I've spent much of my life interested in the places where one thing becomes another: where the body changes, identities shift, and the ways we've understood ourselves no longer quite fit.

My first teacher was the body; my first language was movement, a way of listening and responding to space, sound, and the people around me. As a professional ballet dancer, I learned that the body often knows things before the mind does. Later, cultural diplomacy between Japan and the U.S. taught me to translate between worlds, and work in global health, the arts, and international affairs showed me how much culture shapes the way we live, heal, and die.

For more than a decade, my clinical work as a Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine has centered on women's health and the transitions of the body: from fertility, pregnancy, and postpartum, through midlife, aging, illness, and the end of life. Chinese medicine gave me a different way of understanding these experiences: not as problems to fix or symptoms to manage, but as natural passages in the life of a whole person. My training includes more than 5,000 hours of study, with advanced clinical work at Zhejiang Medical University in Hangzhou, China.

As co-founder and Chief of Clinical Operations of Akin, I helped grow a women's integrative health network to 40 practitioners across 16 California locations, building the teams, systems, and care models that surrounded women through some of their most significant health transformations. That work taught me that how we care for people depends as much on the structures around care as on the care itself.

These transitions of a life are universal, and yet we so often meet them with fear. I believe they are meant to be embraced: birth, midlife, illness, aging, and death are not failures of the body, but passages to be honored. Met with presence and care, they can become some of the most meaningful moments of a life.

Today, my work takes several forms: clinical care, writing and speaking, advising, and The Threshold Collective, which I founded to explore how practitioners, artists, and communities might bring greater presence and connection to death, dying, and grief.

I write about embodied practice, health, culture, and the intelligence we keep forgetting to trust through The Deeper Fluency.