My mission is to offer holistic, personalized care that integrates Chinese Medicine and Japanese Acupuncture with modern techniques, empowering you to achieve sustainable health and vitality through the healing power of nature’s energy.
I honor the whole person, blending and integrating body, mind, and spirit.
Every treatment is tailored to your unique condition.
I continuously improve and adapt modalities, using the wisdom of tradition with modern evidence-based techniques.
We work collaboratively with you to support your wellness.
We work to address symptoms and causes for immediate and long-term health.
We offer information and tools to maintain your health and vitality on your own.
My practice is rooted in the belief that your body knows how to heal, and my role is to assist your body in removing the physical, emotional, and energetic obstacles that stand in the way. Drawing on over 20 years of clinical practice in Alameda and the East Bay, I combine the specialized Kubota family lineage of Japanese Acupuncture with the breadth of Chinese Medicine to offer care that is ancient in its wisdom and responsive to your life today.
Each person I treat brings a unique history, constitution, and circumstance. A treatment plan that works for one person may be wrong for another, this is why I take the time to listen deeply, observe carefully, and adapt to my clients’ needs.
I am also committed to care that extends beyond the treatment table. One of my greatest joys is helping patients with practical tools, acupressure points, breathing techniques, seasonal dietary shifts, simple home practices that give them agency over their health.
This practice serves the full diversity of the East Bay community: Alameda, Oakland, Berkeley, and beyond. Whether you are navigating a chronic condition, recovering from injury, supporting fertility, or simply seeking to feel more vital and alive, you are welcome here.
Numinous is a word that points toward something most of us have felt but rarely been able to name, the sense of standing at the edge of something vast, mysterious, and deeply alive. It is the feeling that arises in moments of profound stillness, in the presence of great beauty, or in the aftermath of loss. It is not comfortable, exactly. But it is real in a way that few things are.
The word comes from the Latin numen, the divine presence felt in a particular place or moment. To encounter the numinous is to encounter something larger than the thinking mind can hold. It requires a different kind of knowing. The body knows it. The breath knows it.
This is the territory that deep healing lives in.
Traditional Chinese Medicine has always understood that genuine healing is not simply the removal of symptoms. It is a journey inward, through the shadow places we have learned to avoid, through the grief and fear and contraction that the body holds long after the mind has moved on. The most profound healing happens when we are willing to meet what has been hidden, the aspects of ourselves we have pushed into darkness, and allow them to be transformed by the light of awareness.
This is not easy work. But it is the work that lasts.
At Numinous Acupuncture and Alchemy, the name is not incidental. Every treatment is an invitation to go deeper than the presenting complaint, to listen to what the body is carrying, and to support its intelligence in moving toward wholeness. Placed with precision, presence and intention, the acupuncture needle does not force anything but holds space for flow, opening and movement. It creates the conditions for the body’s own wisdom to emerge. What comes next belongs to the mystery.
Deep healing from the inside out. That is what we are here for.
"Where there is ruin, there is hope for treasure."
Rumi
"Mari was the first and only practitioner to recognize and then effectively treat my symptoms, using a wide variety of tools - acupuncture, cupping, and more."
— S.A.
