Hi, I’m Michaela.

I grew up loved.

I grew up provided for.

And I grew up unable to stay in my own body.

From a young age, I was shaped by a humanitarian mother, working internationally on human rights, and a public servant father, working locally to provide housing and resources for those without. Suffering far from my reality always felt inextricably close to home. I felt alien among kids comparing sticker books. I felt at home making children laugh whose language I didn't speak. I felt empty watching Full House, and full hearing stories of activists who risked everything to expose the abuses of those in power.

This disconnect weighed on me. I felt undeserving of my life and privilege. My loneliness in my community made me feel ungrateful. Ashamed of my struggles, I masked and hid them. To others, I seemed outgoing and cheerful, but I felt like a fraud, living a lie. I judged myself instead of allowing myself to truly feel, and that decision cost me nearly everything.

What you don't express doesn't simply disappear — it locks into the body and disrupts the nervous system, keeping you stuck in fight-or-flight. It makes the ordinary feel dangerous and the dangerous feel ordinary. Between traumatic experiences that happened around me, situations I ended up in because my nervous system couldn't differentiate between what's dangerous and what's ordinary, and a habit of burying my emotions and truth, I developed what's clinically diagnosed as "extremely severe" post-traumatic stress disorder.

Before I found treatment, and worked through the main contributing traumas — the sudden death of a loved one and a history of sexual assault I carried in silence — I existed somewhere between suicidal and numb. I was dissociated, moving through my life as if switching avatars in someone else's game. My body began to shut down without my permission, collapsing into non-epileptic seizures, as if it had decided that if I wouldn't stop, it would stop for me.

A near-lethal suicide attempt marked a turning point. It was then that I discovered what saved me: slowly, carefully, incrementally feeling the emotions I had spent my entire life running from. After years of being frustrated by therapists telling me it gets better and to breathe deeply, I learned that the way out of suffering was through feeling, not through analysis or breathwork alone. This treatment allowed me to reclaim my life.

While I still take medication and experience anxiety and depression, I have not been suicidal in the same way I was between the ages of 8 and 18. The knowledge that I am alive today because I accessed resources most people are denied gave me a mission.

A supplemental realm of purpose unfurled when another one of my closest loved ones died suddenly. In the midst of that grief, something unexpected happened: I was cracked open to a dimension of love and faith I didn't know existed within me. I found Spirit — not as a concept, but as a lived experience. I learned that energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed, and that the heart translates energy as its own intelligence.

Through this journey, I came to believe that we are spirits having a human experience, each carrying something the world needs that no one else can offer. When we choose to follow our hearts — even when it terrifies us — we become forces that uplift everything we touch.

Mental health resources gave me survival. Spirituality gave me devotion. Yet something remained locked inside my body — a wildness, a freedom, a fire I could sense but could not reach. I had worked on my mind and spirit, but my body and I were still strangers.

The first time I experienced the Somatic Activated Healing Method, that fire ignited. The combination of breathwork, movement, ecstatic dance, and positive affirmation allowed me to not just think or feel my way into transformation, but to move in new ways. I began to feel at one with my body for the first time in my life. And now, instead of needing to overthink my way into safety, I can trust the wisdom of my body — living more present, spontaneously, creatively, expressively, and passionately.

I am able to live fully, unapologetically alive.

It is my honor to share what made a full life possible, because for many years, I didn’t believe it was.

These tools exist. They work. They should be accessible. 

That is why I'm here.