Why I Offer This Work

An Honest Word on Beauty

Before you book, I want you to know what I mean when I talk about beauty. This is the longer conversation, the one I could not fit inside a treatment room.

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I have been avoiding advertising for facial acupuncture or aesthetic acupuncture because I wanted to offer more. After having an honest conversation with our office manager as to why I do not enjoy doing just regular facial acupuncture, I described to her my take on beauty and how I would approach it. Then I thought, why not? This is what makes me unique. Let me put it out there and call in my tribe.

I believe that healing is a moving forward, not a going backward.

Part of what I have not enjoyed when I have worked with patients in the past who came in for facial acupuncture was the movement of the treatment. It was often, "I want to look 20 again. I want to look young again."

I remember when I first started acupuncture and was seeing some of my first patients. I was 25 years old, and I had a 73-year-old patient who came in and said, "I want to look like you again."

That is not realistic.

That experience left an imprint on me. Even though I am trained and have treated many patients since then, it left me with the feeling that I do not really enjoy this work when it is approached from that place.

For me, healing is about moving forward. It is not about being 16 again or 25 again. It is about becoming the healthiest, best version of yourself.

So beauty at every age.

How can we help you have healthy skin? How can we decrease fine lines and wrinkles? How can we support the body, use really good products, drink water, stay hydrated, eat fresh fruits and vegetables, and get the nutrients you need? How can we get you excited again about that level of self-care? And how can we help you embody your soul's true light, your essence?

Because when you embody your true radiance, your true light, that beauty shines even when you are not trying.

There are days when I do not feel beautiful, or I am not thinking about beauty at all, because in many ways I have decentered this constant quest for beauty in my life. Yet I receive many compliments from people who tell me how beautiful I am.

Part of that came from the trauma healing work I did. I completed a two-year trauma healing program with Thomas Hübl, and one of the processes I worked through was the pain of having been disconnected from my beauty. I realized that I get to embody my beauty.

I get to fully embody my beauty.

Collectively, we are also healing many wounds connected to colonization, slavery, and the question of who gets to be beautiful and what the standard of beauty is. For me, this is beauty beyond a European standard of beauty.

This is beauty for every woman.

Every woman is welcome, including women of European descent. How can we all be beautiful? How can we show up knowing that, when we come together as women, we are like a bouquet of many flowers, and that we all get to shine?

Another woman's beauty or radiance does not have to be a trigger for me. It can be something I celebrate, knowing that I too am beautiful. I can be beautiful in the presence of another woman.

This is the type of work I want to do.
This is the level at which I want to do it.
And this is why I am offering it.

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Original Beauty

Only you can embody your unique beauty in this world

Part of the reason I hesitated to offer aesthetic acupuncture is that I did not want to participate in a one-size-fits-all model of beauty, one that is often driven by fear, insecurity, and the message that there is something wrong with you that must be fixed. That is not the conversation I want to have. The conversation I want to have is about celebrating every woman's beauty and wellness.

The world does not need another version of someone else.

The world needs your original beauty.

Many Indigenous traditions speak of original beauty, the understanding that beauty is not something we earn, chase, or manufacture. It is something we arrive with. It is something that has always been present. Much of our healing is the process of remembering that.

Perhaps one of the deepest wounds we carry is the disconnection from our own beauty, our own essence, our own belonging.

When you embody your beauty, your unique beauty, the beauty of your ancestors, the beauty of your lineage, the beauty of humanity, the beauty of the Earth, and the beauty of the cosmos, you remind others to do the same.

You give others permission to shine.

You become a living invitation for someone else to remember who they are.

That is the kind of beauty that interests me.

Beauty that empowers.
Beauty that nourishes.
Beauty that heals.
Beauty that reconnects us to ourselves.
Beauty that allows us to stand fully in our own light.

Because only you can embody your unique beauty in this world.