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Why this space exists

So much of what people turn to for growth, healing, and change is fragmented — and often incomplete.
Talk therapy can offer insight and understanding, but frequently leaves the body and nervous system out of the process. Somatic and embodiment practices can bring people back into sensation and feeling, but without context or meaning, those experiences can remain confusing or incomplete. Spiritual and contemplative paths can open awareness, but too often bypass emotion, history, and embodied reality altogether.
Nervous system work is now widely discussed — but is often reduced to “calming down,” rather than understood as a dynamic system capable of a full range of states, including activation, expression, connection, and depth.
Powerful experiences — through breathwork, psychedelics, or other modalities — can be genuinely transformative, but when they’re not properly held or integrated, they can leave people dysregulated, confused, or worse off than before.
Each of these approaches offers something real. None of them, alone, offers enough.
What’s missing isn’t another technique. It’s a way of bringing these domains into relationship — so that insight is embodied, sensation is understood, awareness includes history, and powerful experiences are integrated rather than left floating.

Insight & Understanding

Offers: Clarity, self-knowledge, narrative
Missing alone: Without somatic experience, things rarely shift at the level that matters

Breathwork & Peak Experiences

Offers: Glimpses of clarity, possibility, and transformation
Missing alone: Without integration, understanding, and embodiment, rarely lead to lasting change

Grief & Relational Work

Offers: Processing loss, relational repair, co-regulation
Missing alone: Without somatic experience, things rarely shift at the level that matters

Somatic & Embodiment Practice

Offers: Felt experience, presence, sensation
Missing alone: Without context and understanding, experience can remain confusing or incomplete

Spiritual & Contemplative Practice

Offers: Awareness, expanded perception, presence
Missing alone: Can bypass emotion, history, and the body entirely

Nervous System Work

Offers: Increased capacity, resilience, ability to respond rather than react
When limited to “calming down,” can create more problems than it solves

Anima was created to hold that missing middle.

A space where body, nervous system, awareness, emotion, self-understanding, and relational context are not treated as separate tracks — but as interconnected aspects of a single human experience.
Rather than asking people to adapt themselves to a method, Anima adapts the work to the person — guided by careful listening, respect for capacity, and an understanding of how different layers of experience interact.
This is not about doing more. It’s about bringing coherence to what’s already here.

Bringing the pieces together

Anima came together through years of moving across different domains of work — and noticing, again and again, what was missing when any one of them was held in isolation.

Working only at the level of insight or understanding can create clarity, but often doesn’t change how the body responds under stress. Somatic and embodiment practices can bring people back into sensation and feeling, but without context or meaning, those experiences can remain confusing or incomplete. 

Spiritual and contemplative practices can open awareness, but when they bypass emotion, history, or the body, they can leave important material untouched.

Breathwork, nervous system education, and regulation practices can be powerful, but when they’re reduced to techniques — or framed only as ways to “calm down”  — they miss the full intelligence of the nervous system and the role of integration over time.
What became clear is that no single approach works on its own, and no single doorway works for everyone.
Anima brings these threads into relationship: somatic embodiment, nervous system understanding, breath and breathing practices, bioenergetics, inquiry and self-understanding, awareness and presence, grief, and relational work.
Within Anima, this integrative approach is referred to as Somatic Self-Discovery — not as a fixed method, but as an ongoing process of learning to meet experience through the body, the nervous system, and awareness.
Rather than asking people to adapt themselves to a method, Anima adapts the work to the person — guided by careful listening, respect for capacity, and an understanding of how different layers of experience interact.
This is not about doing more. It’s about bringing coherence to what’s already here.

“ Michael created a feeling of safety

and trust for such a vulnerable process..He intuitively sensed what I was feeling and guided me gently. It feels like this is his calling and purpose.”
— Sarah Russell

“ My session with Michael came during a particularly stressful time

of transition and to be able to dive into my body and release tension and stored 
energy was amazing. Warm, comforting, and very professional.”
— Kate

“ The session was very healing in many ways.

Physically and emotionally. I learned and began to understand where some of my habits and reactions and responses stem from. This was really powerful for me.”
— DAWN

How this work is offered

So much of what people turn to for growth, healing, and change is fragmented — and often incomplete.
Right now, there are two ways to begin. The Anima Experience is a monthly live session where we work directly with nervous system states through guided experiential practice — relational, embodied, and grounded. Start with the Breath is a foundational guide to the relationship between breathing and your nervous system, with clear explanations and simple practices you can explore on your own.

Both are a genuine taste of what this work feels like in practice.

As Anima grows, this will expand into one-on-one work, virtual and in-person workshops, group programs, and immersive retreats — each held within the same principles that shape everything here: safety, pacing, consent, and respect for individual experience.

Stay connected as Anima grows.

If you want to know when new offerings become available, the best way is to be on the list.
New offerings, live sessions, and updates — delivered without noise or pressure.
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A personal invitation

Hi, I’m Michael.
I came to this work the way most people do — not through a clear calling, but through my own struggle, confusion, and an accumulating sense that what I was doing wasn’t reaching what actually needed to change.
I spent years in talk therapy that offered real understanding but never touched my body. I spent time in spiritual and contemplative communities where awareness was cultivated, but emotion, history, and embodiment were quietly set aside. I could explain my patterns clearly, name my history accurately — and still feel completely hijacked when life pressed in.
That gap mattered more to me than any insight I’d gathered.
So I went looking for what was missing.
For the better part of a decade, I went deep — into breathwork, somatic therapy, nervous system science, trauma-informed facilitation, meditation, grief work, and emotional processing. Not casually. This became the center of my life. I trained under some of the most respected teachers in these fields, logged thousands of hours in study, supervision, and my own deep personal work — and kept going.
During those same years, life pressed in hard. My wife went through a severe autoimmune crisis that turned our world upside down. I tragically lost two beloved family pets. I lost a lifelong friend. I moved my family to another country on the other side of the world. All while running a high-pressure business that never stopped demanding output.
I kept telling myself it was temporary. It wasn’t.

Eventually my body made it clear that the pace I was living at wasn’t sustainable — and wasn’t aligned with the work I was studying and practicing. Something had to change structurally, not just strategically.

What this work gave me, over time, was something I hadn’t had in a long time: steadiness.
I became less reactive under pressure. I could feel anxiety rise without immediately trying to suppress it or escape it. I started noticing my own patterns sooner — the tone in my voice, the way I shut down, the ways I tried to control outcomes. It changed how I show up as a father. More present. More patient. Less driven by urgency. Patterns and thought loops I used to think were simply part of who I am began to shift.
Nothing was inherently wrong with me. That might be the most important thing this work has taught me.

I created Anima because I’m no longer willing to keep this in the background — and because I’ve seen firsthand both how much this work can offer and how much harm can occur when it’s poorly held, rushed, or left without integration. I’ve been in rooms where intensity was mistaken for depth. I’ve seen people pushed past their capacity in the name of healing. I’ve watched one-size-fits-all methods presented as universal solutions.

What I’m most committed to now is restraint, attunement, and care.
I guide and facilitate this work not as a healer, guru, or authority — but as someone who has done significant work on himself, trained extensively across multiple disciplines, and is deeply committed to creating spaces where people can meet themselves honestly and safely. I don’t believe anyone needs to be fixed. And I don’t believe there’s a single right way through this.
What I can do is help create the conditions where people can discover for themselves what’s already present beneath habit, conditioning, and protective patterns — and learn how to live from that place in a way that’s grounded, embodied, and real.

Training, Lineage & Experience

Completed Luminous Awareness Institute 2-Year Training
Completed Dr. Gabor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry Professional Training
Advanced Facilitator — Biodynamic Breathwork & Trauma Release (BBTRS)
Oxygen Advantage Certified Practitioner
Certified Buteyko Breathing Practitioner
Certified SomaMystica Parasympathetic Breathwork Facilitator
Completed Grief Ritual Facilitation Training with Francis Weller
Completed The Field Online Facilitator Training
Certified Culture of Care Trauma-Informed Facilitator
Completed Integral Body Institute’s Healing Developmental Trauma Training
Master’s Degree: Exercise Science & Health Promotion
Certified CHEK Holistic Lifestyle Coach (HLC)
Certified Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner (FDN-P)

Accessibility, integrity, and belonging

A few things I want to say plainly.
The practices held within Anima didn’t originate in the wellness industry. Many of them have roots in indigenous traditions, ancient lineages, and communities of people who developed this knowledge over generations. Often the same communities that have been marginalized, exploited, or excluded from the spaces that now profit from their wisdom.
Where I can name sources and honor lineage, I will. Where I have blind spots, I want to be corrected. This is an ongoing practice, not a solved problem.
Accessibility matters here in a real way. The people who most need this kind of work are often the ones with the least financial access to it. I don’t have a perfect answer to that yet, but it shapes how I price things, how I structure offerings, and what I’m building toward.
Pay-what-you-can options, low-cost entry points, and eventually scholarships are part of how Anima is designed to grow.

This space is intended to be genuinely welcoming, not as a marketing position but as a lived commitment, to people of all sexual orientations, gender identities, races, ethnicities, cultures, and backgrounds. That includes explicit solidarity with LGBTQIA+ communities and BIPOC individuals who have historically been excluded from, harmed by, or erased within healing, spiritual, and personal growth spaces.

You belong here.
I won’t claim this space is perfect or finished. Inclusion and safety are practices that require ongoing attention, humility, and willingness to respond when something falls short. I take that responsibility seriously.