Hi friends! Welcome to my new website. I’m so incredibly excited to share this little piece of the internet with you. This project has been a long-time coming, literally from my heart (and maybe 100+ hours of research and editing). It’s pretty much a résumé of everything I’ve done in my almost 20-year career studying and practicing acupuncture and traditional medicine.
Like any journey, there have been many ups and downs, and all of them have been learning lessons. I didn’t really choose the path of becoming an acupuncturist actually; it chose me.
I guess you can say I became an acupuncturist “by accident.”
In 2003, I was living in Winnipeg, working in the music industry while still in university, and loving it. Then one winter day, I slipped on the ice and fell badly. I was in pain from a young age, and no therapies really helped.
Two years later, I moved to Toronto and I tried everything again. I was an active city girl, and while movement helped, the pain still wasn’t really going away.
In an effort to heal, I decided to try Pilates. So one day, I walked into a three-story building on Toronto’s Queen West, where there was an acupuncture clinic on the second floor. I didn’t know it was a school at the time, but I grabbed one of the flyers outside their door and went on my way.
A few weeks later, something told me to go into my closet and reach for that flyer. And there it was, in a giant stack of papers, jutting out just a touch, like a gentle nudge from the universe. I pulled it out like a Jenga block. Minutes later, I was emailing them everything about my injury to date, and they promptly replied asking me to come in.
A few days later, I walked onto the second floor of that building with no idea who these people were, what I was doing, or much about what they even did in this place. But I shared my story and showed them all my pain points and where it was traveling.
They did the acupuncture on me, which I knew nothing about, and that was when everything changed.
When they removed the needles and I changed back into my street clothes, this wave of emotion came over me and I just could not stop crying. I remember feeling nervous to see them after the treatment. I didn’t want them to think something bad had happened. I just didn’t understand what was going on.
But they were so kind and assured me that emotional releases after acupuncture are normal, and the pain I had, which no one could really find on an imaging test or diagnose, was actually my gallbladder channel.
Okayyyy… I thought.I didn’t really understand. But I knew it didn’t feel bad.
So I went home, opened my laptop (and yes, I’m still crying at this point), and typed “gallbladder channel” into a circa 2000s search engine. And I think this was the first non-academic rabbit hole I’ve ever gone down. Liver channel. Wood element. Tears. Trees. Sinews. Kidney channel. Fear. Heart. Joy. Laughter. Everything I thought of the world, of people,emotions, our bodies, started making sense.
I remember staring at these old, low-quality internet illustrations. Mind you, this was 2004 and the internet was a different place.
There was this one illustration of a man, a man with dots and lines connected like some constellation on the body, and I realized… this is it. Like, this is IT. These are the answers I’ve been looking for. Answers I didn’t even know I was searching for. I’m done. Whatever this is I’ve discovered, I’m doing it.
And that’s where this journey began.
A few weeks later, I quit my job, went back to school on that exact second floor where I had my first treatment and almost 20 years later, here I am, sharing everything from that time to now on this website.
So welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.
