalance of credit or reward.

For those at the top of this system, impunity is the norm. They can move between sectors, introducing borrowed forms into each new context as though they were conceived there. In doing so, they carry the work further from its origins while consolidating the association with themselves. Yet such reputations are not entirely insulated. The growing accessibility of digital archives makes it increasingly possible to reconstruct provenance, even long after it has been obscured. Side-by-side comparisons and well-documented timelines have begun to circulate, quietly shifting the perceptions of those who pay attention. Within professional communities, repeated patterns of extraction are gradually being read less as evidence of range or ingenuity and more as an indication of limited originality and shallow inquiry.

Those who rely on unacknowledged borrowing often mistake prevailing tolerance for permanent security. They operate within systems that reward visibility over provenance and interpret continued invitations, sales, and public praise as confirmation that their methods carry no risk. Yet reputations are cumulative records, not snapshots. When patterns of behaviour recur across contexts and become visible to those who observe the field closely, the narrative that once framed them as innovators begins to weaken. A record built on strategic acquisitions rather than genuine development gradually shifts from appearing expansive to appearing opportunistic.

The social cost of this shift is subtle, cumulative, and often irreversible. In the early stages, there may be no visible change in the public reception of the work. Behind the scenes, however, conversations within peer and professional networks begin to alter. Curators and collaborators may still extend invitations, but they do so with increasing hesitation. Patrons and partners who are aware of the work’s true origins begin to weigh the reputational risk of association. Trust, once eroded, rarely returns to its prior strength, and the alteration in perception quietly reshapes the professional landscape around the appropriator.

Even without public censure, the effect of private doubt can constrict future opportunities. The legitimacy of a body of work depends not only on its public reception but also on its capacity to withstand close examination from those deeply embedded in the field. When such scrutiny reveals a reliance on uncredited sources, the foundation appears less substantial. In some industries, this fragility is tolerated as long as the work sells; in others, it prompts exclusion from the most discerning and enduring circles of influence.

Reckonings in such cases are rarely dramatic. More often they take the form of gradual attrition: a narrowing of access, a reduction in invitations to contribute, and a slow cooling of institutional enthusiasm. This is not punishment in the moral sense, but a recalibration of standing in light of the long-term consequences of building a career on borrowed architecture without acknowledging its original builders. The loss in such a process is not only the appropriator’s claim to originality but also their ability to occupy positions of genuine leadership within the field.

If Steal Like an Artist is to retain value as a principle, it must be understood in a form closer to its original intent. Influence is inevitable, but influence of integrity acknowledges its sources. The most credible practitioners make that acknowledgement visible both within the work and in its presentation. Citation is not a weakness; it is evidence of range, literacy, and professional respect. Naming the origin invites the audience to encounter the full lineage rather than an isolated fragment.

Transformation is the second measure, and its importance cannot be overstated. To work with existing material is not in itself disreputable, but transformation requires more than recontextualisation or cosmetic shifts. It demands the addition of structure, method, or argument that could not have been derived from the source alone. The new work must stand as a substantive contribution to the field, not as a commercially optimised restatement of what was present only in germinal or partially developed form. Without this, the act is not artistic theft in Kleon’s sense but extraction, the removal of what is most recognisable, reissued under another name, and no less traceable for having been lifted.

The third measure is the preservation or translation of the ethical and philosophical architecture that shaped the original. Many traditions encode responsibilities alongside techniques, binding them to specific contexts of care, initiation, or discipline. To remove a practice from its originating framework without carrying forward its ethical constraints is to diminish it, however attractively it is presented. This does not preclude adaptation, but it does require making explicit what has been altered and why.

A culture that rewards these measures produces a richer and more varied public record. Audiences gain access to both the original and the adaptation, allowing them to appreciate the interplay between them. Practitioners strengthen their own work by situating it within a visible lineage. The result is not a culture without influence, but one in which influence is transparent and transformation is substantive. In such a climate, Steal Like an Artist becomes less an alibi for extraction and more a standard by which the seriousness of a practitioner can be judged.

The culture that emerges from unexamined appropriation is one in which visibility is mistaken for authorship and the most familiar name eclipses the actual source. Attribution disperses, distinctive contributions are absorbed into generic forms, and audiences are left with versions stripped of their original depth. The loss is collective, yet it strikes first at the originator and the traditions from which the work arose.

If Steal Like an Artist is to mean anything worth defending, it should demand more than the lifting of what is useful. It should bind the taker to the weight of what is taken, including its origins, its architecture, and its debts. Without that, the act is not creative inheritance but the brokerage of fragments.

What is lost in such transactions is not only the name of the originator but the continuity of the tradition itself. Forms become dislodged from the commitments that once gave them shape, and ideas are stripped of the relationships that sustained them. What remains is a repertoire of surfaces, easy to reproduce yet incapable of seeding anything new.

A culture that tolerates such practices does not collapse in spectacle; it is hollowed in increments until its depth is not merely forgotten but replaced by surfaces that mistake familiarity for meaning. The immediate harm falls on the originator and the tradition they extend, but the deferred harm is collective. The audience inherits a narrowed field in which the work most visible is not the work most original. Over time, the range of available thought contracts and subsequent practitioners must build on copies rather than on the unbroken integrity of the real.

© Kim U-Ming, 2025. Originally published on Medium and Substack. This work is part of a larger body of thought. Please do not excerpt, reframe, or republish without express written permission.

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