For the woman who knows exactly why she's stuck — and is still stuck anyway.
Art making. Meaning making. Belonging.
You can name your attachment style, your Enneagram number (😉7), the exact shape of your “mother wound”…and the year it happened. You probably could teach a class on all of it.
You have really been through some deep s*** in your lifetime so far, but you've knuckled down and done the work.
A. Lot. Of. Work.
And still — most mornings — something in you is bracing.
Because… your mind can only take you so far.
You can understand your patterns with total clarity and still feel your body clench the same way it always has. Knowing isn't the same as healing. It just means you get to watch yourself struggle with better vocabulary.
That gap isn't a personal failure. It's a sign you've reached the edge of what the analyzing mind can do.
Decades of managing, achieving, holding everything together hasn't just numbed the hard stuff. It's numbed the joy, too.
There's another layer of healing, and it doesn't live in your head. It lives in your hands, your breath, the part of you that still remembers how to make a mess without asking if it's good enough.
This is the Artful Embodiment Circle — a place to put the analysis down, finally, and let your body tell you what your mind has been circling for years.
Your body is made for living
For decades, you were taught that your value lives in what you produce and who you hold together. Good grades. Good career. Good mother, good daughter, good friend — endlessly capable, endlessly available.
You did the healing work the same way you did everything else: thoroughly, intelligently, on schedule. You brought your formidable mind to your own pain the way you'd bring it to a work problem — and it became one more thing to manage from the neck up.
So you've been waiting. Waiting for the kids to need you less. Waiting for work to slow down. Waiting for the ache in your chest to make sense before you let yourself sit down and make something with your hands, just because it might feel good.
You are the permission.
That permission you've been waiting for isn't coming from outside. It was never going to. This is where the Artful Embodiment Circle begins — not with another framework for your mind to master, but with a place to finally put it down.
Your body is the portal
You're not usually taught that understanding and healing aren't happening in the same place.
You don't have just one brain. You have one in your head, yes — but also one in your gut, and one wrapped around your heart, all in constant conversation with each other.
Did you know that your heart sends far more signals up to your brain than your brain sends down to it?!
Your body isn't waiting for your mind to figure things out. It's already talking. The question is whether you're in a state where you can hear it.
This is why insight has a ceiling. The freezing isn't happening in the brain that does your thinking. It's happening somewhere words alone can't reach.
When you shift your attention from narrating to sensing — the color in front of you, the weight of the brush — something happens that talking can't replicate. You stop managing the experience and start having it.
You don't need any art skill for this to work. Skill can actually get in the way — the moment you're managing how something looks, you're back in the analytical mind. This is painting like you did before anyone told you it needed to be good.
This isn't one more thing to master. There's no syllabus, no falling behind, no performance required.
The gatherings rotate through a few different doorways — pick whichever one your week needs.
Where you simply listen to what wants to move through you and let it.
Unstructured time to create alongside others. Bring paint, or pencils, a collage, your knitting, your journal, whatever you're making.
Where we play with somatic practice and learn to be in our bodies safely.
Guided meditation that lets your subconscious rewire itself slowly, with reflection afterward to help it land.
A monthly virtual spiritual practice using intuitive art: painting, sketchbooks, small opening and closing rituals, and an energetic embodiment exercise to get us moving first. The themes follow the seasons.
Available to members at a discounted rate.
If life happens, you don't lose the thread.
Where the circle lives day to day — spontaneous check-ins, someone sharing what they made, the kind of ordinary contact that turns into real friendship over time. Just a room full of women who get it.
This counts for anything you make with your hands: painting, writing, drawing, knitting, crochet, collage, music, even dance. Be embodied when you create. Be intentional.
You choose your own adventure here. Come to one thing, come to everything. There's no version of this where you're doing it wrong.
"Michelle, I realized yesterday how much the cord cutting Inner Territory Journey has helped. How little I have thought of him since. Thank you."
— R.G., Inner Territory Journey participant
The canvas starts to hold what you haven't had words for.
You stop managing your experience and start having it.
Drawing and painting engage the whole brain at once — the same channel that flow states and meditation open, minus the years of practice either usually takes to get there.
"Today the next step clicked. I have no idea what I'm doing with acrylics, yet I had an idea and decided to go for it, to play. I mixed way too much paint, made a mess of a whole stack of sketchbook pages — and the exercise of just making marks was good in itself…Art and healing take the time they take. Today was fun. I laughed more than I expected."
— S.R., painting class participantAll three brains are finally in the room together. A place that doesn't ask anything of you except that you show up as you are.
Founding-member rates are locked in for as long as you stay. The price never goes up on you.
There's no contract, no minimum commitment. If it stops serving you, you leave whenever you like. Your founding-member rate stays locked in for as long as you stay.
A few things that come with being in the Circle.
All members get a discounted rate on my workshops and courses.
A six-week live painting journey that's $297 for everyone else. Your code comes in your welcome email.
A two-hour live painting workshop on Zoom, included with your membership.
A one-on-one session with me, usually $197. We listen to what your body has to say about what you're carrying, so you can feel for yourself what body-centered coaching is like.
You don't need any art skill for this to work — skill can actually get in the way. This is painting like you did before anyone told you it needed to be good.
All classes are recorded, so if life happens, you don't lose the thread.
Monthly live gatherings, plus whatever time you want to spend creating on your own. There's no syllabus, no falling behind, no performance required.
Yes — anytime, no questions. No contract, no minimum commitment.
I've spent my whole adult life working with groups — teaching, facilitating, coaching — and the body's wisdom has been the thread running through all of it. I'm a yoga teacher and poet, and the painting came much later, after my neurosurgery, when I finally sat down with a brush and listened.
Along the way I trained in body-centered coaching, then in Leslie Huddart's Subtle Body Method™ through the Body Wisdom Academy, then as a facilitator of Paint From Your Soul™ with Michelle Baker, and most recently in guiding Inner Territory Journeys with Stephanie Greene. I also bring years of trauma-informed work with neurodiverse youth as an educational therapist, and a deeply personal education as an adoptive parent.
But the method that became Artful Embodiment Circle wasn't born in a training. It came the first time I sat alone with a canvas and noticed what happened — the paint just made it possible to quiet my mind and let my body wisdom speak.
My hands carry real damage from a spinal cord tumor, and they're the part of me a painter is supposed to need most. It turns out the limitation was a gift — it taught me, slowly, to find freedom from perfectionism and to let the body lead.
This is the work I was always doing. Painting just became a new portal.
— MichelleIt's a place to put something down.