A Journey Through Healing: From Yoga to Calgary Acupuncture

It still feels a little surreal to write this, but here I am—Dr. Sabina, Doctor of Acupuncture. Those words carry years of study, dedication, and transformation. They carry voices of my teachers, support of my community and quiet strength that grew through both joy and loss.

My path didn’t begin in a clinic, but on a yoga mat, more than a decade ago in Edinburgh. Teaching yoga opened a doorway into the healing world—one that led me through classrooms, countries, and deep inner shifts. When life brought me to Calgary, it brought profound grief, followed by rebirth, motherhood, and wisdom only experience can give.

This blog is a place to share that journey more fully. The intersections are of yoga and acupuncture, Eastern medicine and modern life, grief and growth. I’ll write about women’s health, the seasons of our cycles, and the small, embodied ways we can come home. I hope what you read here offers something meaningful for your own path of healing.

From Yoga to Acupuncture: A Path of Connection

My journey into healing began long before I placed my first acupuncture needle. It started with the rhythm of breath and movement, the quiet wisdom that unfolds when the body becomes a teacher. I began teaching yoga in Edinburgh over a decade ago. Those early classes were about alignment and strength, but what kept drawing me in was something less visible. The energy that shifted beneath the surface, the calm after savasana, the way emotional pain could dissolve through mindful movement.

When I later moved to London to teach full-time, yoga became my work and my study of the human experience. Training in Forrest and Yin yoga gave me a language for understanding how the mind and body hold stories—tension, emotion, resilience—and how presence can transform pain into release. Those teachings became the foundation of everything I now practice and share.

Years later, as I began studying acupuncture, it felt like coming home to the same principles through a different doorway. Traditional Chinese Medicine deepened what yoga had already shown me.Our energy—our Qi—is always in communication with our emotions, environment, and spirit. Where yoga invites awareness through breath and movement, acupuncture invites it through stillness, helping the body remember its own rhythm of balance.

Both practices, at their heart, are about connection. Between systems in the body, between practitioner and patient, and between each of us and the natural cycles we move through. This understanding continues to guide everything I do. I blend ancient wisdom with modern life, and meeting people wherever they are on their healing path.

A Move Across Continents and Into Motherhood

In 2021, love called me across the Atlantic. My Canadian soulmate and I arrived in Calgary mid-winter—pregnant, excited, and ready to plant roots in this wide-open city of mountains and endless sky. Snow crunched underfoot as we envisioned our new life: family walks in Bridgeland, a home filled with baby laughter, and me stepping into motherhood with all the joy I’d carried from Edinburgh and London.

But joy turned to unimaginable heartbreak when we lost our son after birth. The emptiness that followed was a heavy winter of its own. One where social media faded, words failed, and the world felt too bright, too loud. I stepped fully into grief, letting it reshape me in the silence.

In that vast quiet, the decision to study acupuncture emerged—not as a distraction, but as a lifeline. Enrolling at Calgary College of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture became my way forward. Each class and each clinic shift a small anchor pulling me through the darkness, needle by needle, meridian by meridian. What began as survival revealed my body’s profound capacity to hold loss and still seek balance.

Two Pregnancies, Infinite Lessons

Today I’m a mom to a beautiful daughter, born in my second year of studies—she was there for it all, quietly listening as her mum evolved through the acupuncture journey. Those classes became our shared rhythm: her tiny presence in my belly, my hands learning points while celebrating her milestones, all shadowed by the fear of loss still etched in my body.

Pregnancy number two brought both challenge and joy—hormones shifting, body adapting, yet I carried on with barely any time off. There was an internal drive, perhaps divine intervention, that fuelled my perseverance: showing up for clinics, absorbing TCM wisdom on fertility and postpartum recovery, even as exhaustion pulled at me. Each needle placed felt like defiance against fear, a reclaiming of resilience.

These two profoundly different pregnancies became my deepest teachers, illuminating the body’s capacity for renewal amid uncertainty. They infused my studies with lived compassion, preparing me to support other women through their own cycles of conception, carrying, birth, and beyond.

Holding Space Through Women’s Seasons

These experiences—yoga’s breath, acupuncture’s precision, grief’s depth, motherhood’s miracle—converge in my work today. As Dr. Sabina, I hold space for women through every season: the ebb of painful periods and PMS, the hope of conception and fertility, the sacred holding of pregnancy and labour prep, the tender rebuild of postpartum, and the wise transition of perimenopause and beyond.

In clinic, I work with the natural rhythms of your body—harmonizing treatments to your menstrual phases, supporting ovulation through kidney and spleen nourishment, easing cramps by moving stagnant energy. For fertility support, we integrate ear acupuncture and herbal wisdom. In menopause, we restore calm through heart and kidney balance.

Each session honors your unique story, blending Traditional Chinese Medicine diagnostics with the empathy only lived experience can teach.

Your Healing Path Has a Companion

If you’re navigating these chapters in Calgary—know that I am at Encompass Sports Therapy in Bridgeland —and you’re welcome here. Let’s meet your body where it is, gently guiding it home to balance.

I invite you to book a session or reach out with questions. Your journey matters, and you don’t have to walk it alone.

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