Hi. I’m Michele. And I am here to help. To show you the ways to have real happiness and contentment in your life. To have optimal mental health and well-being. To help you find your truth, and fulfill your life purpose. To do what you came here to do. And ultimately, to live in the abundance we are all meant to have.
At its core, this program is about supreme well-being. Ultimate mental health, spiritual health, emotional health, even relational health. Because once you achieve this high level of well-being, once you clear away all of the obstacles in your way, your purpose and your potential become clear. You have to clear out the channels first so you can understand what is meant for you.
I was put here, on this earth in this time, to do this work of helping people heal so they can find and follow their own truth. My job here on earth is to bring others to their path. And ultimately, to help them reach a state of complete internal alignment so that people can fulfill their own full potential. Because the more people we have following their path and fulfilling their life potential, the more beautiful this world becomes for us all in this generation and future ones.
I’m here to teach this guidance. But before I could teach it, I had to learn it.
The main part of the story I have to tell started a couple of decades ago in a small mountain village in southern Europe. It’s an extremely violent culture. It has a long history of cultural violence, and sooner or later, everyone gets hit, or worse. It’s the kind of place where people won’t help you if you scream for your life because they don’t want your attackers coming after them for helping you. So if you get into trouble, you are really in trouble.
As a young adult, I moved to this place by myself. I felt pulled to this place in a way I hadn’t experienced before. For the first time in my life, I sensed that there was a source larger than me guiding my life and experiences. The divine made sure everything fell into place to smooth my way. I got a job teaching at the local public university. It was a highly coveted position as a state job in a culture of extremely high unemployment. And I later found out that in this land of nepotism, that position was earmarked for someone else.
I mentioned it was a violent culture, right? So yes, naturally I got hit a time or two. But that wasn’t the worst of it. I had broken up with this guy I’d been dating, and that did not go well. He literally wanted me dead, and literally tried to make that happen on more than one occasion. There was an incident with a knife, after I’d had an out-of-body experience while he was beating the crap out of me. There was an incident with a gun, where I was stuck in a room across from him and he showed me there was just one bullet in the chamber, and he was drunk. I knew that if I tried to leave, I wouldn’t make it. There was a time when I had to run to save myself from his hands around my throat, and another time I had to hide for my life. He was mad because I started dating someone else and in that culture, that could be a death-penalty-level crime. Once again, I am here by the grace of the divine.
After one year in this culture, still with the boyfriend who it turns out was one of my greatest life teachers because he raked me over the coals so badly, and with the extreme stress of the first guy still very much after me and doing everything imaginable to get rid of me, I was terribly beaten down psychologically. I no longer had the sense to appropriately defend myself because the distortions in this culture were so thick and so deep, I no longer knew what was right or wrong. I was suicidal, and was unable to muster the strength necessary to save myself.
At that time, I had a sister who was having some problems of her own. Not seeing the severity of the mess I myself was in, I invited her out to visit, intending to help her with her stuff. We ended up with her helping me flee that country, with the help of a friend of hers whose dad was in the FBI.
That wasn’t the end of it. My mental health was a disaster and I no longer had a good sense for smart choices. I brought the boyfriend to the US with me, and embarked on another long disaster of an experience. This was to last an additional six months. I was being hit and kicked regularly and often had large and deep bruises on my body. I would wince when people would hug me. I was at a very unhealthy low weight. To make matters even worse, before bringing this guy to the US with me, his father got on the phone and informed me that his son was “all yours”. “All yours”. And I knew that that meant, if anything happened to this man’s son on my watch, I would pay for it dearly. Easily with my own life, and most likely worse. So here I was being smacked around regularly, and could not call the police for fear of what this guy’s father would do to me with his powerful reach all the way from the old country. Those kind of people have connections everywhere. So I tolerated as best I could. I would race down the road in the dark and hide sometimes, even sleeping under a fir tree with very low branches, hiding until the storm of this guy’s violent temper passed. Before long, I was no longer suicidal, but homicidal. At that point, I knew I was in trouble. I could not kill this man who was mistreating me so terribly.
So I got rid of the guy, got him on a plane. Then began the very long road to healing.
My PTSD was complex and severe. I sometimes would be so dizzy from stress that I couldn’t stand or walk. I often wanted to die. The anguish was excruciating. I desperately needed help and I knew it. Mostly, I was just aching for the pain to stop. So I went to a see a counselor, because that’s what we do in our country when we feel we need help, right? So I went to see a counselor, and when she asked me why I was there, I started talking. But I had come from an extremely violent place, and the kind of societal violence I’d been immersed in had become a part of who I was. It was in how I spoke and how I carried myself. So I started talking to this psychologist, and pretty soon I see her expression change. I know the psychologists have to report anyone they consider a “danger to self or others”. That was the look I was getting. To be fair, this woman had no context for the level of internalized violence I needed to process. So I shut up, thanked her kindly, and left, shutting the door to counseling behind me. I was already a terrible mess and in desperate need of help. The last thing I needed was to be institutionalized because some counselor misjudged my situation. Therapy would not be an option.
My PTSD was bad. I expected to be shot down in the grocery store. The rounding of each aisle brought fresh fear as I expected to find a man with a machine gun ready and waiting for me. Every time I would start my car I expected it to blow up. I could barely have conversations with people, not surprisingly. I was aggressive, defensive, angry, anxious, and deeply deeply fearful, just getting through the day. Looking back, I certainly should have been on medication during that time. But since I couldn’t have an actual conversation with a therapist, medication was also not an option.
As luck would have it, my family also didn’t know what to do with me. So they turned their backs on me. Wrote me off. They gave me only meanness and cruelty. They kicked me even harder when I was down.
My aunt took me in. At that time, she and her teenaged daughters were dabbling in the tarot. Unsurprisingly, I explored it as well, just for fun. And as it turned out, that was my saving grace. It provided a path to personal understanding, which meant empowerment. And it was the only thing that made me feel better.
This was the beginning of my healing path. It was about 30 years ago. And I have spent every day of my life since then working on my healing. Lord knows, I had a lot of it to do!
Along the way, I dug and dug for ways to feel better. Ways to heal. Tips, tricks, techniques—I was open to all of it. And I discovered a ton!
I also went back to school at some point in there, and got a PhD in communication from University of Washington. That arduous journey triggered its own mental health episodes, but that’s another story. I learned about healthy communication and learned that there is actually a model for healthy communication and healthy relationships, and learned what that looks like. I began to understand mental health, and psychological abuse. And slowly, I pieced together and came to understand the mental health problems I needed to straighten out. I still had a lot of work to do.
As I dug more deeply, I discovered a sexual trauma from infancy. There was a lot of sexual trauma among the 8 kids of my mother’s family, and it unsurprisingly trickled down into my generation. So yes, I have an uncle who molested me as an infant, and I’ve had that to overcome too. In a way I am glad for this experience because sexual trauma is an experience unto itself. It’s different from other forms of trauma and affects you more profoundly and in different ways. It leaves different kinds of scars. I’m so pleased to understand this because it’s so prevalent in our world. And in understanding it for myself, I can help other people work through those wounds. And also, my mother was also molested as a kid, but her situation was deeply traumatic and continued for a few years. And she never actually healed from that. So it’s not a surprise that she’s easily cruel if she wants to be, even to her own child. I later understood that these were the factors that caused me to choose such a deeply violent relationship experience in the first place back in Europe. And I had to heal from all of it. But now, I’m grateful for the adult violent experiences because they helped me see how much help I actually needed, how wounded I actually was from my developmental years. Before all of that violence, I was just normal mentally unwell like everyone else. And I probably would have stayed in that stasis, getting by, like most people do, for my entire life. But the experiences of violence left me no choice. I had to heal. I had to figure it out.
My healing discoveries are plentiful, and they are tried and true. Some are old and some are newer. And they work. It IS possible to heal from most mental illness. It is possible to live rich, full, fulfilling lives where you reach your full potential. You can develop strong emotional intelligence, healthy relationships and communication, and you can find and keep inner peace, relational harmony, and happiness. All of this is entirely there for the taking. It is our birthright. The things that have happened to us don’t have to define the trajectory of our entire lives. But if you do nothing, nothing will change. The body heals itself. The mind, emotions, and spirit most definitely do not. If you want to heal the mental body, the emotional body and the spiritual body, you simply have to do the work. The work is well worth it! Baby steps, and pretty soon you look back and see that you’ve come a long way.
All of us enter adulthood with some wounds from childhood. That’s called the human experience. Those wounds compromise our mental health, making us mentally unwell. And we have those wounds until we intentionally heal them. You will find techniques for that healing in this program.
There are techniques here for everyone. If you don’t like one thing, look for something that does resonate with you or where your intuition sends you. There is a ton of material here, all broken down into short and simple points for you.