"Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion." — bell hooks, All About Love

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When we're not feeling well in the body, it touches our emotions. And when we're carrying stress, grief, worry, fear, anger --  the body feels it too. You've felt it. The tight neck and shoulders, the restless night, the gut that won't settle. The two were never separate.

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I came to this medicine from Civil and Environmental engineering. I love a system, and using math to map the flow of water through a watershed fascinated me.  But the more I worked, the more I found things the model could not capture. The best built model still missed so much. I wanted more. When I found Chinese medicine, which literally understands the human body as an ecosystem, it was the first time a model of the world actually made sense to me. It is a medicine of change and transformation that is always shifting, always spiraling. It describes the gestures and directions, the functions, the movement, the aliveness. Not the static individual parts.

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For years I approached my own body with my engineering mind, and I compared myself to textbook ideals. The practice of Qi Gong brought the study of Chinese Medicine down into my own body, and softened me. By moving through forms meant to imitate nature, and bringing my attention back into my body again and again, I stopped seeing certain sensations as 'good' or 'bad.' Instead started to understand them as energy. As weather. Sometimes stagnant, sometimes smooth.

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Chinese medicine recognizes three causes of disease: external, internal, and neither. External is the weather and climate, which modern life largely shields us from now. Internal is our internal weather — our emotional state. And neither includes injury, diet, and how we live. What this means is that our emotional well-being isn't a side issue to our symptoms; it's a central cause. And our symptoms, in turn, amplify our emotions, creating a self-feeding cycle. My work is to help that cycle settle.​​

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In our sessions, I listen — not just to your symptoms, but to your life. I ask detailed questions, I remember what you tell me, and I treat you as a whole, integrated person. When you feel comfortable enough to show up exactly as you are, I get better diagnostic information, and you get more from your treatment. Many people come to me having felt dismissed or disbelieved — the medications didn't work, or didn't work enough. They were "too complicated," or it was "all in their head." I listen, and then I show how your symptoms actually make sense. You are not a malfunctioning machine. You are whole.

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Our environment shapes our health — and that includes the social and political world we live in. The stress of injustice, of not being safe to be fully yourself, lives in the body. As a queer person, my care is grounded in the belief that all of us deserve to be well, whole, and free. I welcome queer and trans patients, people of every body and background, and anyone the system was never built to see.

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My approach to care is inclusive and life-affirming, and accessibility matters to me. I'm in-network with most commercial insurance plans. If anything is standing between you and care, reach out — we'll find a way through together. And as a parent, I know childcare is often the obstacle, so please know your child, at any age, is always welcome in the treatment room.