about folks healing

Folks Healing is a community-rooted apprenticeship program grounded in seasonal rhythm, cosmology, and embodied care. Apprentices offer a weekly community healing clinic that supports patients living in relationship — to season, body, and community.

Drawing from Chinese Medicine, Vietnamese folk traditions, and Indigenous ways of knowing, Folks Healing offers a way of learning and living medicine that is relational and accessible. Rather than focusing on techniques or credentials, the work centers on aligning with natural rhythms — learning to listen, sense, and care for self, for others, and for community.

Learning unfolds over time through shared practice, seasonal study, self-care rituals, and embodied inquiry. This learning is inseparable from the Folks Healing clinic, which offers care to the broader public and brings the medicine into lived community context. The clinic supports the mission of accessibility while allowing the program to remain connected, responsive, and accountable to the people it serves.

Folks Healing exists to support people in remembering that healing is not rare or distant, but a human birthright — something we cultivate and steward together.

a short history

Folks Healing emerged over time through clinical practice, teaching, and long-term study of cosmology and seasonal medicine. Its earliest roots lie in community acupuncture, where accessibility, shared space, and relational care shaped a way of practicing medicine grounded in everyday life. This work expanded into teaching through workshops, public education, and the founding of the Navajo Healing Project — a pivotal experience that clarified how medicine could be transmitted experientially, in community, and with cultural responsibility.

Continued study of Classical Chinese Medicine, folk traditions, astrology, and Feng Shui, alongside writing, art, and storytelling, further informed the above approaches.

Folks Healing was formed to gather these threads into a coherent, long-arc learning pathway rooted in seasonality, embodiment, and shared stewardship. Folks Healing grew from lived practice and shared study, shaped over time by the people who have devoted their lives to this work.

instructor bios

  • thuy nguyen

    FOUNDER & DIRECTOR

    Folks Healing emerged at the crossroads of many sources — shaped by years of study, practice, questioning, and return. It grew through lived experience, community care, and a persistent longing for a medicine that could be both deep and accessible.

    My early life was shaped by displacement and survival. My family came to the U.S. as refugees after the Vietnam War, carrying both resilience and unresolved trauma…

  • daniel burgess

    CO-FOUNDER, INSTRUCTOR

    Daniel’s path runs in parallel to Thuy’s, shaped by a different geography but a shared devotion. His journey took him through years of international travel and study, eventually leading to a close apprenticeship with Liu Ming of Da Yuan Circle…

  • rosie ueng

    INSTRUCTOR

    I am a child of immigrants from Taiwan, raised with a sense of disconnection from land, culture, and family. Looking back, the through-line of my life has been a deep search for belonging…

  • canyon de chelly

    INSTRUCTOR

    Canyon de Chelly was most likely born in Chinle, Arizona, beneath wide desert skies and ancient red canyon walls. As a very young pup, Canyon found herself on her own in the high desert,  learning from wind, stone, sun, and silence…

apprentice bios

  • cynthia le

    APPRENTICE

    Cyn is a playful Water Monkey who delights in discovering the quiet joys tucked into the nooks and crannies of everyday life…

  • infinity ku

    APPRENTICE

    I am of Hakka Chinese ancestry and a child of immigrant parents from Taiwan. I was born and raised on Tamien land in the Santa Clara Valley. As a young one, I felt amply disturbed and bewildered by human affairs, both within my private sphere and on the world stage…

  • jeannie pham

    APPRENTICE

    Jeannie was born and raised in California and Oahu, from parents who were refugees in the 1980’s from Vietnam. Her ancestors are from Lạng Sơn and Hà Nội, Vietnam…

  • jessie nguyen

    APPRENTICE

    Jessie is a fire cat/rabbit, raised by California landscapes and coastal waters. A child of Vietnamese refugees and one of four daughters, Jessie’s path emerges at the intersection of culture, family, and belonging…

  • ki quach

    APPRENTICE

    Ki (she/they) is a girl still learning her way. A student of birds, dance, and divination, she’s practicing to listen before she speaks…

  • leslie tran

    APPRENTICE

    My spiraling path to Folks Healing is one that includes many healing modalities and attempts at finding reconnection. For a large part of my healing journey, I felt a disconnect between what I knew and what my body was ready for…

  • mơ trần

    APPRENTICE

    Mơ descends from the ancestral lineages of the Trần, Nguyễn, and Lê families. With paternal roots in Thừa Thiên, Huế and maternal roots in Mỹ Thuỷ, Hồ Chí Minh City (Sài Gòn). Mơ’s childhood was interwoven with rice fields, wandering barefoot, climbing trees, floating down rivers, and bathing naked in the rain…

  • michelle iliev

    APPRENTICE

    Bay Area native and first generation American. I was introduced to this medicine while navigating chronic stress and childhood grief, wanting to better understand my own body and what healing means to me…