Above photo of Dmitri and Kendra taken by Tiffany Barfield at the Cascade Raptor Center in Eugene, Oregon.

You belong here.

An earth-honoring worldview includes us in its expression of inherent wholeness, despite our fears, imperfections, or insecurities, despite all the ways we might try to keep ourselves separate and outside of its naturalness. Here the deep ecology of our bodies — the soil, wind, water, and spark — reminds us that we are nature embodied in human form. 

As an acupuncturist and herbalist, I uphold a sacred container in which people are able to express and explore all of the layers of their lives: their bodies’ wise teachings, their heartaches, their celebrations, their soul’s longings, and the things they never tell other people. 

The voice of our bodies reminds us that we can not close to heal. Like serpentine rivers, ancient forests, and endless galaxies, we are governed by a natural intelligence, a wild force that is always headed towards healing when given the opportunity. 

It is only by expanding that we metabolize our unwanted experiences and traumas. We do not work these things through our systems by freezing, numbing, or locking the past into our somatic memory. It is by opening ourselves further, by coaxing, loving, and nurturing these closed down places that we find the best of a life we have not yet lived. 

Kendra Ward, LAc., MAOM, (she/her) is a traditional East Asian medicine practitioner and herbalist. Her primary teachers are the land and kin where she lives, her life-long meditation and spiritual practices, and the complex, honest, radiant human beings she has been fortunate to hold sacred space for in her healing practice. 

Kendra’s first steps onto a path of health and spirituality began in 1998 when she completed the School for International Trainings’ Tibetan Studies Program in Tibet, Nepal, and India. She then went on to receive her bachelor’s degree from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and master’s degree in acupuncture from the New England School of Acupuncture in Boston. From 2003 to 2020, she co-owned the Whole Family Wellness Center in Portland, Oregon.

In addition to being a diplomate of Chinese herbology, Kendra has advanced training in aroma acupoint therapy, therapeutic essential oils, flower essences, and various bodywork modalities. She has also studied advanced energy mastery, shamanic journeying, practical animism, and ancestral healing with contemporary shamanic practitioners, Christina Pratt and Sandra Ingerman, and ritualist educator, Dr. Daniel Foor. 

When she is not in the clinic, Kendra is the host of the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain podcast, a gathering place for conversations about ecological embodiment and finding intimacy with the land and beings where we live. These explorations seek creative, disruptive ways of living beyond our human-centric tendencies, all the while making wide space for a new/old earth-honoring culture to re-emerge.