Dear Dr. Yuan: Please provide a few sentences for a biography to be included in our physician profile. Market research tells us that patients research providers on hospital websites before choosing one, and they consider how personal or human you are. We encourage you to write a biography that shows your personality, values, why you practice medicine, etc.
Dear Human Resources:
The guidelines you provided rang deeply and reverberated there on and on for weeks. My most vulnerable self showed up. The affirmation of the day may as well be, “I have found my spiritual money-making home.” Please see bio below.
“Dr. Yuan specializes in caring for people with neurologic problems and has advanced training in headache disorders. She received her medical degree at University of Minnesota and completed her residency training at Washington State University, where she served as chief resident and won best resident research poster. After spending the entire ten years of her medical training like an impala running for her life with a perpetually overstimulated sympathetic nervous system, Dr. Yuan surrendered to the Universe’s call earlier this year to embark on a 4-month self-directed journey during which she confronted the fact that her meaning, purpose, and weaknesses in life turned out to be what her mother believed were her own, and what her mother’s father believed were his, although neither one of them had the opportunity or desire to figure out if those were actually theirs. Dr. Yuan has bravely held space for the inward searching of her own meaning and purpose, which is, honestly, still TBD unfolding.
This uninhibited journey has led Dr. Yuan to the one and only true-truth so far: she finds hiking alone in a deserted forest for 12 hours a day to be infinitely more resonant with her divine self than “helping others,” which she wrote was the most meaningful thing in her medical school application, because everyone kept telling her what a helpful person she was and how much they loved her for helping other, so like, how could there possibly be a more meaningful calling than that? To be fair, everyone also told her to NOT write about “helping others” in her application essay because admission officers don’t believe any 20-year-olds actually want to help anyone besides themselves. (In hindsight, what wisdom those officers hold.)
Dr. Yuan plans to continue her journey to her most enlightened self by doing the following Radical Anti-Magic Bullets that Hold Real Magic:
- Sleeping
- Resting
- Doing nothing
- Community drumming
- Minimizing ultra-processed foods
- Regulating her nervous system with breathwork, EFT (tapping), Reiki, meditation, yoga, cold plunges, EMDR, and acupressure mats.
Dr. Yuan is a new devotee to Astrology. If you’ve ever been frustrated by the limitations of Western medicine, she’d be happy to read your birth chart as part of your visit. Dr. Yuan’s own birth chart reveals she needs copious amounts of alone time. So, if patients are mindful of how much they call/message her office, they may be gifting themselves with a physician who shows up with Presence and a Regulated Nervous System, which if you ask any parent/toddler/unhappy person, they would for sure consider that to be like, they’ve “made it,” or they’ve “hacked life,” or it’s like the “one thing” they would do every day. If the anxiety of wanting her medical psychological reassurance becomes overwhelmingly uncomfortable in between visits, Dr. Yuan suggests to Just Breathe.
Dr. Yuan is synchronized with the rhythms of the natural world and would also like to achieve the “1000 Hours Outside” goal of spending 1000 hours outside. In addition to bringing your insurance information, please bring appropriate rain gear and waterproof shoes for you and your family as her clinics will be held outdoors facing eastward in the direction of the majestic Mt. Hood. Should the godly clouds of Pacific Northwest be inspired to part, most of that appointment will be dedicated to allowing intentional space to place our insulated hearts in the path of beauty. On such rare occasions, she will also open one Sunset Clinic slot starting around Golden Hour until the elusive Green Flash. She urges patients to recite the mantra “open” and embrace such unparalleled opportunities for spiritual and physical (yes, the body actually is connected to the mind and spirit despite Western medicine practicing organ medicine) healing. Picking a cold and overcast day, on the other hand, would result in the highest likelihood for patients’ self-directed questions to be answered. Such questions, however, are generally concocted by the ego (using the formal psychoanalytic definition, not the willy-nilly one ending with -tistical). It is Dr. Yuan’s philosophy that being alive means becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable, again at odds with the default expectation of Western medicine fulfilling the role of a self-soothing pacifier.
Healing is a lifelong process, not a destination, and everyone is on their own journey. Dr. Yuan is merely one of many guides patients may encounter. Whatever thoughts, feelings, and sensations bubble up during patients’ time with her, she invites them to observe each one like a curious pebble bobbing along the divine stream. And then let it go.
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Xinran Maria Xiang likes to walk in big circles on treacherous paths where her legs get really tired, or walks in a straight-ish line for hours and then turns around to walk the same line back to the exact spot where she started and then calls it a journey.