Your Practitioner

I grew up in the Catskill mountains of New York, relishing the small mountain town and walking for miles in the woods and looking for wildflowers. I spent my high school senior year in Norway as an exchange student, living with a family and learning to speak Norwegian. By the time I came home, I spoke it so well that my sister grumbled, “If you're going to talk in your sleep, you could at least speak in English!” I attended Oberlin College in a small town in Ohio, combining my interests in Language and the Mind in an Independent Major in Psycholinguistics. After a pastoral break from academia, I returned to grad school at the Tai Sophia Institute, then called the Traditional Acupuncture Institute in Laurel, MD. Tai Sophia is the first Institute of Acupuncture to have granted Master’s Degrees in the United States. I am licensed to practice Acupuncture in the states of Maine and Maryland, and I am certified by the State of Maryland to treat animals with acupuncture. I hold a Diplomate of Acupuncture granted by the National Commission for the Certification of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine.

Since 1997, I have worked in many varied and diverse settings. I worked for five years in a veterinary hospital providing Acupuncture treatment for dogs, cats, rabbits, ferrets, a bird or two, and I made farm visits for horses, cows, pigs and goats, and even a turkey who lived in the Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary in Poolesville, Maryland. This work has certainly been a highlight of my life: to provide healing comfort to a being with whom communication is so perfunctorily non-verbal!

A little over two years of my practice found me working in the Baltimore City Detention Center with women who were surviving the city streets and looking to find a new way of life. Acupuncture provides substantial relief during the withdrawal process from drugs and cigarrettes. Fascinating conversations are possible when a body is relaxed and at peace, and counseling and GED studies have a greater chance for success.

More recently, I travelled to New Orleans to provide a similar type of stress relief acupuncture for Hurricane Katrina survivors and thrivers. The group Acupuncturists Without Borders provided the backdrop and in February I became one of the 50 or so acupuncturists who travelled to New Orleans across the five months following the hurricane to offer services. The gift of service is returned in so many ways, and clearly rebounds across the globe. For more information about this project, see www.acuwithoutborders.org

At this point, I run a successful practice in the small town of Farmington, Maine. As a general practitioner she offers her gifts to all from 8 years of age to well over 89 (sometimes we aren't sure). I have a pleasant office downtown, overlooking the University's athletic fields with a large picture window that lets in the sun and sky of western rural Maine. Cardinals, gold finches, purple finches and woodpeckers offer their healing presence for all to see. Please drop by the office sometime, help yourself to a cup of tea and browse my small lending library. I'll look forward to meeting you!