Somewhere along the way, most of us absorbed a story about our bodies. For me it started when I was little, how my size was unreliable, or that I wasn’t as coordinated during team sports or how I preferred quiet time to process. And as I grew older, I began to think my hair wasn’t as pretty and long enough or how my skin was too freckled. Then I became a teenager and everything became inconvenient, humiliating to discuss or not enough in society’s eyes. That my aching growing pains, my irregular cycles, or even my anxiety or fatigue were simply normal for someone my age.
As an adult, I started to navigate the harrowing inconsistencies of fertility, family planning and ultimately pregnancy and childbirth, and it was then that the story about my body expanded into chapters of mysterious vacuums of what was a confirmed normal symptom in biomedical versus evidence of something fundamentally broken.
Now as a women in my age of the matriarch and menopause, I am able to synthesize all the input within and without me, into an embodied presence. So thanks to my TCM education and acupuncture training, I have learned how to see and understand my body through my own lived experience with a much kinder script and personal quantifiable predictions.
I want to offer you that same understanding of dialogue and differentiation, to offer a new way of seeing your body, more so as a messenger showing us the issue with a certain kink in the narrative.
The Body as Messenger
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, symptoms are not malfunctions, they are communications and signs of systems that need rebalancing. A disrupted cycle is our body is signalling where something in our system — the flow of Qi, the fullness of our blood or the balance of Yin and Yang, needs attention and restoration.
Pain is not a punishment. Fatigue is not a sign of weakness. And let’s remember also how our lives are cyclical, just like the seasons in the sky and our lives walking the earth to contend with. Time is adaptable but our space also holds a power to hold us steady. Health the therefore is also about adapting to the changes around us with grace, understanding and bold action.
These along with other symptoms are invitations to a deeper reframe, to understand your body not as demanding more from you, but rather redirecting your focus asking that you matter in a more profound and meaningful way. We learn to stop fighting our bodies signs as decoys and start listening to them as lighthouses. We move from adversarial and conflicting to functionally collaborative and healing.
When we learn to see how we have adapted to cope and manage our symptoms, we will allow that shift where healing can begin.
What I See in My Practice
I work primarily with women navigating fertility, pregnancy, and the full arc of reproductive health. My patients who find their way to Alcove have often spent years being told their labs are normal, or that what they’re experiencing is just stress, and what they haven’t always been offered is someone who will sit with them, listen to the whole story, take their pulse in the TCM sense — literally and figuratively — and help them understand what their body is actually asking for.
That’s what I’m here to do.
Precision and Presence, Together
My approach combines clinical precision with something that doesn’t always get named in a healthcare context: genuine human presence. Every treatment at Alcove begins with a thorough intake — not just your symptoms, but your sleep, your digestion, your emotional landscape, your history. Because in TCM, everything is connected. The picture is always larger than the chief complaint.
Acupuncture works by restoring flow — of Qi, of blood, of information between systems. When flow is restored, the body’s own intelligence comes online. It knows how to regulate. It knows how to heal. It has always known.
My role is to support that process, not override it.
An Invitation
If you’ve been carrying a story about your body being broken, I want you to know: that story was never yours to carry. It was handed to you — by a system that measures health in narrow terms, by a culture that has long been at odds with the cyclical, feeling, knowing female body.
There is another way. One that honours the intelligence already present in you.
Alcove Acupuncture is a space built for exactly that — for women who are ready to stop fighting themselves and start working with what’s already there.
If that resonates, I’d love to meet you.
Book a consultation at: www.alcoveacupuncture.ca
Alcove Acupuncture | 3195 Granville St, Suite 210, Vancouver | South Granville
Tessa Neilson
Contact Me