Real change comes from reconnecting with yourself, not fixing yourself.
It's one thing to understand yourself. It's another to become yourself.
Missy was thrust into meditation in 2009 when chronic pain gifted her the opportunity to look more deeply at life in an existential way.
What felt like a betrayal of the body ultimately led to the discovery that our bodies are not in the way, they are the way. With a particular interest in rebalancing the feminine and masculine energies, her work draws on ancient wisdom traditions, consciousness, movement, sound and other embodiment practices. She believes this path can be gentle and that play is essential.
Missy completed her mindfulness meditation certification with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, her coaching certification with Claire Zammit, and is a licensed psilocybin facilitator in Oregon. Drawing on multiple tools, Missy’s greatest message is that there is nothing to fix. When we return to our inherent wholeness we are free to change, connected to the wisdom of the body and the strength of the heart.
From the outside, my life looked exactly the way it was supposed to.
I was raised in Salt Lake City, in the heart of Mormonism, the middle of eleven kids in a family with a clear structure and rhythm. Life revolved around faith, service, discipline, and purpose. I knew who I was, why I was here, and what I was supposed to do.
And I followed that path.
BYU. Marriage. Family. A life that reflected everything I had been taught would bring happiness. I believed in it, I thrived in it and I built my life around it.
Yet despite all my efforts, the promise of deep happiness somehow seemed to evade me.
I felt a nagging, persistent gap between my inner world and my outer life. I moved through my days doing what I was supposed to do, but I felt disconnected from my desires, my body, and any real sense of who I was beyond the roles I was playing.
I was exhausted but couldn’t slow down, afraid of what would happen if I stepped off my life-treadmill.
So I did what I knew how to do.
I tried harder.
I became more disciplined, more devoted, more committed to getting it right. I believed that if I could just figure out the right formula, I would finally feel at ease.
But instead of relief, there was a growing exhaustion.
The questions kept churning.
There was a time in my life when I followed all the right paths, and still felt disconnected from myself.
When will this feel like enough?
When will life slow down?
When will I be happy?
Around that same time, my body began to interrupt the life I had built in a way I couldn’t ignore.
What started as foot pain developed into plantar fasciitis so severe that it stopped me in my tracks. I could hardly walk, let alone run. I had always pushed through discomfort, overriding my body in order to keep moving, achieving, performing.
And suddenly, that strategy stopped working.
My body was forcing me to stop and listen.
And when I did, a deeper question surfaced:
If I’m not who I’ve been taking myself to be… then who am I?
That question reached into everything—my identity, my faith, my understanding of what it meant to be a good person, a worthy person, a whole person.
For the first time, I began to really question the systems that had shaped my life, especially the religious framework I had grown up inside of.
One of the most intriguing threads that opened everything for me was the theology of a Heavenly Mother, a divine feminine that was acknowledged but rarely spoken of.
The silence around her confused me.
How could something so essential to our identity also be forbidden?
As I began to explore that question, it led me into something much larger. Read More…
