Mud, Medicine, and Mary Janes: A Story of Healing

My first living memory of Western medicine came after an unfortunate spill from the monkey bars in kindergarten. I was, admittedly, not wearing the right shoes—a darling pair of Mary Janes that were much better suited to tea parties than playground acrobatics. I’d never monkey-barred before, but my friends encouraged me to try. And so, with tiny palms gripping the cold metal, I made my way across, heart pounding, the thrill of three feet of empty space beneath me. I was one bar away from triumph when my hand slipped.

I landed hard, and a sharp, shooting pain spread from my left ankle. My mom picked me up from school and rushed me to the doctor’s office, where I sat on a paper-covered table, wincing. A man in a white coat came in and asked me to point to where it hurt. But everything hurt. My whole ankle was swollen and hot, and I had been crying too hard to have any sense of precision. Still, he calmly asked me to stop crying so I could help him get a really good x-ray. At seven, this logic baffled me. I couldn’t understand how a good picture was going to change the fact that it hurt like hell.

They wrapped me in a heavy lead vest “for protection” and assured me the x-ray was safe, though I quietly wondered if I was about to be zapped into oblivion. No bones were broken, they said. They wrapped my ankle tight, gave me some crutches, and sent me home to heal.

It was decent care by Western standards, I suppose. But something about the whole experience—being expected to name my pain clearly, quickly, and quietly—never sat right with me.

Even so, not all of my experiences with Western medicine felt disconnected. I have other memories—softer ones—of visits to my pediatrician. He was an older man with kind eyes and a patient presence. He took his time. He looked into my eyes, ears, and nose with curiosity instead of urgency. He listened to my breath through his stethoscope, pressing it gently against my back in a thoughtful pattern. He tapped my knees with a rubber mallet and watched my legs jump, as if confirming that all my inner workings were awake and responsive. His care transcended these visits beyond what may typically occur in a routine check-up.

That kind of presence left a deep impression. Even as I found my way into Chinese medicine, it shaped the practitioner I wanted to become—someone who listens carefully, who notices the quiet details, and who offers care that doesn’t rush or reduce.

When I played doctor as a kid, there were no white coats, clipboards, or sterile exam rooms. My “clinic” was the backyard. My tools were found in the dirt and trees: leaves, bark, flowers, and bits of sticky pine sap that I was sure could heal anything. I’d mix mud into salves and pretend to treat imagined wounds, fully convinced that nature had everything I needed. We’d dig clay from lake beaches and smear it on our skin, not because we were told to, but because it felt good—cooling, earthy, and oddly soothing.

Without knowing it, I was already living two core principles that now guide me in my practice of Chinese medicine. The first is wu wei—often translated as “non-doing” or “effortless action.” It doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means not forcing. Nature doesn’t heal by pushing. It just responds. Cold enters, the body shivers. Heat rises, sweat cools. The body knows how to find its way back. As a child, I didn’t need to be taught that pressing cool earth into sun kissed shoulders brought relief. I just listened to what felt right. That, in itself, was a kind of medicine.

The second principle is balance. Chinese medicine calls it yin and yang—opposites that are always in relationship, always shifting toward harmony. Even my tumble from the monkey bars held a lesson in this: joy and pain, movement and stillness, risk and recovery. I’ve come to see that health isn’t about staying perfectly on one side of anything. It’s about learning to move with the rhythm of change. 

Those early games of make-believe medicine may not have been clinical, but they were deeply intuitive. They taught me to observe, to trust my senses, and to believe that healing is not always something we chase—it’s often something we return to.