After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 2005, I took various jobs in several industries—civil engineering, publishing, marketing—and I learned valuable things in each, yet was always looking for something more. In 2009, I had a near-death experience in a hospital setting, and spent the next several months in a state of sustained shock. Nothing seemed to be able to make me snap out of it, and I reached a point at which I was ready to try anything, no matter how strange or unknown to me.

Fortunately for me, I had family members acquainted with the leaders of the Wu Hsing Tao School of Classical Five Element Acupuncture, and only a day after my hospital experience, the dean of the school suggested that I should make an appointment at the student clinic. I had never given a moment’s thought to acupuncture before that day, but eventually I thought that at least I might be able to do something to keep from having to go back to the hospital. I made my first appointment, and when it was over, it was as though someone had unwrapped a funerary shroud from around my head, and I was able to breathe and see and hear like my old self again. This, along with various other experiences in my own course of treatment, convinced me that, although each healing discipline has a great deal to offer those in need, the Five Element acupuncture tradition was unique, and I consider it my duty to share it with as many people as possible.

I sought treatment in this system of medicine originally for physical issues, but the mental and emotional changes that have resulted from treatment have changed my life in ways that I scarcely could have imagined when I began. It is my hope that all those who are in some way falling short of their best state of personal health will give this medicine the opportunity to do something similar for them.