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I knew I was meant to become an acupuncturist the moment I received my first acupuncture treatment.

When I was 22, while living and working in France as a school teacher, I started to suffer from chronic debilitating migraines.

I had broken up with my boyfriend of four and a half years while I was there. I had gotten off a particularly intense form of birth control. Being in a foreign country and dealing with financial and logistical everyday stresses was it’s own emotional roller coaster, let alone my early 20s heartbreak.

That’s when my symptoms started to spiral. I stopped getting my period altogether. My hair was falling out in clumps in the shower. I started gaining weight around my middle and my clothes were fitting tighter. My emotions would ramp up around bedtime and I would stay up late and journal for hours. In these wee hours I would eat a lot, those ‘baguette binges,’ trying to feel my body, and self-soothe. My sleep schedule was so off, sometimes I would wake up at three or four in the afternoon. I was always feeling depressed, moody, anxious, and sensitive to many little things.

The migraines started in the early spring leaving me bedridden, foggy, and bleary-eyed for the whole day. I remember often they came right when I woke up for work. Feeling wracked with guilt, shame, and overwhelm I would text the primary school teachers these overwrought French texts through my painful psychedelic tunnel vision.

I thought to myself, ‘Wow, here I am, in the very labor-conscious country of France, during a school calendar year that gives ample time off for staff every quarter, and I’m working part-time as a language assistant, why am I so not able to ‘get it together?' I really didn’t know what was happening to me and the social anxiety was almost too much to bear.

It got worse and more frequent, pain became nausea. I remember it interrupting French country road trips with my friends, one time puking on the side of the road on the way to Mont Saint Michel. Socially, every time I cancelled plans with these burgeoning friendships, I got so much anxiety. I thought they would never forgive me, thinking with all these migraine-RSVPs that maybe I was lying or being flaky. I was worried all the time, wracked with guilt. I dreaded not getting invited to as many things. I was always irritable and depressed and wanted to be alone. Feeling discarded by my ex and ugly all the time, just not my normal, funny, enthusiastic self.

My weight gain got worse as spring and warmer temperatures arrived and my late nights persisted. The elementary school French kids were constantly asking, “Maitresse, êtes-vous enceinte ?” (“Are you pregnant?”).

Back in the U.S., I met with an OB-GYN’s office for an appointment to treat my lack of period. After a 50-minute wait in a very empty waiting room followed by a 10-minute consultation, I was able to receive the medical care that would hopefully help the hormones. The OB-GYN stated in the first minute that I was twenty pounds overweight and on the verge of being hypothyroid - that I shouldn’t weigh this much unless I was pregnant going on full term. I couldn’t handle the reality. I still remember the pale pink walls and how angry and hopeless I felt on her treatment table - and yet so emotionally heavy more than anything else. I was silent and didn’t say anything until she saw me out. I really had a deep sense in myself that she didn’t understand the whole picture and I had to figure it all out myself. She sent me home with a prescription to make me start my period. I shouldn’t have expected a pill would solve it or that one person would be my saving grace.

A friend recommended I see an acupuncturist. The idea of a totally natural and gentle approach that was medical yet had the space for me to explain what I felt was going on, was refreshing to my mind and heart. I felt this feeling of relief and of joy about seeing someone who could help me who was more clued in to the every day reality of all these other factors. It was now nearing a year of near constant symptoms that only seemed to get worse and worse, compounding the issue.

From the moment I entered her tiny treatment room in the space bedroom of the second floor of this Cathedral Heights rowhouse, I felt comfortable with my acupuncturist. I communicated in detail what was going on in my body. All of it seemed to make perfect sense to her as she nodded her head and didn’t break eye contact. I kept going, expressing more. I tried holding back tears a couple times. It was so nice to talk to someone.

She sympathized with the pain and the struggle. She asked me sort of far-out questions I didn’t expect about what my favorite time of day was, what my favorite season was. It was nuanced. It was complete-feeling to me in both its simplicity and depth.

I was a little nervous about the needles until the first one was in, painless and sending a little buzz throughout my body. I started to feel the effects. A sense of calmness readily swept over me. The needles felt so good, especially at the nape of my neck - like pressure escaping from a valve. I felt like a rice pot diffusing steam, all these feelings that had no outlet were moving again.

I remember the humid air that day, and the thick canopy of August leaves waving at me though in the window. I felt a paradoxical sense of heaviness along with lightness as my body lay effortlessly still. She tucked me into her thin vintage floral sheets and made sure I was comfortable. She no sooner closed the door behind her as hot tears of relief, grief, and lamentation streamed down into the pockets of my ears. What arrived deep down in this homecoming was a sense of ‘I am going to be OK;’ ‘I have found the medicine for my life’ — yet it went beyond any cognizant words at the time. I began then to stir and well up a deep feeling of joy.

That afternoon I went to the pool and felt ready to swim 20 laps. Afterword I rested in the shade limply, feeling my body releasing and the lingering buzzy effects of this newfound chi of my life energy.

Miraculously, my cycle started the next day and has since been on time over all these years. My migraines all but disappeared. I had maybe two recurrences in the first two weeks of treatment that we continued to treat and then they completely went away.

Within a year almost to the day of that first treatment, I enrolled for my Masters degree in Acupuncture at Maryland University for Integrative Health (MUIH) in Laurel, Maryland for a three-year comprehensive clinical and medical study of Eastern medicine.

I completed my Diplomate of Acupuncture from the National Certification Committee of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (NCCAOM), as well as a certificate in National Acupuncture Detoxification Association (NADA).

Since 2012, I have worked at addiction clinics, community clinics, and mostly in my own private practice to give patients the same experience I had. I started seeing patients privately in Silver Spring, Maryland, and later moved my private practice to Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. in 2018, moving up to Tenleytown D.C. after the coronavirus pandemic.

I am incredibly passionate about sports medicine and personal growth, becoming a certified yoga teacher in teacher training workshops in 2008 and 2009 and completing my certification in 2017. I love weight lifting and strength training. In 2019 I began practicing orthopedic acupuncture, a needling technique with different type needles used in the hospitals in Beijing, China. I was introduced to Andrew Nugent-Head’s work and his incredible story of his Chinese Medicine doctor treating his broken ankle from a motorcycle accident using only acupuncture and herbs. The doctor helped him heal in less than half of the normally expected time with no complications during or after.

Incorporating my natural gifts for fitness and sports has been such a gift for me as a practitioner and a game-changer for so many of my patients (I am so good at treating migraines!). It feels so good to give them the immediate results and relief as I had.

Such a reverence for the wisdom of the human body we most likely will never see in conventional medicine in the West in our lifetime. Most of us are seen as a number and a dollar sign, or are too pained with no support to solve the issues our bodies are telling us have more of a compounded emotional root. If we knew more to embrace natural healing in our own bodies, we as a society would be able to bring about more of nature’s peace and balance in the world.

My journey started young, and continues to serve with love for nature and a way of life that can actually carry this earth and the people living on it for generations and generations to come. I love healing and supporting living things and will continue to do so for the rest of my life.

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