A wilder perspective on wellness
Meet Michelle
Raised in the sagebrush against a snowy mountain backdrop, under expansive Wyoming skies, freedom is a sensory experience for me. And it’s become the driving creative force in my life. I was raised in a high-demand religion and created a sense of safety for myself by striving for the unending list of demands created by culture. I married young, got an education, and began a career, even as I was diagnosed with a frightening and poorly understood neuroendocrine-genetic disease.
That disease changed the course of my life in many ways. Perhaps the most significant is that I began questioning the meaning of a life well-lived in my early 20s.
What works?
To be fully alive—that’s what I wanted when I turned 34. I was going through a contentious divorce, raising a small child, working—balancing all the responsibilities as well as could be expected, but I was a slave to anxious thought after anxious thought, moving like ticker tape through my mind. The anxiety was powerful enough to make my life a misery. I went to work. I functioned. But I was tortured.
What works? This was my quest. I listened to Oprah Super Soul episodes on repeat. I read self-help books like it was my job. I wandered through my neighborhood staring at dew drops and palm fronds and blooms and birds, trying to experience the presence that Eckhart Tolle and Mary Oliver pointed to as cure, or at least a balm, for the walking-exposed-nerve that was me. I took classes. I took vacations. I went to therapy every week. I spoke openly about how I had turned my life into a real-time social experiment. It was liberating. It was empowering.
WILD OPEN
Wild Open is a marriage between my own lived experience and what I’ve learned in more than a decade of psychiatric practice. It’s a path you can follow to uncover your essential self. To be human is to be creative and Wild Open is designed to help you manifest your creative potential in whatever form is uniquely you.
This stuff is fun! (and it works)
Attune to your body
Learn how to listen inward by connecting with your body and your emotions to reduce anxiety and awaken to the aliveness that’s always there.
Free your mind
Identify limiting beliefs inherited from culture and free yourself from the ones that aren’t serving you. Create a personal set of values to guide you.
Expand your potential
Practice acceptance of your limitations and self-compassion to ultimately expand your ability to get around blocks and live a life authentic to you.