hello! welcome!
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 from my migraine 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 guild. 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 medical care that wouldn’t 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 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. 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 this 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 thinking about seeing someone who could help me. It was now nearing a year of near constant symptoms that only seemed to get worse and worse. Even though I had never been around an acupuncturist or seen an acupuncture needle before, I
From the moment I entered I felt comfortable. I communicated in detail what was going on in my body. All of it seemed to make perfect sense as my acupuncturist nodded her head. 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 about what my favorite time of day was. It was nuanced. It was complete. The needles felt so good to me, especially at the nape of my neck - like pressure escaping from a valve, much like how I felt inside with all these feelings pent up. 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.
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 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 my ears. What arrived was a sense of ‘I am going to be OK,’ and ‘I have found the medicine for my life’, yet beyond any cognizant words and more of a deep stirring and welling up of joy.
That afternoon I went to the pool and felt ready to swim 20 laps. Afterword I rested in the shade and felt my body releasing more, still feeling the lingering buzzy effects.
Miraculously, my cycle started the next day and has since never been a problem. My migraines all but disappeared. I had maybe two recurrences in the first two weeks of treatment and then they completely went away.
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 and acupuncture approximately one year to the date of my first ever acupuncture treatment.
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 my own private practice. I started seeing patients privately in Silver Spring, Maryland, and later moved my private practice to Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. in 2018.
I am incredibly passionate about sports medicine and personal growth, becoming a certified yoga teacher in 2017 after taking other teacher training workshops in 2008 and 2009. 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 half the normally expected time with no complications during or after.
Learning this 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 as most of us are seen as a number and a dollar sign. 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 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.