Meet your acupunks
Christina Chan, R.Ac.
Owner/Operator & Clinic Director
Christina (she/her) is a first generation, Hong Konger-Canadian originally from the Greater Toronto Area, the traditional territory of the Wendat, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Anishinaabeg and since 2005, has been a visitor on the unceded territories of the Lekwungen peoples.
She is a Community Acupuncturist, grassroots organizer-educator, martial artist, lupus survivor and high functioning spoonie. In 2006, Christina became certified as an National Acupuncture Detox Association (NADA) provider. Then completed her training as a Registered Acupuncturist at the Canadian College of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (CCAOM) in Victoria, BC in 2009.
Christina is a Balance Method practitioner, training in the system since 2010, initially with the late Dr. Richard Teh-Fu Tan, followed by Si Yuan Balance Acupuncture based in the EU and in November 2023 completed the 9 level Balance System Acupuncture certification with Gold Level certified Dr. Sonia Tan, based in Vancouver, BC. Currently, she is part of a 2 year mentorship in the 8 Extraordinary Vessels with the esteemed Dr. Yvonne Farrell.
She is also a certified Cranial Sacral Therapist, completing her training in 2011, through the Department of Holistic Health Studies at Langara College in Vancouver, BC. In a previous lifetime, she completed a Master’s in Human Physiology in 2005, specializing in Cardiovascular Cell Biology at Queen’s University in Kingston, ON.
She has practiced her craft in a variety of unusual settings including at the Vancouver Daytox, Indigenous Wellness Week at UVic’s First People’s House, Motherfest at Mothering Touch, Fernfest, Victoria’s Annual Anarchist Book Fair and AIDS Vancouver Island to name a few.
Active in the community, she is passionate about using acupuncture as a tool for positive social change through providing outreach, increasing accessibility and bringing the practice back to its traditional roots. She continues to explore her own personal experiences as a woman of colour living with chronic illness, first gen Asian diaspora, working class organizer-educator, and founder of an unorthodox social enterprise in Lekwungen Territories, otherwise known as Victoria BC.
Jade Kulhawy-Bartlett, R.Ac.
Office Manager
Jade (she/her) is a white settler trans woman who came to Chinese medicine after 8 years of work in activist communities where she honed collectivist values and observed a shared need to address our physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies alongside liberation work for the social body.
Moving to Victoria from Alberta to start on this path, Jade started studying Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) at Pacific Rim College in the Fall of 2017 and earned her Diploma of Acupuncture in December 2020. She has been licensed to practice acupuncture in this province since December 2021.
As a student of this medicine, Jade is interested in the ways in which the Daoist philosophy underpinning Chinese medicine and classical Chinese medical texts makes space for identities, bodies, minds, and hearts unrecognizable to mainstream Western culture. Part of this exploration has led her to undertaking mentorship as a Balance System Acupuncture certified practitioner under Shīfu Dr. Sonia Tan. She completed the formal certification in April 2025, but the mentorship provided by BSA instructors is a lifelong path.
As a trans woman, during a time when the rights of trans people and other marginalized people are being offered up as sacrifices upon the altar of fear and division, Jade is particularly interested in how acupuncture and Chinese medicine can be accessed as an effective and financially accessible form of health care to fill in the gaps that many of us experience when engaging with the conventional medical system. She intends to provide a space where people can be seen and held in their unique embodied humanity while taking care of their earthly form and all its needs and intricacies.
She is also deeply passionate about the role acupuncture – and Community Acupuncture in specific – can play in helping communities and individuals to be more engaged in their own health care, and more aware of- and connected to their own bodies/hearts/minds/spirits. Jade finds the profoundly accessible, effective, and minimally invasive medicine we practice to be a radical intervention in the health of our culture as a whole.
Breanna Johnston, Diploma of Acupuncture
Breanna or Bre (she/they) lives and practices on the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples, also known today as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.
She came to acupuncture not as a calling, but as a lifeline. In her early 20s, Bre entered what would become a long and often isolating stretch of illness — years of being dismissed, misdiagnosed, and trying to survive with complex conditions no one could quite name. Like many, she had to become her own advocate: researching, navigating fragmented care, and trying to piece things together on her own.
In 2009, she was lucky enough to experience community acupuncture at Six Degrees in Toronto, where, for the first time, she felt truly seen. The care offered there was financially and physically accessible, consistent, and rooted in mutual respect — and it changed the course of her life. Acupuncture has supported her ever since, and it’s been a long-held dream to pay that care forward.
Bre is currently offering relaxation massage and craniosacral therapy at Heart & Hands while preparing to write her licensing exams in October. In addition to her Diploma of Acupuncture—which included extensive training in anatomy, physiology, and hands-on techniques, her bodywork education includes relaxation massage training with Krystel Harvey, an experienced massage instructor with over a decade of practice. She also studied Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (Level 1) with Kari Toft and Jamie Lee Mock of Healing Hands Training, both long-time practitioners and educators in trauma-sensitive, nervous system-focused bodywork. Through their guidance, Bre learned a 10-step full-body craniosacral protocol that informs her current practice. Her roots in bodywork go back to 2010, when she studied Swedish massage, and introductory Shiatsu at the Transformational Arts College in Toronto.
Her work is shaped by lived experience with chronic illness and disability, and by a long history of navigating the healthcare system from both sides — as a patient and now as a practitioner-in-training. She’s passionate about reimagining what care can feel like: accessible, collaborative, and rooted in dignity. Being part of a community clinic like Heart & Hands allows her to offer care in a setting that reflects those values. She welcomes people of all backgrounds and bodies, whether you’re managing complex, chronic conditions or seeking support for acute pain or stress.
Outside the clinic, she makes experimental music and engages in community-rooted creative work that helps her stay connected to process, collaboration, and care.
While continuing to grow in her practice, Bre brings presence and sensitivity to each session. As a lifelong student, she is committed to showing up with care, gentle curiosity, and deep respect for each person’s pace and process.
