Celina Lyons, R.Ac., L.Ac. is a Registered Acupuncturist in British Columbia, and a California Licensed Acupuncturist and Clinical Herbalist, board-certified by the U.S. National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. She earned her Masters of Science in Chinese Medicine from the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in San Francisco. She is also a Registered Member of the Canadian Association of Obstetrical Oriental Medicine (CAOOM). She is also certified in Tui Na, a powerful traditional Chinese medical branch of bodywork.
She has studied and worked alongside Raven Lang O.M.D., a master acupuncturist in the field of obstetrics and women’s health, foremother to the home-birth midwifery movement in North America, as well as the great acupuncturist and herbalist, Robert Lavine, O.M.D in Berkeley.
Besides her own private practice, she is a professor at Pacific Rim College in Victoria B.C. and a health educator. She has had other work experiences that have enriched her practice and her life…like interning with Survivors International in Oakland, California using Acupuncture to treat a population of refugees and immigrants who had survived torture and/or war trauma in their home countries, working with acupuncture to help rehabilitate stroke patients on the stroke ward at The California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco and volunteering as a Chinese medical practitioner at the Charlotte Maxwell Complementary Clinic, a non-profit clinic in Oakland California that offers free complementary and alternative medical treatments for underserved women with cancer.
Celina practices medicine with a joy that is grounded in great personal respect for Chinese Medicine and is informed by her over twenty years of study and practice in the world of holistic medicine.
FOCUS: She is a general practitioner with a specialty in women’s health and paediatrics, including the treatment of fertility, pregnancy, postpartum care and the wellness care and treatment of the many common childhood illnesses that pertain to children and their growth.
HISTORY: Celina was fortunate to grow up as a child with Chinese Medicine as a regular part of her family’s health care. Visits to the family herbalist were just as common as visits to the regular family doctor; so Chinese medicine has always been a valid and valued form of medicine in her life. She also grew up with a mother who was and still is a practicing midwife, and in this way got to be a close observer of pregnancy, and of childbirth and newborns. Celina has always felt that health and healing were her work. Eventually, it became clear that Chinese Medicine encompassed the most of what she loved in one medicine; consideration for the whole person, working with needles, with touch, through conversation, teaching, listening, observing…She loves that body and mind and spirit are more than just equally valued in Traditional Chinese Medicine, they are seen as inseparable expressions of a whole human life.
In her life before Chinese Medicine, she studied horticulture, taught children and milked goats in the Santa Cruz mountains, earned her undergraduate degree in Anthropology, from San Francisco State University, had many adventures travelling far and wide, lived in Spain and in Italy and came back speaking their languages.
One of her greatest teachers has been the experience of becoming a mother. The journey through pregnancy, childbirth, and raising her daughter has changed her in many wonderful ways and led to her specializations in women’s health, obstetrics and paediatrics. She currently lives with her daughter Solange and has her practice in Victoria, British Columbia, living near the sea at the tip of Vancouver Island…where it is beautiful and rains hard and often.