ADHD Gathering

Host Ying Deng interviews mindfulness teacher and nature-based practitioner Lisa Pedscalny about how to face “this moment” by discerning media intake and intentionally resting attention on both human systems in transition and the sustaining wisdom of the natural world. Lisa, a highly sensitive and neurodivergent naturalist on Vancouver Island, shares how spring rhythms (recorded back in February), interdependence, and cycles like compost mirror human renewal and inform sustainable engagement. She outlines non-negotiable “pillar practices” (nature time, contemplative practice, connection/community, and nourishment through food, rest, and movement) plus Maitri—unconditional friendliness toward oneself—framed as asking, “What does it mean to be the friend I most need in this moment?” They discuss love as a responsive practice, value-driven service through sanghas and Tara Brach’s Choosing to Love, sources of hope in peaceful actions and nature’s resilience, and close with a guided “coming to our senses” embodiment practice.

Listen now on Apple Podcast and Spotify

00:00 Welcome to ADHD Gathering

00:18 Meet Lisa Pedscalny

01:57 Navigating This Moment

06:53 Sensitivity and Self Care

08:39 Pillar Practices Toolkit

11:44 Maitri Self Friendship

16:08 Tending the Soil Metaphor

18:06 What’s Mine to Do

21:48 Love as a Verb

24:31 Begin Again Practice

27:19 Resistance and Hope Stories

31:49 Embodiment: Coming to Senses

39:26 Closing Thanks and Farewell

Find more podcast episodes.

Find this episode’s transcript here.

Resources:

Lisa Pedscalny is a mindfulness teacher rooted in nearly twenty years of Vipassana practice and a lifelong relationship with the natural world. Her teaching grows from that lived connection, blending deep contemplative practice with close attention to the more-than-human world.

A graduate of the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program with Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield, Lisa facilitates trauma-informed retreats, courses, and sangha gatherings through Forest Floor Mindfulness and serves on the teaching team for Tara Brach’s yearlong program, Choosing to Love. Her work integrates mindfulness, embodiment, and ecological connection as pathways of healing, belonging, and sustainable engagement with the wider web of life.

As a nature photographer specializing in fungi, Lisa brings the same attentive presence to the forest floor, inviting others into the simple, joyful practice of looking closely and discovering that mindfulness often arises naturally when we slow down and meet the living world with curiosity.

She lives and practices on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, where time outdoors continues to shape and inform both her life and her teaching.

Find Lisa on:

Her website https://www.forestfloormindfulness.com/ (Lisa has a new bi-weekly practice group starting September 2026!)

YouTube

Instagram

Facebook

SoundCloud

On this episode, the host, Ying Deng, interviews Born I / Ofosu Jones-Quartey, a meditation teacher, hip hop artist, and author whose work blends music, mindfulness, and radical self-compassion, including his album Komorebi and book Lyrical Dharma. Discussing how he’s meeting the current moment, Ofosu describes shifting emotions—sadness, rage, hope—and frames them within a Buddhist view of relative and absolute reality and the “great freedom” of experience, which helps him avoid despair and return to equanimity. He explains self-compassion as cultivating a “wise friend inside,” which was slowly developed while dealing with OCD and depression, with the help of therapy & medication, and overcoming cultural stigma. For engaged practice, he focuses on making contemplative art and encouraging self-love, and he highlights hope in authentic self-expression, allyship, and intergenerational community. He shares upcoming Hip Hop Sound Bath tour dates and the inaugural Neurospicy Retreat with Jeff Warren, and closes with a brief self-compassion meditation practice.

Listen now on Apple Podcast and Spotify

Timestamp:

00:00 Welcome & Guest Intro

03:21 Great Freedom Explained

06:47 Self Compassion Practices

11:29 Building the Inner Friend

12:12 OCD and Healing Tools

19:11 Engaged Practice Through Art & Community

24:19 Hope in Community

29:01 Upcoming Tour and Neurospicy Retreat

31:36 Guided Self Compassion Practice

35:19 Gratitude and Closing

Find more podcast episodes.

Find this episode’s transcript here.

Resources:

 Born I / Ofosu Jones-Quartey is a meditation teacher, hip hop artist and author whose work sits at the intersection of music, mindfulness, and radical self-compassion. As a teacher was more than two decades of practice. He blends mindfulness with contemporary creative expression to make inner healing accessible to all. His latest projects include the contemplative hiphop album, Komorebi, and the book Lyrical Dharma, Hip-Hop as Mindfulness. Across retreats, performances, and community gatherings, Born I supports people in remembering their inherent worth and living with presence and courage.

Find Ofosu on Instagram @bornimusic

Check out the Neurospicy retreat happening in July 2026, led by Ofosu and Jeff Warren

Check out Ofosu’s book, album, and upcoming tours here.

Host Ying Deng launches a mini-series on “how do we face this moment?” and interviews Ash Lounsbury, an ecopsychologist and enrolled citizen of the Osage Nation with ecotherapy training, meditation experience, and research on bird divination. Ash describes holding spring’s renewal alongside political and climate “polycrises,” reflects on privilege, neurodivergence, and “autistic joy,” and explains ecopsychology as the study of human relationships with nature (humans are nature). They discuss sustaining practices like sangha/community, small nature-connection rituals (sunrise, birdsong), and Ash’s bird divination workshops as meaning-making. Ash shares examples of collective action and resistance in Asheville (protests for protecting the urban forest, opposition to data centers & surveillance cameras, mutual aid) and leads a “sphere of influence” practice at the end centered on the inquiry: “How can I sustain my wave of change?”

Listen now on Apple Podcast and Spotify

00:00 Welcome

00:38 Meet Ash Lounsbury

05:32 What Is Ecopsychology

06:57 Nature as Daily Practice

08:20 Sustaining Practices and Community

10:28 Bird Divination Explained

14:10 Service and Collective Action

18:30 Hope and Resistance Stories

21:31 Sphere of Influence Practice

28:57 Final Quote and Where to Find Ash

Find more podcast episodes.

Find this episode’s transcript here.

Resources:

Ash Lounsbury is an ecopsychologist and enrolled citizen of the Wahzhazhe (Osage) Nation. Ash holds a non-clinical Master’s in Ecopsychology from Naropa University and Level 1 and 2 certificates in ecotherapy from the Earthbody Institute. Her graduate research culminated in a dissertation on the intersection of ancient bird divination and contemporary ecotherapeutic modalities. Ash sometimes writes about myth, ecohealing, queerness, and birds.
With over a decade of meditation experience, she’s had the honor to support Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield’s virtual meditation community members. In 2025, she co-founded Earthwild Ecology Club where she co-facilitates virtual ecopsychological workshops.

Wake! Ecohealing  https://wakeecohealing.com/

Earthwild Ecology Club https://www.earthwildec.org/

IG: @wake.ecohealing

Ever feel like ADHD advice is just an endless list of productivity hacks that never quite address why everything still feels hard? That’s because most frameworks focus narrowly on attention and task completion—missing the full picture of what it’s actually like to live in an ADHD brain.

In this episode, award-winning ADHD coach and meditation teacher Ying proposes a different lens: ADHD as an ecosystem. Drawing from her environmental science background and coaching hundreds of ADHD adults, she maps five interconnected dimensions—cognition, emotion, somatics, narrative, and execution—all embedded within larger systems of relationships, work, culture, and time/space. This isn’t a research paper or universal ADHD experience; it’s a multidimensional model that sees you as a whole person, not just a collection of executive function deficits to manage.

The five dimensions:

03:48 Emotion — Intense highs and lows, deep empathy and attunement, rejection sensitivity shaped by lifelong negative feedback. Emotional regulation isn’t optional; it’s foundational.

04:50 Cognition — Out-of-the-box thinking through unexpected associations, interest-based attention that enables hyperfocus, and the “carrot bunch” effect: pulling one task reveals an interconnected web of related tasks, creating both creative insight and potential overwhelm.

06:41 Somatics — Sensory sensitivities to light, scent, taste; emotions showing up as body signals (tense neck, heat in chest, cold hands) before words arrive. Movement, food, breathing, and meditation become essential tools for regulation.

09:00 Narrative — The stories we tell ourselves about rejection, routine, success, and identity. Shaped by years of feedback, these narratives can be deliberately reframed through mindfulness and behavioral experiments—like shifting “routines are boring” to “routines are how I cultivate secure attachment with myself.”

13:16 Execution — Challenges with starting and finishing, but sustained motion in between. The wrapping-up phase suffers when novelty wanes. Project rotation keeps each one feeling fresh by cycling through multiple interests.

14:46 Systems — Personal routines, relationship structures (monthly deep-dive friendship calls instead of constant small talk), work environments (neurodivergent managers, autonomy, direct communication), cultural expectations, economic structures. Most systems are built for neurotypical brains; understanding this changes what you optimize for.

18:43 Why this matters: Tips and tools can only get you so far. They help you manage what’s on your plate, but without examining system-level issues, ADHD management always feels like an uphill battle. Ying’s approach: change the outer environment to work with your ADHD brain instead of forcing yourself into neurotypical systems while managing the emotional fallout. If you’ve ever felt like you’re doing everything “right” but still struggling, this framework might help you design a life that actually matches your brain’s natural way of operating—not someone else’s.

20:30 Other frameworks: Russell Barkley’s executive inhibition model, dopamine and reward system approaches, and interest-based nervous system perspectives offer complementary scientific lenses.

Listen now on Apple Podcast, Spotify and Youtube. Click here for podcast episodes.

Resources:

To Learn More:

Ever feel like mainstream success advice – wake up at 4am, run marathons, host constantly – sounds exhausting? That’s because it’s most likely provided by people with endless physical energy. In this episode, award-winning ADHD coach and meditation teacher, Ying shares the concept of overexcitability from Polish psychologist Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration, exploring five categories of overexcitability/intensity needs: psychomotor, sensual, intellectual, imaginational, and emotional.

For many late-diagnosed ADHD adults, especially those who experience the world with vivid depth, understanding which needs actually sustain you (versus which ones hit diminishing returns) changes everything.

Ying shares her own discovery that she’s “Type B ambitious”: deeply driven to grow, learn, and contribute, but without that relentless physical energy the success culture glorifies. Through personal reflections on relating, travel, social media use, and how she structures her time, Ying explores how her intellectual overexcitability (that thirst for knowledge) is actually the foundation of what counts as bonding, novelty, and fulfillment for her. If you’ve ever felt like you’re ambitious but don’t fit the hustle culture mold, this framework might help you design a life that actually matches your brain’s natural way of operating, not someone else’s.

00:00 intro and update

01:45 what is overexcitability

06:10 rethinking how I met my needs

08:47 type B ambitious, ambitious without the psychomotor overexcitability

12:02 my coaching philosphy: accomplish more by doing less

13:40 intuition need important but not included in the overexcitability model

14:53 rethinking how I structure my weekends, evening, travel

16:02 novelty needs, which one doesn’t have diminishing marginal return

19:08 what needs am I trying to satisfy on social media

20:59 summary

Listen now on Apple Podcast, Spotify and Youtube. Click here for podcast episodes.

Resources:

To learn more about Dabrowski’s theory, check out:
Dabrowski Center’s podcast episode on Overexcitabilities and Dabrowski’s theory. Book recommendation: Living with Intensity

Another podcast episode ‘Meeting Intensity Needs’ from AuDHD Flourishing, which partially inspired this podcast episode of my own.

Join meditation teacher and ADHD coach Ying, aka me, for a grounding mindfulness practice that uses nature as your anchor. This gentle, sensory-rich meditation is perfect for ADHD brains seeking a concrete way to experience and practice non-judgmental awareness. I first learnt this practice from my good friend, also a great meditation teacher, Lisa Pedscalny.

What You’ll Need:
Any natural object (rock, leaf, flower, pinecone, feather, etc.)
Or simply use your hands if no natural object is available

What You’ll Experience:
Explore mindfulness through sight, touch, and physical sensation
Practice radical acceptance using nature as your guide
Learn to observe without judgment – the essence of mindfulness
End with the beautiful poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver

This practice adapts traditional mindfulness techniques to be more accessible for neurodivergent minds by providing tangible focus points and multi-sensory engagement. Whether you’re new to meditation or looking for ADHD-friendly practices, this guided session offers a peaceful way to connect with the present moment.

Timemark:
00:00 Intro to the Practice
01:03 Guided Meditation

Perfect for:
✨ ADHD brains seeking concrete meditation anchors
✨ Anyone wanting to connect with nature mindfully
✨ Those struggling with traditional “empty mind” meditation
✨ Building self-acceptance and non-judgmental awareness

💚 If this practice resonates with you, please share it with someone who might benefit and subscribe for more ADHD-friendly meditation content!

Remember: There’s no “perfect” way to meditate – just your way. You belong in the family of things. 🦆

More from Ying:
→ Book a coaching discovery call with me, exploring mindful, strategic, and multi-dimensional coaching designed to help you accomplish more by doing less: https://calendly.com/ying21/discovery
→ ADHD-friendly digital tools: https://adhdasiangirl.com/product-category/tools/
→ Join my newsletter: https://adhdasiangirl.substack.com

🧘‍♀️ Figure 8 Breathing: ADHD-Friendly Mindfulness Practice Join meditation teacher and ADHD coach Ying for a unique twist on traditional breathing meditation. This figure 8 breathing technique combines mindful breathing with gentle hand movements, making meditation more accessible for ADHD brains

Timestap:

00:00 Intro to the Practice

01:46 Guided Meditation

What You’ll Learn:

✨ How to practice figure 8 breathing meditation

✨ Combining breath awareness with physical movement

✨ Making mindfulness more tangible and engaging

✨ ADHD-accessible meditation techniques

Perfect for:

People with ADHD seeking accessible meditation

Beginners looking for engaging breathing exercises

Anyone wanting to try movement-based mindfulness

Those who struggle with traditional seated meditation

💡 Why This Works:

By engaging both breath and gentle movement, this technique gives your ADHD brain multiple points of focus, making it easier to stay present and engaged throughout the practice.

Want more ADHD-friendly mindfulness tools?

New meditations every Thursday

Subscribe & hit the bell for future guided practices, tools, and reflections from the intersection of ADHD, mindfulness, and Asian identity.

More from Ying:

→ Book a coaching discovery call with me, exploring mindful, strategic, and multi-dimensional coaching designed to help you accomplish more by doing less: https://calendly.com/ying21/discovery

→ ADHD-friendly digital tools: https://adhdasiangirl.com/product-category/tools/

→ Join my newsletter: https://adhdasiangirl.substack.com

— #adhd #meditation

Feeling overwhelmed, stuck in shame, or hard on yourself? This short self-compassion meditation is designed to help you soften those spirals and reconnect with kindness — especially for ADHD brains.

I’m Ying, a meditation teacher and ADHD coach. In this practice, I’ll guide you through 3 science-backed steps to cultivate self-compassion — especially when you’re feeling behind, rejected, ashamed, or stuck.

Timestaps:

00:00 – Intro

01:49 – Guided Meditation

🔹 Based on Dr. Kristin Neff’s research

🔹 No need to clear your mind — this is ADHD-friendly

🔹 Perfect for moments of doubt, overwhelm, or emotional dysregulation

🌱 Whether you’re new to mindfulness or returning to yourself again, this gentle practice is great!

Want more ADHD-friendly mindfulness tools?

✨ New meditations every Thursday

Subscribe & hit the bell for future guided practices, tools, and reflections from the intersection of ADHD, mindfulness, and Asian identity.

More from Ying:

→ Book a coaching discovery call with me, exploring mindful, strategic, and multi-dimensional coaching designed to help you accomplish more by doing less:

https://calendly.com/ying21/discovery

→ ADHD-friendly digital tools: https://adhdasiangirl.com/product-category/tools/

→ Join my newsletter: https://adhdasiangirl.substack.com — #adhd #meditation

Looking for a mindfulness meditation that’s actually ADHD-friendly? 🧠

✨ Join ADHD coach and meditation teacher Ying for this gentle Lotus Breathing practice—a movement-based, somatic breathing meditation designed to calm your nervous system, anchor your focus, and ease your mind without forcing stillness.

What is Lotus Breathing? Lotus Breathing pairs simple hand movements (open + close) with your breath (inhale + exhale), giving you a tangible anchor to return to—perfect for ADHD brains or anyone who struggles with traditional breath awareness meditations.

This practice is: Ideal for ADHD, HSP, and neurodivergent folks Great for focus, emotional regulation, and grounding Easy to do sitting, lying down, or even standing. Ideal for folks who enjoy meditating with music.

Time Stamps:

00:00 – Intro

02:27 – Guided Practice

Want more ADHD-friendly mindfulness tools? Subscribe & hit the bell for future guided practices, tools, and reflections from the intersection of ADHD, mindfulness, and Asian identity.

More from Ying:

→ Book a coaching discovery call with me

→ ADHD-friendly digital tools

→ Read my mindful reflections on ADHD

Looking for a mindfulness meditation that’s actually ADHD-friendly? 🧠

✨ Join ADHD coach and meditation teacher Ying for this gentle Lotus Breathing practice—a movement-based, somatic breathing meditation designed to calm your nervous system, anchor your focus, and ease your mind without forcing stillness.

What is Lotus Breathing? Lotus Breathing pairs simple hand movements (open + close) with your breath (inhale + exhale), giving you a tangible anchor to return to—perfect for ADHD brains or anyone who struggles with traditional breath awareness meditations.

This practice is: Ideal for ADHD, HSP, and neurodivergent folks Great for focus, emotional regulation, and grounding Easy to do sitting, lying down, or even standing. Ideal for folks who enjoy meditating without music.

Time Stamps:

00:00 – Intro

02:27 – Guided Practice

Want more ADHD-friendly mindfulness tools? Subscribe & hit the bell for future guided practices, tools, and reflections from the intersection of ADHD, mindfulness, and Asian identity.

More from Ying:

→ Book a coaching discovery call with me

→ ADHD-friendly digital tools

→ Read my mindful reflections on ADHD