Yoon Im Kane LCSW, CGP

Founder

Yoon Im Kane has spent over twenty years learning to hear what people carry but will not say.

Her work is built on a single, unrelenting conviction: that what is visible obscures what is invisible. That the most consequential conversations in our lives are not the ones we are having; they are the ones we have stopped having. The relationship that has gone quiet. The team that performs but cannot trust. The identity inherited so early and so completely it was mistaken for truth. What runs through all of it is the same silence — charged, alive, and waiting to be met.

This is relational intelligence — not a method, but a way of attending to the whole field. Not solving, but asking what remains unknown. The capacity to stay present to what is uncomfortable without collapsing it into what is familiar, and to hold the tension long enough for the inherited narratives of family, of culture, of conditioning to loosen their grip. What follows is never what we predicted. It is what we could not have imagined possible: an unfolding from the unknown toward the unknown known self, the one we are only now learning to meet, to befriend, to become.

Trained at Yale University in the Internal Family Systems model (IFS) and modern psychoanalytic group leadership, Yoon founded Mindful NYC to create what most therapeutic spaces remain reluctant — and often unwilling — to fully hold: the deeper listening, and what emerges from it. Her practice moves across individual psychotherapy, group process, and organizational consulting, leading people and systems through the charged, unnamed space between self and other, across race, gender, culture, class, power, desire, faith, and the body.

She has testified in both federal and state court on behalf of children who were trafficked and abused. For two decades she has sat in rooms where the cost of silence had become so familiar it was no longer visible, where that silence, left unattended, was quietly foreclosing the very process of deeper understanding and change. In her circles, the space between people who are different from one another has opened, for the first time, into a fierce vitality: the kind of insight and call to action that leads to real practice and transformation, and that only comes alive when difference is met rather than curated into comfort.

She is the author of The Mindfulness Workbook for Depression, a practical guide designed to make mindfulness-based therapy accessible beyond the limits of a therapy practice. She is the co-founding editor and author of Women, Intersectionality, and Power in Group Psychotherapy Leadership, one of the first texts in the field to examine the assumptions about gender, identity, and power embedded in group psychotherapy leadership itself. Now required in graduate programs at Smith, Harvard, and psychotherapy training institutes, it asks what the field had left unasked: what happens when the people doing the healing carry their own unexamined wounds of identity and power into the room? It opened a conversation that had been silent, and gave voice to the deeper, unspoken one that was long overdue. Her third book, Intimate Strangers: The Risk of Identity and Love, is in development.

Her doctoral studies in organizational psychology — alongside the rigors of psychoanalytic and IFS training — begin with a radical premise rooted in expertise, scholarship, and her lived experience as a Korean American woman: that marginalization, the lived experience of the outsider, the misfit, sharpens a perceptual intelligence most rooms don't recognize. An attunement to what moves beneath the surface, to the frequencies others have learned to ignore. Her craft is the cultivation of what becomes possible when that intelligence is no longer pathologized but met, allowed to unfold into direction and purpose, and to reshape the contours of identity, of self, of other, and of the spaces between.

Beneath those spaces — descending inward toward the self we have not yet met — runs a current with a direction of its own, captured in an old Zen koan: Not knowing is most intimate. This is where the work always returns: to the willingness to relinquish the known, to mind the space between self and another, in love, in work, in friendship, in family, and to stay in the presence of what emerges until it opens into the path we could not have found or walked alone.