Hi, I’m ASHLEY ABBS
Acupuncturist. Artist. Author.
Earth & Water type.
I work at the intersection of ancient wisdom, art, and twenty years of clinical practice to help women understand who they are and what they need. So they can ask for it, choose it, and live it without apology.
I KNOW WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO HAVE A GOOD LIFE THAT DOESN’T QUITE FEEL LIKE YOURS
For most of my career I sat across from women who were doing everything right. Building careers, raising children, maintaining relationships, holding everything together. And quietly wondering if this was all there was.
I know that feeling personally. Not as a concept. As a lived experience.
I left a life of competitive skating without grieving the identity I was setting down. I chose a career that was the middle road between what I wanted and what seemed sensible. I built a practice, wrote a book, became a mother and still found myself, in the quiet moments, asking the same question my patients were asking.
Is this it?
It wasn't until I stopped treating the Five Elements as a clinical framework and started living them as a personal one that something shifted. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But I could finally see my own patterns. I could name what I needed instead of just feeling the absence of it. And when I could name it, I could make different choices.
That is what I want to give you.
THE WORK I DO LIVES AT THE INTERSECTION OF THREE THINGS.
TWENTY YEARS OF CLINICAL PRACTICE
I’m a Registered Doctor of Acupuncture with the College of Acupuncturists of Alberta. I have spent over two decades sitting with women through fertility challenges, pregnancy, postpartum, hormonal shifts, loss, midlife transition, and the quiet crisis of a life that looks fine from the outside but feels somehow incomplete on the inside. The Five Elements have been my clinical lens for all of it.
THE FIVE ELEMENTS AS A LIVING FRAMEWORK
In 2021 I published 5 Element Alchemy — a book that maps the ancient Five Element framework onto the specific areas of your life: your relationships, your creative life, your self care, your work, and your soul's mandate. It is the map I wish someone had handed me twenty years ago. Everything I teach online — the masterclasses, the Elemental Ritual, the quiz — is rooted in this same framework.
ART AS MEDICINE
I am a pastel artist whose work is rooted in the seasons and the elements. I came back to painting after a period of significant loss and discovered that making art did something nothing else could. It moved what needed to move and gave form to what language couldn't reach. I make art the way I make everything else. From a felt sense of what is true right now, in this season, for this woman.
THE TURNING POINT
The week my book came out, I lost my dad.
There are no words for that particular collision of arrival and grief. So I didn't try to find them. I picked up pastels instead. My father taught me how to draw. Making art became a way to grieve him and to stay close to him.
What I know now, having lived all of it, is that transformation rarely announces itself. It arrives in the body first. In a restlessness you can't name. A longing that doesn't make sense given everything you have.
And the elements have been my map through every season of it.
WHAT I BELIEVE
That the distance between the life you have and the life you want is rarely as vast as it feels.
Understanding yourself — your nature, your patterns, your seasons — is not a luxury. It is the foundation everything else is built on.
Art, writing, and embodied practice are not separate from healing. They are how healing actually happens.
And that one woman coming home to herself changes everyone around her.
That is why I do this work. And that is why I will keep doing it. For the woman who is looking for the same map I was.
HOW WE CAN WORK TOGETHER
"The sovereignty and calm that I feel in knowing who I am and not needing to apologize for it has been EVERYTHING. I am so much more compassionate and accepting of myself and those that I love."
Katrein R, Fire Type
MY FANCY OFFICIAL CREDENTIALS:
Registered Dr. of Acupuncture with the College of Acupuncturists of Alberta.
2003 Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from University of Calgary
2006 Diploma of Acupuncture from ACATCM
2006 Diploma of Traditional Chinese Medicine from ACATCM
2009 Clinical Excellence in Fertility Practitioner training with Randine Lewis.
2010 Fellowship with Acupuncture and TCM Board of Reproductive Medicine
2010, 2026 5 Spirits Mentorship with Lorie Dechar and Benjamin Fox
A FEW PERSONAL NOTES
I live and work in Calgary, Alberta, on Treaty 7 territory.
I’m a former competitive top 10 Canadian National Ice dancer.
I married my husband Sheldon in 2011. We welcomed our son in 2013. He is becoming his own person in ways that delight and occasionally exhaust me.
When I am not in the studio, the clinic, or at my desk I am walking in nature, skiing, or sitting quietly somewhere with a good cup of something hot.
I am an Earth and Water type. Which means I feel things deeply, give generously, and am still learning — every day — to put myself on the list.