Abigail Elizabeth McClam’s passion for holistic health and mindfulness came from her lifelong experience with chronic pain.

As a child, she underwent multiple surgeries to repair damage to her hip, caused by an infection contracted shortly after birth. Growing up, she had over a dozen complex surgeries. Her experience with medicalized, emotional, and physical trauma due to surgery and chronic pain has been what she embraces as transformational.

After completing undergraduate studies at Elon University in Human Services (with an emphasis in Social Work), she went into Holistic Health Care.

In college Abigail was often overwhelmed by chronic leg pain. She worked, as a result, with top medical practitioners at Duke University Pain Clinic. However, she was unable to find the relief she hoped to feel from Western Medicine. Around the same time, in a medical anthropology course at Elon, Abigail learned about traditional methods of healing pain with acupuncture and meditation, as well as with other global perspectives. She could not get enough: meditation, mindfulness, and yoga were the start of a new path to understanding and living with pain. Abigail began to realize that being in pain was more than a physical symptom of her medical history; but instead was also a combination of mental, emotional, and spiritual struggles and sufferings. She now believes more than ever that her experience of chronic pain led to the awakening of her heart as a healer.

After graduation, Abigail moved to Asheville, NC where she focused on her personal healing – with regular acupuncture, massage, diet changes, exercise, and deep-needed rest. With this, she was able to stop taking pain medications, which she had depended on since her youth. In the Appalachian mountains, she continued her studies of “human services,” learning massage therapy at the Center for Massage and Natural Health and Bodywork, a COMPTA accredited School in Weaverville, NC.

Since then, Abigail has been working to integrate ancient healing philosophies – to cultivate new skills for balanced living, embodiment, and self-actualization.

Abigail’s lifelong journey with chronic pain has served as a source of inspiration, heartbreak, and enlightenment. “Chronic Pain has been my greatest teacher on how to live life with instead of against pain.”