My Healing Story

How I Learned to Stop Treating Symptoms and Start Listening to the Body

I didn’t grow up in a household obsessed with health, but I didn’t grow up disconnected from it either. My early years were shaped by a traditional Korean diet: rice, fish, soups, fermented foods, and vegetables. Food was familiar, nourishing, and cultural, not moralized or feared. I ate plenty of “normal” American food too, but my body was generally resilient. I rarely got sick, missed very little school, and didn’t think much about health at all.

That changed dramatically in my late teens.

When My Body Stopped Cooperating

During my senior year of high school, I began experiencing debilitating menstrual cramps. Not discomfort — incapacitating pain. I would become freezing cold, nauseated, unable to eat or sleep, curled up with a heating pad for days at a time. Painkillers barely touched it.

When my mom took me to a doctor, I was told I was constipated.

I knew that wasn’t true.

What followed were nine years of monthly pain that disrupted school, exams, work, and even my college graduation day. I learned very quickly how normalized women’s suffering can be, and how little curiosity there often is around why symptoms exist.

The Early Clues I Didn’t Understand Yet

During college, I developed frequent digestive pain. I now understand it as the result of irregular meals, chronic stress, and overwork, but at the time, it was confusing and limiting. During my worst menstrual cycles, my digestion became so reactive that I survived on porridge alone.

Doctors offered one consistent solution: birth control pills.

But my intuition resisted. I wasn’t trying to prevent pregnancy. I wasn’t trying to silence my body. I wanted to understand it.

I didn’t know it then, but I would later learn I had severe endometriosis — something no one had investigated during those years.

Discovering That Healing Is Systems-Based

A basic nutrition course during my freshman year of college quietly changed the trajectory of my life. I became fascinated by how food affected mood, energy, digestion, and clarity, and how differently the same foods affected different people.

That curiosity led me into formal nutrition training, internships, and eventually a Master’s degree in Human Nutrition. During that time, I learned how to heal my digestion, detox heavy metals, and support my thyroid. As those systems began to stabilize, many symptoms resolved: digestive pain, fatigue, brittle nails, low energy. My menstrual pain and associated syptoms improved but they didn’t disappear entirely.

I had addressed physiology. But something was still missing.

The Missing Piece: Injury and the Body’s Memory

Years later, a colleague asked a question that stopped me cold:

“Are you sure there isn’t an injury involved? ”

At first, I couldn’t think of one. He told me I must have one. In my lower body.

Weeks later, I remembered a severe bodyboarding injury years earlier — both legs gouged deeply by coral reef, only months before my menstrual pain began. That injury had healed on the surface, but it had never been cleared from my system.

Once it was addressed, my remaining symptoms resolved.

That moment permanently changed how I understand the body. Symptoms are not isolated. The body remembers. Healing is layered.

From Personal Healing to Clinical Work

By the time I opened Healthee Life in Los Angeles in 2009, I had already seen in my own body and in clinical settings, that healing rarely happens by addressing one system at a time.

I worked with hundreds of clients dealing with hormonal imbalances, digestive disorders, autoimmune conditions, neurological symptoms, and chronic stress. Again and again, I saw the same pattern:

People were treating symptoms, sometimes very diligently,m without ever being taught how to understand their bodies as integrated systems.

I built my work around three core principles:

• Detoxify what doesn’t belong

• Nourish what’s missing

• Adapt the body to stress, injury, and environment

Not as a protocol — but as a way of listening.

Why I Don’t Believe in One-Off Healing

Over the years, I’ve become increasingly clear about this:

Healing is not something that happens in isolated appointments.

It requires education, rhythm, nervous system safety, and consistency. It requires learning how to interpret signals rather than override them. And it requires structure, not dependence. That belief has shaped how I work today: through guided programs, intentional intensives, and mentorship rather than scattered one-off sessions.

My goal has never been to make clients reliant on me. It’s to help them become fluent in their own bodies.

Where I Am Now

Today, my work focuses on helping women understand their bodies across seasons of life: from menstruation through menopause, with an emphasis on root causes, nervous system regulation, and long-term sustainability.

My story is not one of perfect healing or linear progress. It’s a story of listening.

And that’s what I aim to teach. If there’s one thing I know with certainty, it’s this:

The body is not broken. It is responding.

When we learn how to listen, healing becomes possible.