Micaela Lauren
My own path of homecoming to the body began in an elective yoga class in college. I was a young woman only just beginning to heal from complex trauma — though I didn't know it at the time. For most of my adolescence, my body's ecology had been managed by prescription birth control, ADHD medication, and an SSRI antidepressant. Practicing yoga allowed me to access the more subtle sensations of my body, after being numb to them for so long. A revelation that led me to begin tapering off all medications & walk a path outside of institutional studies.
The floodgates opened. The unregulated wild of my body awakened — the pain & the gifts that had been inaccessible for so many years came online with momentum — and I was running amuck trying to sift through it all. I channeled my fire into environmental advocacy work, was initiated by several hard life lessons, and somehow found myself caring for children and the families raising them. I didn't plan it. The work found me, the way the most important things tend to.
For eleven years I have lived inside the labor and art of that care — not as a credential, but as the pathway that informed my own greatest healing, service, and remembrance. Along the path, my body became my guide — and I became a trauma informed yoga teacher, a dancing freedom facilitator, and — in my mother's footsteps — a bodyworker. These years of training informed my embodied understanding of how the body holds what the mind cannot yet speak, and how movement, breath, and skilled intentional touch can return us home to ourselves.
It wasn't long until my deepening relationship with my womb, cyclical rhythms, & mystical connection with the earth led me to birthwork.
In 2020, when the world paused, I was immersed in the study of an ancient and cross-cultural framework of care that has been tended across lineages for as long as women have been giving birth. I became a certified Innate Postpartum Care provider, and my maternal grandmother died as I completed that training. Grieving her & integrating the training revealed an intimacy in my relationship with life and a strength in my devotion to the thread between mother, lineage repair, and earth ecology. I completed my first Permaculture Design Certification that fall.
In 2021 I attended Whapio Diane Bartlett's last in-person Holistic Birth Doula Training. All of it — every teacher, every threshold, every initiation — sharpening my attunement to multidimensional listening. To what the body needs in order for life to thrive. To what the culture has largely forgotten but is slowly, necessarily, reclaiming.
I came to this work as a poet comes to language — not because I chose it, but because it chose me. I simply continued to show up. I am an artist, a devotee of the Great Mystery, a woman who believes that the work of tending bodies and the work of tending culture are not separate things.
As this path continues to spiral & unfold — I locate true belonging through the safety I've built with my body, through an intimate relationship with the elemental living earth, through the slow and nonlinear work of reparenting myself and healing my relationship with the Mother. Chronic pain in my spine has been one of my greatest teachers — revealing what it means to heal the pain of a lineage, and what it asks of me to walk in integrity, beauty, and reciprocity with life.
This is not work I do from a place of arrival. It is work I do from inside the spiral — alongside you.
Come as you are. I will meet you there.
