It’s hard to think back to how my love of Chinese medicine began, it’s been a 20year journey and like an old shoe its comfortable, fits well and has taken so many paths its impossible to remember the ‘breaking in’ bit at the beginning. I have always been fascinated by peoples health stories, how they explain their ‘dis-ease’, the words chosen to describe their somatic experience of pain, hurt, longing, shame, love and joy. I’ve held hands of the dying and helped to bring in new life in my specialism of fertility medicine, but is always the stories that I cherish, its a position of great privilege to hold space for these stories and I learn so much about not only the patient but myself through them.

The vision has always been to help people get well or achieve specific goals, like getting pregnant or sleeping better. To facilitate a state of wellbeing or ‘ease’ in a client using tools such as acupuncture is only one part of it. Crucially, it is the significance given to bear witness to stories and the search for the clues that enable healing, because it is in the stories we find meaning and solutions. My vision is not to heal but to facilitate healing for an individual using the skills that I have. I am a facilitator in that persons goal at that point in time using my tools to best enable that, Acupuncture, reflexology, massage, listening, instructing, advising. I liken it to a process of cartography in the map of health, finding patterns and conduits through which to facilitate change for a client.

When we talk about vision we talk about hope, hope is what motivates, propels and gives momentum to change. Clarity of vision and hope can be tricky amidst a COVID Lockdown when normal doesn’t really exist anymore. But there is an undercurrent of hope that our new normal might contains some seeds of newfound ways of being, a clearer recognition of what’s important, a sharpened view of what humanity actually needs, new ways we can be kinder and show a deeper respect for mother earth and each other.