Dr. Joanny Liu
Hi, I’m Dr Joanny Liu, TCMD, BEng(Civil) My old friends wouldn’t recognize me today. I used to be so unhappy, dissatisfied, and negative. I hated my job. I was really restless and often angry.
When I talk about those days to my clients, they can hardly believe it. They deal with a very different person today and it’s all because of the lessons I was forced to learn – the hard way.
You see, I had a cancer scare. And I was ashamed to admit it for a very long time. It hurt me to my very core and I was embarrassed that I let this happen to me.
I was embarrassed because ever since my mid teens I was very much interested in keeping healthy. So prevention has always been my focus. I learned that diet was extremely important, that eating my vegetables was very important. This felt right so I didn’t have to make an effort to eat my veggies. A little later I learned that exercise was very important, so I decided this was good for me, too. So I also exercised – walking everywhere I could. I enjoyed yoga and then I took up running. I thought this was all I needed to do.
But by the time I reached my mid 30s, I was miserable and very unhappy with my job. I felt unappreciated. I felt underemployed. I felt used. I was angry and frustrated. I blamed other people for my unhappiness. It wasn’t easy to keep these feelings out my life.
So I looked for extracurricular volunteer positions to get a sense of myself and give me some meaning. I felt like a newborn baby that was struggling to get out of the tightly wrapped swaddling blanket. Maybe I was just sick and tired of being told who I am all the time, by everyone.
My husband and I are a couple of soccer nuts (football to the rest of the world). We used to live, breathe, and eat soccer and we made a lot friends and still have some close ones due to soccer. I chaired our community soccer program. My husband coached our sons and he and the boys played.
When I stepped into my role as Chair for the community soccer program, I didn’t know a thing about how to organize a sports program, but here I was. I inherited a board of half soccer nuts and half hockey nuts, but it was evident from the start that the mostly male board was about to get shaken up a bit. Actually not just a bit, a lot!
Hockey players did soccer for off-season training in those days. So there was potential for conflict, as I moved the program into a pro-soccer focus. My board was dedicated though and all we really wanted was to create a great program for the kids. In those days, the program attracted mostly boys.
When I first started, the program was quite small, mostly a spring program with a smattering of glued together older teams participating in the fall. The program was mostly recreational with maybe a handful of competitive boys teams. The kids numbered somewhere in the low 300s, maybe.
So I learned. I learned enough from attending meetings with our umbrella organization, the Calgary Minor Soccer Association (CMSA) to see how we weren’t organized like the top community teams were. So I started to make wholesale changes. I emulated the top community soccer associations.
At the time, I didn’t know that being unhappy was being out of balance. But I soon fell even more out of balance because I was burning both ends of the candle. I started to find that after our board meetings, I couldn’t fall asleep. I spent countless sleepless nights going over our plans over and over again for registration, schedules, uniforms, expenditures or think about a problem that had shown up or details of the next advertising campaign. I spent endless hours thinking about our soccer program. Everyone would come to me to make the tough decisions or ask my opinion. BUT I loved it!
Nothing pleased me more than walking the soccer fields filled with happy, laughing, and running kids. Together with the board, I restructured and re-engineered the program. It became a year round program with both recreational and competitive indoor and outdoor programs. There were full girls’ teams and full boys’ teams in competitive play. At the end of every season, we’d look at our results and talk about what we did well and what we didn’t so well, what to drop, what to keep, as well as what to re-examine.
Eventually, we caught the attention of CMSA who suddenly noticed that there was this huge hunk of kids up in NW Calgary that wasn’t there before. They were glorious days.
But the imbalance I so gladly invited into my life doing something wonderful coupled with the unhappiness and negativity of my job, caught up to me.
One day I got the bad news of a so-called Positive Pap test result – they found something abnormal. I reacted in my usual way. I got mad and I was mad as hell. I was so mad I cried all the way home, driving from work that day.
Why was I so angry? I was mad as hell at my body. How dare it betray me when I was taking care of it all the time – my diet and my exercise routine, though not 100% perfect, were pretty good compared to what so many people didn’t do.
In my rage, I somehow became introspective too. When I look back, I was finally forced to take a good close look at my life. I was finally forced to look at all the crap in my life. I was finally forced to really look at what I didn’t like. I was finally forced to look at what I really wanted out of my life.
I was the mother to two young boys and my marriage, was usually pretty good. I thought and I thought and I thought.
My cancer scare was for me and me alone to deal with. I only mentioned it to my husband. I didn’t tell anyone else. But something changed inside me that day.
And I decided, just like I did in my mid teens that I was going to take control of my health and my life again. My research about cervical cancer at the time told me it was very rare and that it occurred most often in women who had multiple sexual partners, who also had multiple sexual partners. In other words, the nurse said, it’s mainly a disease of prostitutes.
I said, “That’s not me!”
I didn’t know I had let other people tell me what to do. I didn’t know that being obedient was killing me. I didn’t know that by denying myself, I was killing myself.
So that was the day, I decided no longer to be a victim. I started to stand up to people in my life. I stood up to my boss. I stood up to my family. I began to do the things that I wanted to do. I decided to live.
And the circumstances in my life began to change. I finally had the courage to ask for the things that I wanted. I finally had the courage to fight for my right to live my life. It wasn’t easy of course, but you know, I suddenly had this calmness that I hadn’t ever had.
Eventually I would move on. I became a consultant and a contractor for a few years. There was fear and opposition to my decision. Like, what about your pension? What about benefits?
Then I decided I was leaving corporate life altogether. The signs were there again to leave that behind. I wanted to do something really meaningful. I told my boss at the time and he seemed to understand. He said, “Joanny, go out there and get that piece of paper and you do whatever you want with it!” So I went for it and that’s how I went back to school after 24 years as a Professional Engineer and became a Doctor of Chinese Medicine.
But in the ensuing years after my cancer scare, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I just had this general idea. I had become much less tolerant of the status quo. I was still having a stressful time, but it was better than before my cancer scare. So I was inconsistent. I was successful sometimes and unsuccessful other times. I didn’t know why, but I was definitely searching for answers for questions that I didn’t know I was asking!
And the outcome of that cancer scare? It was later found that it was only inflammation of the cervical cells. It scared the hell out of me, but it WOKE me up.
It would take many more years for me to finally figure it out. It started in that Fundamentals of Traditional Chinese Medicine class for me. But, you see, life will always present challenges and opportunities to learn. The point is that life continues to change and evolve so that you continue to change and evolve. When you can finally embrace this, then you can finally let go of the STRESS.
I’m just like you. It wasn’t easy for me either. I had to figure it out. I had to dig myself out of that hole that I call a cancer scare. But I did it alone. It took me almost another two decades to get to where I am today. I’ve spent a lot of time, effort, and 10s of thousands of dollars going from seminar to seminar, learning bits and pieces and finally putting it all together. You don’t have to go through that.
Today, I’m just so ready to teach you how to have a meaningful life. Because it’s in you. I know that you’ve had many challenges. I know that you’ve also suffered. I know that you’ve had some pretty awful things happen to you and you wonder why. Maybe it’s a diagnosis of a terminal illness (such as Concussion Calgary) or maybe it’s someone you love that’s been given this awful diagnosis.
Maybe you’ve gone through an awful time with your family, your kids, your spouse. An awful divorce. Maybe you’ve lost loved ones – either they’ve died or they’re estranged from you. Maybe you’ve suffered from some pretty awful abuse.
You can recover and become happy and purposeful again. If only you had the tools to get over the pain and sorrow you’ve experienced.
One day, I was looking at the face of one of my clients and I noticed how much better she looked, which coincided with how much better she felt. Then it struck me. When my clients successfully release their pain and their unhappiness, whatever the cause, their faces light up, their eyes light up, their wrinkles fade. They look younger and feel much happier. They start looking at things differently. They start looking at possibility instead of limitation!
Their faces and demeanor taught me that there is a way to reverse aging, pain, and disease. And it’s an inside job. Learn what to do about your stress before it makes you look old and feel old. And not just that, before it makes you sick. Because I worked with a lot of corporate workers, they began to ask if I could teach some of what I do to more people.
The work I do and the process I developed have proven results. In my work, there’s ALWAYS a way to end pain and misery. I start with the end result, the one that you want. That’s what you and I focus on. In end you get what you want if you follow the PROCESS of Calgary Chinese medicine.
So let me save you lots of time and heartache. Let’s tone down and even eliminate the stress in your life. Because that’s going to determine what you look like and feel like right now and in the future. It’s going to determine how you perform everyday, whether it’s in your career, at home, and your finances. Because there’s a universal truth: How you do one thing is how you do everything! It’s already happening right now.
Be well. Be happy. Be YOU!
Cheers, Dr. Joanny, TCMD (Doctor of Chinese Medicine), BEng(Civil)
