I come from a lineage of Chinese Medicine practitioners going back three generations.

The other half of my lineage is in the culinary arts. I grew up in restaurants with chefs and home cooks who taught me everything about food.

When I was 12, I began my food as medicine journey by being a private chef every day for one month. In Chinese culture, the period immediately after childbirth is called "zuò yuè zi" (坐月子), which literally means "sitting the month."

It's a traditional postpartum confinement practice that highlights rest, recovery, and proper nourishment for new moms. Food is prepared to help the mother regain strength, boost milk production, and restore her body's vitality.

Under my Chinese Medicine Mother's guidance, I prepared food for my elder sister (who's 15 years my senior) postpartum and fell in love with food as medicine.

Emotional wellness is, in my opinion, the most important factor that influences your lifestyle choices, and therefore your health and wellness. I have a Daoist approach to emotional healing.

I don't believe emotions are good or bad, they are just energy in motion.

When we try to suppress, repress or deny emotions, that's when the resistance renders healing impossible.

My entire body of work is to help you release the Resistance by accepting, understanding and caretaking the emotions that are desperately trying to communicate with you - sometimes as illness, sometimes as addiction, almost always as pain.

I want you to know that the health and wellness you seek is already inside you. By going IN, you get THROUGH. I want you to live in a world where you don't need to bury the difficult things but have the tools to excavate, examine, and care take them. Together, you get to take your power back and be the alchemist of your life.