As a kid, I struggled with debilitating asthma and allergies.

 

I spent years relying on inhalers, breathing treatments, and steroid medications just to make it through everyday life. Those medications helped me breathe, but they also changed my physical appearance. I gained significant weight at an age when I was too young to understand why my body was changing—only that I didn't feel comfortable in it.

 

And my body seemed to have limits that everyone else's didn't.

 

Running a single lap around the playground could leave me struggling to catch my breath. There were times when the other kids ran and played and I had to sit on the sidelines and watch.

 

I remember what that felt like.

 

To want to participate.
To want your body to cooperate.
And to realize that sometimes, it simply couldn't.

 

Those experiences shaped the way I see healthcare today.

 

Not because they made me distrust medicine—they didn't. Modern medicine gave me the ability to breathe. But as I got older, I began to discover something else: what it felt like to build a relationship with my body instead of only experiencing it through its limitations.

 

Movement became medicine.
Exercise became confidence.
Nutrition became curiosity.
Recovery became just as important as training.

 

And somewhere along the way, the kid who couldn't run a lap around the playground became a runner.

 

I've been running for nearly 20 years now. I've crossed the finish line of three half marathons and countless other races. Even after all this time, there is something deeply meaningful about asking my body to carry me mile after mile when I can still remember what it felt like to sit on the sidelines because I couldn't catch my breath.

 

I don't take that for granted.

 

My body didn't become a different body. It became one I learned to understand, support, challenge, recover, and trust.

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And that changed more than my relationship with movement.

 

It changed the way I understood healing.

 

Healing wasn't simply about getting back to where I had been. Sometimes it was about discovering what might be possible next.

 

That curiosity eventually became my profession.

 

Today, I help people recover from surgery, reduce pain, restore movement, support their nervous system, and feel more at home in their own bodies through evidence-informed acupuncture, lymphatic drainage, and clinical bodywork.

 

I don't expect every person's story to look like mine. But I do know what it's like to feel limited by your own body—and what it means when that begins to change.

 

I spent part of my childhood watching from the sidelines. Today, I get to help other people discover what their bodies may still be capable of.

 

That's my why.