The Calling
Who she became, and why
Orchid Child
Born to Chinese immigrant parents in Austin, Texas, she was what psychologists call an orchid child — noises average to others could startle her, foul odors reached her before they reached anyone else, and sometimes she felt she could almost hear the chatter of other people's minds.
She preferred quieter spaces — inside a closet, or outside under a cedar tree — spending entire Saturdays alone with her Fisher-Price Little People, drawing magical kingdoms.
As a little girl, I never dreamed of becoming a doctor. I'm not sure I dreamed of becoming anything at all, unless princesses and fairies count.
But it was not long before the real world broke in: a brother's blood dripping on the carpet after he sliced his toe on the door, a black stray cat that choked and gagged in front of her, and her shock at realizing that the roly-polies she had lovingly housed in a jar were dead.
The colors of my magical childhood began to fade — as though someone had taken a big eraser to the rich hues and textures and left only the hard black outlines.
· · ·Heaven & Hell
Her parents — survivors of war and upheaval — had arrived in America with a belief in God above all else. When they settled in Austin, they founded a Chinese evangelical church; her father was a deacon, her mother a Sunday school teacher.
In Sunday school, they watched A Thief in the Night — a rapture film in which a woman runs through empty streets searching for her family, swept up by God while she, a nonbeliever, is left behind. By the end, my legs, fingers, and insides would be quivering with fear, she writes. She became terrified she wasn't enough — that come the real rapture, she too would be left behind.
In her family she was literally called Number Two in Mandarin, as was the Chinese custom. The second child, always in her sister's shadow. At school, she was usually last to be picked in teams, and teased. Then one afternoon, a childhood misadventure ended with her mother, frantic, cursing Gai si — colloquially "Damn it," though its words mean "you should die." To a girl primed by visions of hell and a God too high to reach, it landed like a verdict. I thought I should die. I sure wanted to. The threat of backsliding haunted her, so she began to pray day and night, in atonement.
This sense of helplessness continued, until one day, she spotted Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, sunglasses on, biceps flexed —
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
She cut it out and taped it in her diary. That decision would carry her very far — and, she would one day learn, only so far.
· · ·The Autopsy Room
In college, a study partner casually remarked — "have you ever thought about medical school?" — and it caught her by surprise. She turned the question over, then did something unexpected: she made an appointment and went to the morgue one Saturday before dawn.
Entering through the back door, she saw the corpse of a young Latina woman — died a few hours earlier, a drug overdose suspected. Her body was so fresh she looked like she was merely dozing. The pathologist investigated her body organ by glistening organ — brain, heart, liver, spleen, intestines — examining and weighing each, the details recorded.
For the rest of the weekend she couldn't shake the image of the dead woman. At a party that evening, she saw her face in everyone around her — and in a housefly buzzing nearby. What had her pain been? And could this tragedy have been prevented?
Hell wasn't in the afterlife. It was here, now. To become a doctor wasn't a choice for me. It was a calling.· · ·
Kurt
In medical school, she met a fellow classmate named Kurt — from West Texas, quoted Shakespeare at study breaks at Chili's, asked more questions than he answered, made her laugh out loud in the library stacks. They fell in love, got engaged. Then, during residency, he was killed in a car accident driving home from a late dinner. She threaded his ring onto a chain and wore it close to her heart. She packed his letters and a few keepsakes into a shoebox. After a couple of weeks, she resumed her ninety-hour work weeks. When she got hit with a horrible case of mono, she continued to work through it.
This was the only way I knew to keep the grief from eating me alive.
Competence was the armor she wore over the loss. She would be so good at her work that grief couldn't find her there.
· · ·From Center to the Edges
Her first position after training was in a standard clinic — fifteen-minute appointments, conditions that fit the billing codes, medicine working as designed. She was capable there. But capability wasn't what she was looking for.
She moved to a county hospital in San Francisco serving people living with HIV/AIDS, refugees, homeless families, the working uninsured. Thirty-minute appointments — though what walked through the door seldom fit in thirty minutes. One patient came in for neck pain; Cynthia would learn, only in the course of their conversation, that she had been sleeping in her car for twenty years while raising two children in it. Another came in for an ingrown toenail — both feet so badly damaged by unmanaged diabetes and living on the streets that he'd stopped registering them as problems. Each story was larger than its presenting complaint. Some days she left the clinic in tears.
Through Doctors Without Borders she worked in a Chinese farming community where whole middle generations were sick or dying — where medicine moved slowly, collaboratively, sometimes at a family table over homegrown vegetables while the treatment plan got discussed. She wrote her husband David about it every day. She had found what she was looking for. She'd first return home to her husband in San Francisco before embarking on this path together. Or so she thought.
The Crack
When the map ran out
There was a distinct line, she had been taught, between the physician who knows and the patient who doesn't. Between well and sick. She knew which side of it she stood on. Or at least she thought she did.
What the Fifteen-Minute Appointment Couldn't Hold
The unease arrived quietly, the way most significant arrivals do. She attended a workshop on managing "difficult patients" — the presenter defining them as people who don't comply, challenge authority, keep asking for more tests or explanations. A patient who brings multiple complaints, he advised, should be told upfront: we only have time for one or two issues in fifteen minutes. She sat with her discomfort and didn't examine it too closely. This was how medicine worked. That was also how you helped people inside it.
Then a patient with persistent fatigue asked whether Cynthia could test her for "chronic mono." In conventional medicine in those years, "chronic mono" wasn't a recognized diagnosis — nor was "leaky gut," which a colleague reported hearing about in the parking lot afterward. They shared a laugh. But driving home alone, something settled in. She had done everything right, by the standard of care. Still, she writes, I felt something missing from this paradigm. What exactly, I couldn't put my finger on.
· · ·Her Own Body Begins
After her daughter Rosa was born, Cynthia noticed a flutter in her chest walking uphill one morning. She was winded just standing still. She went home, rested, and dismissed it. At the clinic, when her heart would flutter or her body would burn mid-appointment, she would take a quick break, collect herself, and move to the next patient. She couldn't come out as a patient. She was the doctor.
Then, on a Friday, the last patient of the day was a single mother of three, working two jobs. Heart palpitations, insomnia, weight loss, elevated heart rate, jumpy reflexes. "You've got all the signs of hyperthyroidism," Cynthia told her. Then a sharp pain gripped her gut. The flutter in her own chest. The muscle wasting that her husband David had pointed out in the mirror last week. I was a textbook case, too.
She ordered her own labs. Thyroid hormones sky-high. When she went to see a specialist, the moment he inserted a thermometer into her ear, something shifted:
My colleague-to-colleague confidence turned into a stark awareness of my nakedness under the thin paper gown, and I wondered how in the world I had ended up on the wrong side of the bedside.
She had, she writes, the illusion of doctorhood — I imagined my knowledge of diseases would provide an immunity against them. My patients were there, in illness, and I was here, in wellness. Or was supposed to be.
· · ·Beijing
Her numbers eventually normalized. She considered herself recovered. The following spring, feeling more herself than she had since before Rosa was born, she traveled to Beijing with her family. They climbed the Wild Wall — ancient, untouched, bricks winding through green mountains. She felt her vitality return and shouted into the open air: "I'm back to my old self!" Her parents suggested celebrating with jiaozi — Chinese dumplings.
An hour later, at the restaurant, an intense pressure shot up her spine and seized her skull. Her heart rhythm snapped and thundered. She lay across the adjacent seat and did what physicians do in extremes — ran through diagnoses, placed two fingers to her carotid artery, tried to count a pulse too fast to count. She had the distinct feeling of life becoming very thin, like paper held against light. The room tilted. She closed her eyes, certain this was the end. She was thirty-six. Rosa was two.
She woke on a gurney in a Beijing emergency room, four empty IV bags overhead. Every test unremarkable — except one. A nurse showed her a small plastic wand: one line dark pink, the other barely there. So at the moment I thought I was to die, I learned I was instead to give new life.
She returned home pregnant with her second child. The pregnancy and the years after Sonia was born were some of the most disorienting of her life — vertigo, heart surges, a sensation like undertow pulling her under, a hypersensitivity so acute that the sound of a visitor's voice felt draining. In and out of emergency rooms, discharged every time. Labs: normal. The question she had spent her career asking had nowhere left to go. This left her housebound for two years.
A Different Medicine
The decade of healing — and what it required
An Opening
The way out didn't come through another specialist. It came through her old medical school pathology textbook, pulled from the shelf while housebound with her infant daughter. She read the opening chapters and stopped. Disease, it said, begins as subtle imbalances and low-grade inflammation for years, sometimes decades, before a diagnosis can be made. There is no fixed line between well and sick. It is a continuum — dynamic, capable of moving in either direction. The model she had spent her career practicing, on herself as on her patients, was incomplete in ways she hadn't been trained to see.
The new question wasn't what is broken but why has the system broken down. That shift opened into an entirely different medicine.
· · ·The How to Get Off the Couch Experiment
She made herself the one-person clinical trial — one subject, one data point, watching carefully what changed. Researchers call this an n of 1. She moved through it methodically, the physician's instinct repurposed:
This medicine asked her to think in time horizons the standard appointment didn't allow. To ask about a patient's first decade, not just their last blood panel. To see the body not as isolated organ systems but as a conversation — between every system, simultaneously.
· · ·The Grief That Lived in the Body
And she came to the step that surprised her most. Kurt, dead since residency, had been mourned only in motion — ninety-hour weeks, a sealed shoebox on the high shelf. At a grief ritual, she burned it: photographs, letters, small objects sealed for over a decade. I cried until there was nothing left to cry. The next day her body felt lighter than it had in years.
Unprocessed grief does not disappear into the past. It lives in the body as a quiet, persistent load — registering in the nervous system as low-grade vigilance, in the immune system as chronic activation. Releasing it was medicine. This was perhaps the hardest thing the new question had made visible: that suffering carried privately doesn't stay private. It gets metabolized somewhere. And it can be metabolized outward.
· · ·A New Question
Slowly, across nearly a decade, while also having returned to clinical practice, she healed. She found that a single shift in how she opened each appointment changed everything that followed.
She began to ask, Why are you not well?
She wrote it all down — Brave New Medicine — a map for others who might need the path she'd had to find alone. Ten years of disciplined experiment, distilled into a guide. A physician who had been invisible to her own system had rebuilt herself and documented every step. That felt, at the time, like the whole story.
The Ceiling
What willpower cannot reach
As she was finishing the final pages of Brave New Medicine — ten years of root-cause healing distilled into a guide, ready to share with the world — the symptoms came back: dizziness, bone-deep fatigue, heart palpitations. The triggers had stacked all at once: toxic mold in the bathroom, her daughter's serious concussion, blood tests showing markers of a tick-borne infection, and Northern California wildfires turning the sky a dark, apocalyptic orange with daily evacuation warnings. She was back on the couch.
She had done everything right. The diet, the supplements, the gut work, the movement, the grief. The crisis arrived not despite a decade of disciplined practice but precisely at its culmination. The timing carried its own message.
The approach that had carried her through every hard thing had a ceiling she hadn't known was there. She had spent a decade reaching it. Until one day, she writes, I simply couldn't anymore.
This time, she didn't just lose her health. She lost hope. She didn't have the strength to go through another decade of this again.
Being
The medicine of flow
She had no reserves left to strategize. And for the first time in her adult life, she stopped trying to.
Zhineng Qigong
For three years she had been practicing qigong — Zhineng Qigong, an ancient Chinese lineage whose name translates to wisdom abilities: the art of cultivating life force energy in mind and body. She had practiced it the way she practiced everything else — with disciplined interest, tracking outcomes. It had helped, at that surface level. But she had never fully entered it.
Pinned to the couch, she grabbed her phone and clicked a recording at random. Her teacher's voice: Allow your mind to relax. Observe and embrace everything that's coming up. And smile — inward — toward yourself. The instruction felt absurd in the context of this crisis. She had no energy to resist. She did as he said. Something shifted. In those cave years, on her worst days, she had recited a mantra — Today is a new day — believing it was keeping her present. She later understood it had been a prayer: that today would finally be the day she was permanently healed. What happened on that couch, for the first time, was the absence of that prayer. She had surrendered into the practice, not just toward it. And through it, into something larger: the field of her teacher, of the lineage, of practitioners who had practiced this together across generations. She was not alone on that couch.
She continued the same protocols — diet, supplements, acupuncture, bodywork. But she began practicing in long stretches, because she couldn't do much else. Within months — not the decade it had taken the first time — she was recovering functions she had spent years reclaiming before.
Embodied Flow
Flow, as she uses the word, is not a psychological state reserved for peak performers. It is a physiological one — available to anyone, in any condition. Research on radical remissions pointed toward why: of the ten factors shared by people who healed against the odds, three were physical — diet, movement, supplements. The other seven were all interior: releasing suppressed emotion, quieting the mind, trusting intuition, finding meaning, cultivating love and joy, reclaiming agency, receiving support. Seven out of ten. She came to see that these seven could be addressed not one by one but at their common root — by changing the quality of the inner state itself.
She had worked on those interior dimensions during the first decade — the grief, the emotional reckoning, the slow dismantling of the competence armor. But she had done it the way she did everything: as strategy, as campaign, as something to work through and resolve. What the second crisis asked for was a different quality of engagement altogether — not effort directed inward, but the willingness to stop directing. Surrender told the body what years of disciplined practice had not fully conveyed: that the crisis was over. That it was safe. When the nervous system finally stepped out of alarm, the body's long-term repair mechanisms came forward.
The most notable difference, she writes, was the state of activated calm within me. My inner state felt naturally reordered, not tightly managed. My emotions felt lighter and less volatile. I didn't need to exert extra effort. I clearly knew which practitioners to see and when, as if life itself was guiding me.
She calls what she found embodied flow. At its center, the golden triad:
Mind empty. Heart open. Body fully inhabited.
When these align, the heart's rhythms organize into coherence, the nervous system shifts from alarm to repair, and courage arrives unbidden — jumping off a boulder into a cold lake, snorkeling with manta rays at night, revisiting places that held very difficult memories and finding healing there instead.
What this practice promises, she is careful to say, is the primary healing — what transpires within us. A healing of the relationship to oneself. A truer, fuller version of I. The physical recovery — months instead of a decade — she doesn't claim as the point. The secondary healing isn't guaranteed. If it happens, it's a bonus. Everything else is downstream, and not hers to guarantee.
· · ·Where Medicine and Faith Converged
She had left the evangelical faith of her childhood behind in college — declared herself an atheist, to her parents' considerable distress — and hadn't looked back in more than twenty years. Then, during a Pulling Qi session in the depths of the second crisis, a yearning arose from somewhere she couldn't explain: she wanted her childhood Bible — the evangelical one, from her parents' church in Austin. She read it again through the lens she had spent a decade building. The stories of Jesus feeling power leave him as he touched the leper, calming the storm — she read them now as a physician who understood and perceived energy fields. The Lord's Prayer in Aramaic vibrated in her chest like the resonance sounds of qigong. Her natal religion, she writes, enlivened her qigong practice as much as qigong enlivened her natal religion. The hell she had grown up fearing and the field she had spent years learning to inhabit were, at their root, pointing at the same thing.
The Terminator on a diner placemat, taped into a teenage diary in Austin: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. That had carried her through Kurt's death, through the night in Beijing, through the cave years, through the whole first decade. It wasn't wrong. It was just not the whole story. The medicine of flow doesn't ask what can be survived. It asks what can be inhabited.
And what can be inhabited is already here — closer than the breath, older than the question. The field doesn't need to be reached or earned. It needs only to be recognized. And it is strong — she would say — with you too.
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