Hi, I’m Michelle.
I built this practice for a specific person. Someone who has followed the path they were told would make them happy and successful. Somewhere along the way, they found that they had optimized their life beautifully without ever really consulting themselves in the process.
I know that person because I was that person.
My background is in healthcare. Eight years as a Registered Nurse, then a Master of Health Administration and five years in healthcare leadership. On paper, everything made sense. Inside, I was quietly disappearing…
My Story
I found myself frustrated and increasingly disconnected, not just from my work, but from myself. I could see exactly where the system needed to change and was stopped at every turn. Again and again, I was asked to act against the values that had brought me to healthcare in the first place. Each time I complied, I abandoned myself a little more.
The hardest part was not the dysfunction of the system. It was realizing that I had spent years making decisions based on what would look impressive, responsible, and socially acceptable rather than what was actually true for me. I had optimized my life beautifully. I just hadn't consulted myself in the process.
The Crossroads
Eventually the choice was no longer avoidable: stay, keep my title, my salary, the identity I'd built, and keep abandoning myself, or leave, with no clear plan and no guarantee of what came next.
I chose to leave.
Before I did, I gave myself something I'd never allowed before: space to listen. I went on a four-day silent psilocybin retreat to sit with the question of who I actually was underneath everything I'd been performing.
What came through was not a strategy or a plan. It was something simpler and more disorienting than that.
“You keep trying to do things that look impressive, even when it means betraying your own compass. Stop trying to force outcomes. Your only job is to trust and follow what feels true.”
The Year I Stopped Forcing
What followed was more than a year without a job, a title, or a salary, the external measures of success I'd spent years chasing. I never experienced the financial panic I expected. Help arrived in unexpected ways instead. I spent that time in nature, meditation, and honest self-inquiry, learning to regulate a nervous system that had been working overtime since I was a child, and for the first time I started hearing my own inner voice instead of constantly seeking direction from outside myself. Teachers like Martha Beck, Joe Dispenza, and Eckhart Tolle helped light the way.
Then, through a series of synchronicities, I discovered the Psychedelic Coaching Institute, and saw a clear path for my future open up.
Why This Work
I built Noema Studio for the person I was at that crossroads. Someone who has done everything right and still feels something wrong underneath. Someone who has been so faithful to everyone else's expectations that they've lost the thread back to themselves, and who knows, somewhere deep down, that there is another way.
I bring my background in healthcare, my training in psychedelic integration, and my lived experience of this terrain to every client I work with. I understand the clinical landscape and the sacred one. When the right conditions are in place, the beliefs and patterns that have been quietly running your life start to loosen their grip. That's when change stops feeling impossible and starts feeling inevitable.
The Year I Stopped Forcing
What followed was more than a year without a job, a title, or a salary, the external measures of success I'd spent years chasing. I never experienced the financial panic I expected. Help arrived in unexpected ways instead. I spent that time in nature, meditation, and honest self-inquiry, learning to regulate a nervous system that had been working overtime since I was a child, and for the first time I started hearing my own inner voice instead of constantly seeking direction from outside myself. Teachers like Martha Beck, Joe Dispenza, and Eckhart Tolle helped light the way.
Then, through a series of synchronicities, I discovered the Psychedelic Coaching Institute, and saw a clear path for my future open up.
Why This Work
I built Noema Studio for the person I was at that crossroads. Someone who has done everything right and still feels something wrong underneath. Someone who has been so faithful to everyone else's expectations that they've lost the thread back to themselves, and who knows, somewhere deep down, that there is another way.
I bring my background in healthcare, my training in psychedelic integration, and my lived experience of this terrain to every client I work with. I understand the clinical landscape and the sacred one. When the right conditions are in place, the beliefs and patterns that have been quietly running your life start to loosen their grip. That's when change stops feeling impossible and starts feeling inevitable.
My Story
I found myself frustrated and increasingly disconnected, not just from my work, but from myself. I could see exactly where the system needed to change and was stopped at every turn. Again and again, I was asked to act against the values that had brought me to healthcare in the first place. Each time I complied, I abandoned myself a little more.
The hardest part was not the dysfunction of the system. It was realizing that I had spent years making decisions based on what would look impressive, responsible, and socially acceptable rather than what was actually true for me. I had optimized my life beautifully. I just hadn't consulted myself in the process.
The Crossroads
Eventually the choice was no longer avoidable: stay, keep my title, my salary, the identity I'd built, and keep abandoning myself, or leave, with no clear plan and no guarantee of what came next.
I chose to leave.
Before I did, I gave myself something I'd never allowed before: space to listen. I went on a four-day silent psilocybin retreat to sit with the question of who I actually was underneath everything I'd been performing.
What came through was not a strategy or a plan. It was something simpler and more disorienting than that.
“You keep trying to do things that look impressive, even when it means betraying your own compass. Stop trying to force outcomes. Your only job is to trust and follow what feels true.”
My Approach
How this work actually happens
A nervous system you can borrow
My role is to be a regulated presence while you do the work.
When you're meeting what's been buried, your nervous system needs somewhere safe to land. I offer that first. Not answers, not a roadmap. From that steadiness, something becomes possible that usually isn't: you can actually hear yourself.
I don't guide you toward my conclusions. I help you get into genuine contact with your own inner wisdom. It's already there. Most of us have just learned not to listen to it.
A bridge between two ways of knowing
I take science seriously. I also take the traditions this work actually comes from seriously, the ones that have been doing it for a very long time. I don't think you have to pick one.
My training is clinical. I'm fluent in the research and the safety considerations. I also bring a real respect for the wisdom traditions, particularly Eastern ones, that understood something about how to live and move through the world long before Western medicine existed. Both of those inform how I work with you.
How I work with you
Preparation is the foundation. Physical, mental, spiritual, and environmental. All four matter and we don't rush it.
Integration draws on what each person and experience calls for:
Somatic and nervous system regulation
Acceptance-based approaches
Contemplative and meditative practices
Internal Family Systems
Creative expression (drawing, writing, movement)
Systems thinking: understanding yourself in relationship to your environment and the people around you
What I know because I've walked it
I've moved through many sides of this: the clinical and the contemplative, the conventional and the unconventional. I understand where you're coming from because I've been in many of those places myself.
The work is yours. I'm simply here to help you hear yourself.
-
My role is to be a regulated presence while you do the work.
When you're meeting what's been buried, your nervous system needs somewhere safe to land. I offer that first. Not answers, not a roadmap. From that steadiness, something becomes possible that usually isn't: you can actually hear yourself.
I don't guide you toward my conclusions. I help you get into genuine contact with your own inner wisdom. It's already there. Most of us have just learned not to listen to it.
-
I take science seriously. I also take the traditions this work actually comes from seriously, the ones that have been doing it for a very long time. I don't think you have to pick one.
My training is clinical. I'm fluent in the research and the safety considerations. I also bring a real respect for the wisdom traditions, particularly Eastern ones, that understood something about how to live and move through the world long before Western medicine existed. Both of those inform how I work with you.
-
Preparation is the foundation. Physical, mental, spiritual, and environmental. All four matter and we don't rush it.
Integration draws on what each person and experience calls for:
—Somatic and nervous system regulation
—Acceptance-based approaches
—Contemplative and meditative practices
—Internal Family Systems
—Creative expression (drawing, writing, movement)
—Systems thinking: understanding yourself in relationship to your environment and the people around you
-
I've moved through many sides of this: the clinical and the contemplative, the conventional and the unconventional. I understand where you're coming from because I've been in many of those places myself.
The work is yours. I'm simply here to help you hear yourself.