MEET BELINDA

the 8thhousebish

Mystical black and white portrait of a woman with a sheer veil covering her face and shoulder, looking at camera with a neutral expression.

I’m Belinda (she/her)

I identify as a Chinese-Taiwanese American queer femme, and I’m an astrologer, trauma alchemist, and kink coach.

My work is for those who are ready to meet themselves fully: the light, the shadow, and everything in between.

I don’t believe in fixing anyone. I believe in listening — to the body, to the patterns written in the stars, and to the stories we’ve carried for far too long. I believe in finding the places where truth still lives, even under layers of fear, shame, or forgetting.

My work is rooted in both lived experience and formal training. I am certified in Somatic EMDR through The Embody Lab and I study Hellenistic Astrology under Austin Coppock. I also integrate applied polyvagal theory, parts work, ritual, and past life journeying into my practice.

My teachers — human and celestial, academic and embodied — form the constellation from which I guide.

My story

A woman is sitting and bowed over on a pink fluffy rug with a shibari rope upline connected from her back up to a bamboo post, in an indoor setting with a plain wall.

Roots

My path into this work began with loss. When my father died when I was 23, I was overwhelmed with panic attacks. I turned to Vipassana meditation alongside therapy, attending weekly sits with Tara Brach and immersing myself in her teachings and those of Dan Siegel, Sharon Salzberg, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Kristin Neff, and Thích Nhất Hạnh.

In 2015, I found The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. Holding space for others while still finding my own way back to myself, I began hosting weekly meditations and trauma workshops.

A woman is kneeling on a tatami mat with hands bound and face covered in shibari ropes.

Living Through
Complex Trauma

My cPTSD grew from a collection of moments: witnessing violence as a child, surviving abusive relationships, escaping a home fire, enduring threats from a stalker, going through chemo and immunotherapy.

My nervous system learned to live in extremes — either locked in collapse or running at full tilt. Talk therapy and meditation gave me tools, but they didn’t get to the heart of my body’s trauma. The harder I tried to “think” my way through trauma, the more tangled and overwhelming it became.

It wasn’t until I began to recognize my own neurodivergence that the pieces started to shift. My mind doesn’t move in straight lines — it spirals, loops, lingers. Understanding neurodivergence gave language to the way emotions and trauma responses seemed to cling long past their origin. Instead of seeing this as a flaw, I began to understand it as part of how my nervous system works — and that recognition opened the door to self-acceptance, rather than self-blame.

A woman with long dark hair, wearing black clothing and thigh-high socks, is suspended with shibari rope connected to a bamboo bar, with her arms tied in front of her. An arm holding a singing bowl extends toward her from the lower left.

Astrology and kink became transformative allies in my healing. Both are mirrors for the parts of ourselves that are hidden: our shadow, our longing, our power. They gave me a framework for things I had no prior language for. Astrology illuminated why my life had unfolded with such intensity — my Mars-Pluto conjunction in Scorpio spoke to a path of survival, transformation, and reclamation.

As I deepened into kink and relationship education, I began to see how many of my earlier experiences had blurred the lines between pleasure and harm. Untangling trauma from desire allowed me to reclaim agency, practice consent in fuller ways, and finally find safety in my own body.

Things shifted profoundly when I began Somatic EMDR. For the first time, I wasn’t just “managing” trauma — I was integrating it. My body learned new pathways: the panic softened, my stress became more manageable, and my nervous system expanded its window of capacity. Slowly, I stopped chasing chaos and learned how to cultivate peace.

Turning Points

A woman, wrapped in a colorful floral blanket, is resting on the ground with her head on a cushion in a minimalistic room with white wall and carpeted floor.

Beyond the Work

Away from sessions, you might find me letting the rhythm of nature reset my nervous system or singing to bring my body back into resonance.

That same sense of presence moves through my practice of shibari and pole dancing — both as art forms and as pathways into deeper embodiment, where strength and surrender meet.

I keep rituals: lighting candles, brewing tea, tracing celestial bodies across the night sky. I believe healing is woven just as much from these moments of connection and embodiment as from the breakthroughs we work toward in session.