I didn’t begin this work as a professional project.

I began it trying to understand why my life felt harder than it should have.

I grew up in a home shaped by instability and emotional unpredictability. There was food. There was shelter. But thanks to my father’s alcoholism, there was also chaos. The emotional climate could shift without warning. I learned early to read the room, to stay alert, to adapt.

What I didn’t learn was how to feel steady inside myself.

Long before I had language for it, my nervous system organized around inconsistency. And even earlier than that — in infancy, before memory — there were likely gaps in attunement. Distress didn’t always bring reliable response. Over time, those early patterns don’t disappear. They become the operating system.

For most of my life, I believed I was fundamentally whole — just flawed in discipline, motivation, or character. I relied heavily on intelligence. I tried to think my way out of patterns that were rooted much deeper than thought.

It took decades to recognize what I now describe as chronic attunement insufficiency — the long-term impact of growing up without consistent emotional responsiveness and nervous system support.

That recognition brought grief. It also brought relief.

Because the problem wasn’t that I was broken.
It was that I had adapted.

My background is in the Daoist internal healing arts. I’m a licensed acupuncturist with over two decades of experience in Chinese medicine and related disciplines — meditation, movement, nutrition, and the study of natural cycles. These traditions understand human beings as integrated systems of body, emotion, and spirit.

Over time, I began to see how precisely Daoist healing practices speak to the kinds of dysregulation and fragmentation that early developmental gaps create. They don’t force change. They work with capacity. With regulation. With restoring internal rhythm.

This site is my ongoing exploration of that intersection.

Not as a promise of cure.
Not as a program.
Not as a system to master.

But as a way of understanding how survival patterns form — and how they can soften over time through steady, embodied practice.

I’m not writing from the finish line.

I’m writing from inside the work.

If parts of this resonate, you’re welcome here.