(In english, pronounce it “lôr”, like folklore.)
My education began at age five, in the rooms of Vancouver BC Children’s Hospital. I injured my right eye playing with a joycopter, causing a total hyphema — my right eye filled completely with blood.
Days later, I was diagnosed with a rare bleeding disorder, Immune Thrombocytopenia (ITP), and told this was a condition of unknown origin in which the body systematically dismantles its own repair system by destroying blood platelets. The narrative was clear: my body was a mutiny. It was fighting itself.
My occluded right eye does not see, but it maintains a sensitivity to my environment. It feels the wind on a cold winter day and the warmth of direct sunlight like exposed skin. It demanded that I take breaks from staring into the world and learn other ways of understanding. It taught me to trust the sensation of flows within my body as proof of life.
I spent my youth transiting in and out of hospitals. I became a case. I had my spleen removed, the first laparoscopy of its kind ever performed at BC Children’s Hospital. I spent a decade on daily penicillin. I sat in blue clinical care recliners, bleeding red while clear plasma fractionations made up the difference. My body was a black box, and my veins were Schrödinger’s cat. I was kept going with intravenous immunoglobulin, a product prepared from the pooled serum of thousands of unknown donors. I carried a laundry list of medications but was never offered a handout on how to live in a body that hurt.
The medical system kept me alive — and I am deeply grateful for that technology — but it treated my biology while ignoring the context.
I carried western immunology’s war mentality into adulthood. In university, I treated my fatigue as a weakness. I pushed through. I worked harder. I ignored the “No” my body was screaming, until the inevitable burnout landed me back in the hospital.
Autoimmunity is endlessly alienating when viewed solely as a pathology. I’ve learned to reject the narrative that my cells were hijacked or that my biology was in mutiny.
Autoimmunity is a recalibration, a warning. It is the body in revolt against global poisoning. I realized that if my body cannot hold its toxic blood, it is because the rivers of Terra have been poisoned. Health is not a pristine state to be achieved, a fixed identity to hold onto, or a commodity to be consumed. It is an ecology of presence. I stopped treating my body as the enemy. It is my vessel, my teacher, and my most intimate companion.
The pivot happened in 2019. A series of meetings brought me to a dance studio and the practices of Contact Improvisation and Taiji.
For the first time, I wasn’t fighting gravity; I was collaborating with it. I realized then that my “useless” blind eye was actually my first teacher of somatic awareness. It does not see light, but it feels. It registers air pressure, warmth, and the proximity of others. It taught me that we can navigate the world by sensing the shift in density rather than just scanning the surface.
I learned that only peace cures war. No amount of aggression toward your own physiology will bring you home.
In 2024, I self-published a memoir which tells the story of my childhood and young adulthood in raw prose-poetry-essay. You can learn about Auto-Immune Heresy: A Memoir, and order it here.
I write about all of this at length at autoimmunetheory.com — autoimmunity, ecology, the body, what it means to navigate a condition that doesn’t resolve.
The Practice
My work today is the vessel I wish I had been offered.
I am not interested in becoming a wellness influencer. I do not stand above anyone as an expert on how to find health. I am a practitioner who is learning the terrain by walking it, often painfully. My approach is an archaeological dig into a life that I was taught to view as a war zone. For decades, I believed my body was an enemy to be battled. It took me half a lifetime to realize that you cannot bomb a body into health.
The bodywork — tuina, craniosacral therapy, somatic education — is hands-on, structural, and slow. It takes place in Montréal and involves following the body’s own impulses in gravity until something resolves.
The Ayurvedic consultation is remote: reading your constitutional pattern, mapping imbalance, and building an approach to how you eat, sleep, move, and rest that respects the intelligence of your particular ecology. These are two registers of a single inquiry: how to inhabit a body that has been through difficult weather.
My daily practice supports the work. I practice qigong — a method of internal hygiene, a way of discovering and regulating the current of vitality that connects the body to the wider ecology. My foundational training took place at the Montreal Gongfu Research Center. My inquiry has been further shaped by the practices handed down to me by Mata Amritanandamayi Devi. Though she uses the language of Hinduism, I find each day that the teachings of Sanatana Dharma are resonant with the truths of every culture I have encountered.
Training & Affiliations
- Adjunct Director, Académie Québécoise d’Ayurveda
- Member, Association Québécoise des Thérapeutes Naturels (AQTN)
- Diploma in Tuina, Chinese Physical Culture, and Craniosacral Therapy — Montreal Gongfu Research Center
- Somatic education: My practice is continuously enriched by the Feldenkrais Method of Awareness Through Movement, the Alexander Technique, and by the framework of Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing.
- Taijiquan and Qigong — My foundational training took place at the Montreal Gongfu Research Center under Ethan Murchie. Further, my inquiry has been profoundly supported by the work and teachings of Julie Liu, Master Zhang Mingliang, Olivier Meunier, Marie-Claude Rodrigue, and Corey Hess. I primarily engage with Yang style Taijiquan, and some practices of Chen style. My main form of qigong is Zhan Zhuang. These disciplines teach me how to inhabit my body from the inside out, turning me into a student of my own whole system is relation with my wider ecology.
- Contact Improvisation — Nita Little, Andrew Harwood, and others
- Ayurvedic Practitioner (ongoing) — Académie Québécoise d’Ayurveda
