In 2020, I contracted COVID while working on the front lines. Two weeks later, I was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome - a rare autoimmune condition - and was forced to pause. For the first time in my relentlessly achievement-driven life, I was forced to simply be.
In the months and years that followed, I did what many high-achievers do: I tried to fix myself. I made checklists. I pushed harder to do the "right" wellness practices. And my body responded with more illness - more autoimmune disease, recurring infections, one diagnosis after another. I was sick every six weeks.
Then came the moment of surrender. Lying on the floor, unable to move, I stopped fighting myself. And something shifted. The question changed from How do I fix myself? to How do I be with myself?
What I began to realize was that much of my suffering was rooted in disconnection: disconnection from myself - my body, my emotions, my own knowings - from community, and from something larger than the isolated self I had spent much of my life trying to perfect. Slowly, over time, I began to feel more alive, more connected, and more purposeful - and I stopped getting sick.
It became clear that "being with yourself" is not a place to arrive or master, but an everyday practice rooted in self-compassion.
That turning point became the foundation of everything I now teach. I dove deeply into emotional literacy, psychoneuroimmunology, and yoga philosophy - weaving together over a decade of work as a counselor, teacher, and physician into a single guiding inquiry:
What obscures access to the vitality already within us, and how does that manifest in our health?
I teach emotional literacy because learning how to be with ourselves is a practice - and often a difficult one. Many of us never learn the skill sets or frameworks needed to sit with deeply human and universal experiences such as grief, shame, uncertainty, or trauma responses. Becoming more emotionally literate gave me the tools to practice compassion.
My interest in psychoneuroimmunology grew from a deeply personal question: what happens to the body when we live in chronic stress states like hypervigilance, unprocessed emotion, and survival mode? I explore the science of how stress shapes the nervous, immune, and endocrine systems - and how our lived human experience becomes biologically expressed through the body.
Yoga philosophy offered another layer of understanding: that beneath our suffering, an innate wholeness lives within all of us. No one is broken at their core - we are simply, at times, obscured from our true nature by the conditioning of our lives. Honestly, it was a relief to discover thousand-year-old texts that could serve as a roadmap and guide.
And through all of it - the science, the medicine, the emotional work, the philosophy - I found myself arriving at something unexpectedly simple: much of my suffering came from experiencing myself as fundamentally separate and alone.
Over time, I developed what I now understand as a spiritual practice. For a long time, spirituality felt confusing and unattainable to me - I thought it meant subscribing to a rigid belief system, always being at peace, or finding something outside of myself. But what I eventually realized was much simpler: it was a moment-to-moment practice of reconnecting to myself and to something greater than myself that was already there all along. And the natural ebb and flow between feeling connected and disconnected is part of what makes us human.
I found that spiritual practice became its own form of medicine - and this is the medicine I am interested in prescribing.
I now write, teach, and speak at the intersection of science, humanness, and deeper meaning. As a physician, I see health not only through the lens of disease, but through a deeper question: what obscures access to the vitality already within us, how does that become reflected in the body, and what becomes possible when we live in more connected and fully expressed ways?
