Hello! I’m Celia.

I work with people who want to feel better, to get out from under the residue of sickness, pain, trauma, anxiety, exhaustion. 

I use the tool of acupuncture and herbalism, true. But the most effective thing I can do is to show you that you have all the tools you need to: 

• have more ease and comfort even if you are down and out, while sprinkling in a little creative joy and connection
• be more of a vessel to hold energy, when it seems like you’re an empty bucket full of holes
• deal with the stress of cold and flu season or winter blues, summer anxiety, insomnia, postpartum discomforts, whatever… while actually effortlessly flowing with the natural —and wise— ebbs and flows of our lives
• be OKAY with your body, no matter what’s going on with it
• connect to your own internal guidance system, which bring more interconnectedness with what personally guides YOU into your life

Yes, healing is possible.

We can listen to our bodies. We can transform:

pain into feeling good

trauma into neuroplasticity

wounding into a creative knitting back together

illness into deep restoration

anxiety into awareness

exhaustion into meditation

Embodiment for Healing 

How do we take the reins of being their own healer? Through Embodiment, or being aware of the body. 

We all are embodied. We all pay attention to our body. If you’re like many, it’s mostly when it knocks you on your butt or gets sick.

But having an intentional embodiment practice can shift us into working with the full range of our healing capacity. 

We can put technical names on embodiment.

We can call it the realm of psychoneuroimmunology, or behavioral neuroscience. We could call it’s techniques 4 Square Breathing (what the military calls it), somatic feedback (what psychologists call it), meditation (what spiritual communities call it), MBSR (mindfulness-based stress reduction – what Ivy League universities call it), heart-rate variability, HPA Axis or Vagus nerve adaptability (what white-coat researchers in labs call it), or guided relaxation (what the self-help community calls it). 

I call it embodiment because at its core, we are getting back in our body. 

Names aside, we all have the tools of:

Breathing – Three conscious breaths can reduce those stress hormones

Sensing – Info/data you gather about your body

Feeling – How your body feels right now

Communicating – What your body is saying

You are already doing more healing than anyone could do on your behalf. How? Because if there’s a wound or sickness, a stressful time or intense process, our body has the exact capacity and pinpointed wisdom to move through it, or to heal.

Our body is an ally. Within it much healing occurs, every moment of every day.

Pain and Sickness Doula

The essence of what I do is like being a pain doula. 

Being a anxious, highly-sensitive kid, tired teen and sickly adult with lots of debilitating pain sprinkled in, I’ve had practice finding ways to cope and deal with pain and sickness.

I have been at the side of others through the their pain and discomfort — but also very doable and sometimes totally normal — processes of birth, postpartum, menstrual cramps, miscarriages, migraines, medical procedures, exhaustion, chronic illness, addiction, panic attacks, and intense spiritual awakenings (yeah, those can hurt sometimes too). 

And lots and LOTS of colds, flus, ear infections and bladder infections, too — because those happen a lot and are just as annoying as anything else. Click here to read about the treatment specialities of my practice.

Plant Person

When I was 4 months old, my mom dressed me up in my stroller as a potted plant for Halloween, and I guess it stuck because I’ve loved plants ever since.

If I’m not making teas, transforming my lawn to turn into an herb and flower garden or giving treatments, I can be found meandering slowly through the urban jungle of my neighborhood (I live in Portland, OR), saying hello to the crows (if you feed them once they will forever follow you) admiring old houses on the way to the coffee shop (because I have two little kids). 

I also love to craft, preferably with plants and fibers/fabrics (many of which come from plants…you can see a theme here).

Some of my favorite herbs are yarrow, rose, chamomile, plantain, motherwort, peony, catnip and thyme. Yes, I am a clinical herbalist and use all sorts of herbs, but as you can see I have a liking for gentle garden herbs. 

My favorite plants of Portland are rosemary and lavender, and all the roses of course. 

My first plant friends as a child were tiger lily, pineapple weed, those tiny delicious wild blackberries of the midwest, and sorrel, and from my grandparents garden I much loved monarch-covered dill, marigolds, strawberry and sunflowers.

Thank you for being here. 

Healing can be one of the hardest things. But I also know there is much healing available. Every wound carries the healing. We just have to pay our bodies a visit.