Cynthia Li

The yoga class for new mothers had dissolved into full cacophony -- every baby crying at once, every mother off her mat, nursing, bouncing. Then: "All mamas, Tree Pose." Put the babies on the mat. Go still. How cold, she thought. How insensitive. But in desperation, you follow orders. The mothers went still. Within seconds, the wails subsided. Cynthia's daughter lay calm on the mat. One word entered her mind -- How? -- and faded. She was a physician. It would take two collapses and twenty years to answer it.

Today, Cynthia is an integrative medicine physician in Berkeley, California. She arrived there through her patients' worst fear: a chronic illness that standard medicine couldn't name. After her first daughter was born, Hashimoto's disease deepened into chronic fatigue syndrome that left her housebound for two years -- normal by every lab measure, invisible to the system she'd given her career to. She recovered. Then in 2017, she collapsed again. Her 2026 book, The Medicine of Flow, maps what she found there.

She grew up in Texas, the sensitive daughter of Chinese immigrant parents who had fled war. A pre-dawn morgue visit in medical school settled it: "To become a doctor wasn't a choice for me. It was a calling." After training at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, she took that calling to the margins -- HIV/AIDS clinics, a free clinic for refugees and people experiencing homelessness, Doctors Without Borders in rural China.

She had spent her career skeptical of conditions like these -- unmeasurable, therefore not quite real. Now she was living inside one. What followed was a decade of rigorous recovery: functional medicine, gut healing, treating hidden infections, and practices that reached what protocols could not. She returned to practice asking a different question: not what is wrong, but why. She wrote it as Brave New Medicine. That felt, at the time, like the whole story.

In 2017, finishing the memoir's last page, the body gave out again -- mold in the walls, her daughter's concussion, wildfires, a tick-borne infection. "Healing was to me a strategic campaign that happened by skillful calculation and sheer force of will," she would write. Competence has a ceiling. This time, she surrendered. She was well within months -- where the first recovery had taken ten years. Of the ten radical remission factors, seven are interior -- not the protocol, but the quality of the inner state. That discovery became The Medicine of Flow.

She is a member of the American Board of Internal Medicine and the Institute for Functional Medicine, and teaches at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times and Psychology Today. Her memoir was praised by Pulitzer Prize-winning physician Siddhartha Mukherjee as writing that "cuts like a knife"; Mark Hyman, MD, writes of her follow-up that Cynthia "doesn't offer another protocol -- she offers a portal."

She practices Wisdom Healing Qigong daily, tends 50,000 honeybees in her backyard, and plays piano and ukulele. "What the medicine of flow doesn't promise," she writes, "is how healing will manifest. What it does promise: the primary healing -- what transpires within." Join us in conversation with this physician-healer who discovered that the body's deepest medicine was never outside the skin.

In Conversation With

Interviewer Michael Lerner Founder of Commonweal, pioneer in integrative cancer healing, and Cynthia's longtime mentor

Host Rahul Brown Long-time Awakin calls volunteer, serial-entrepreneur and film-maker.