How I came to be an acupuncturist and move to a small mountain town in Colorado …

I have been practicing acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine for over 20 years and have been fortunate to call Nederland home since 2018. These two pieces of my life have been my greatest blessings and joys (other than my family, including fur kids of course!) and they have one incredible thing in common: they found me.

Neither was ever on my radar. I had never had acupuncture before or even known someone who had had it when I was “told” to become an acupuncturist. And I had never even been to the state of Colorado when I was “shown” that I should be here. But I know I am not alone in experiencing a revelation that instantly feels like a deep knowing or cosmic guiding message… I know that it happens to all of us. Unfortunately, not all of us listen, or even trust such a message. And fewer of us still, follow a beckoning like this, radically changing our entire existences to do so. It’s kind of tragic!

On a bright summer day in 2001 I was folding laundry in my bedroom in a beautiful Victorian home we had built near the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. My two babies were babbling and crawling around the floor in diapers amongst the giant baby Legos. It was a random moment of contentment, nothing extraordinary. Suddenly out of nowhere, I had an instant and highly-charged knowing funneled into me from above and I exclaimed “Oh, I am supposed to be an acupuncturist!” It was a sparkling moment that had my heart racing and tears in my eyes. I recalled flying to the Philippines a few years prior, and as dawn was illuminating the land underneath, the pilot announced that if we looked out of the windows on the left side of the plane, we could see mainland China. Gazing down at the misty coastline I was overcome with a euphoric and breathless happiness and longing as I heard myself say “I will be back!” My heart was instantly connected with that ancient land and indeed I did go back. I enrolled in acupuncture school that very month and studied in Shanghai after graduation.

As my sons finished up high school in Bethesda, Maryland and started applying to colleges, I told my husband that I didn’t know where yet, but it was time to move, and when I knew the location it would be fast and intense, so be ready! I did not want to sit in my empty house in the city, sad after my kids left. Like John Muir, the mountains were calling (they had always called!), so I started researching such places and took many road trips on the east coast, eyes and heart wide open. I found the most beautiful places and was actually quite dismayed to understand that none of them were my next chapter. Then one early morning I had a dream. I was walking arm and arm with the Dalai Lama (I know, a little presumptuous) along a white and grey rocky path by a stream, and we paused to sit. His Holiness laughed and laughed as I looked at the boulders and rushing water and his face was the radiating warmth of creation itself. The moment was one of perfection and bliss, and when my eyes flew open I went running downstairs to my husband who was already working in his study. I urged him to bring up the image of the flag of Colorado and declared that if any part of that image evoked the dream I just had, we were moving to Boulder Colorado! He obliged and turned the screen to face me, and through my tears, I said I have just found our home. For what I see when I look at the Colorado state flag is an aerial view of the shaven head of a monk in Tibetan Buddhist robes, walking along a white path by a river.

Within 3 months I was walking my dogs in the mountains just outside of the Boulder in my dream, in Nederland Colorado. Life is just sprinkled with magic if you follow the flashes of insight that are occasionally revealed!

I don’t want any more signs. I am deeply happy. I love these mountains, and the wildlife and people of these mountains, and I just want to share my knowledge in eastern healing traditions right here in this very special town. But if I am shown another path, I will follow, and I urge everyone to listen to their own messages. They will likely take you places you never dreamed and enrich you in unfathomable ways!

Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu

May all beings be happy and free