How Did I Get Here?

I have spent much of my career caring for women, and over the years I began to notice something I couldn’t unsee. Women were exhausted. They were overwhelmed. They knew something wasn’t right, but too often they felt dismissed, given something to manage the symptom, or told everything looked “normal.” Medicine could become a placeholder, something that helped us get through, but I wasn’t always seeing the healing, growth, and restoration I knew were possible.

I wanted to understand what was underneath it all.

I began looking beyond individual symptoms and toward the whole woman: her hormones, metabolism, nutrition, sleep, stress, nervous system, relationships, life experiences, and the demands being placed on her every day. I came to believe that we have to control the controllables, build the fundamentals first, and then optimize the margins. Because optimization means very little when a woman is depleted, overwhelmed, and using nearly everything she has just to make it through the day.

That is why nervous system health became such an important part of the way I practice. When the body is constantly operating in a state of stress and survival, there is very little left for anything else. Healing isn’t just about improving a lab value. It’s about helping create enough safety, capacity, and energy for a woman to participate fully in her own life again.

And even that wasn’t the whole picture.

I believe we are mind, body, and soul. I am interested not only in the symptoms of the woman sitting in front of me, but in her. What lights her up? What has she lost touch with? What does she know intuitively about herself? What gifts does she bring to her family, her community, and the world? What would her life feel like if all of her energy weren’t being spent simply trying to keep up?

I tried to practice this way within traditional medicine. Later, I tried within integrative medicine. Through both experiences, I learned more about the kind of provider I am and the kind of medicine I am called to practice. I wanted to create a way of practicing medicine that allowed me to bring my full presence, energy, and attention to the patient sitting in front of me.

Eventually, I realized that if I wanted to practice medicine this way, I needed to create the space for it myself.

That space became Ascension.

Ascension brings together evidence-based medicine, individualized care, intuition, and spiritual medicine. It is a place where symptoms can become invitations to look deeper, where your story is part of the clinical picture, and where you remain an active participant in deciding what healing and optimization look like for you.

Because the goal isn’t simply to get you through the day.

I want you to have enough of yourself left to actually live it.