About Lean Into Your Life: Life Coaching

Gary Merel M.S. CLC

My life has been guided by a commitment to my own personal and spiritual growth. I am a certified life coach with 25 years of experience as a functional medicine practitioner at Ann Arbor Holistic Health. In 2022, I stepped away from clinical practice to devote myself entirely to the deeper work of transformation, helping people live with clarity, intention, and alignment.

As a young adult, I lived in a yoga ashram for several years, immersed in disciplined spiritual practice. In midlife, I moved to Ann Arbor to study with a spiritual teacher, a relationship that shaped me for more than two decades. Most recently, my connection with my current teacher led me to spend extended time in India. These were not casual explorations. They were commitments, immersions into the questions that define my life.

My path has included facilitating men’s work through the ManKind Project and the Path 2 Spirit Warrior Program.  I have also trained with the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine in the therapeutic use of psychedelics and have also studied with indigenous traditions, including the Huichol, Shuar, Quechua, and Kallawaya peoples, always holding these tools within a grounded, ethical, and spiritually centered framework.

As a cancer survivor, I have faced fragility and the power of life directly. That experience stripped away abstraction and demanded authenticity. Today, I draw on decades of spiritual practice, personal inquiry, and professional experience to help others grow honestly, courageously, and with heart. This work is about awakening. It is about becoming fully alive.

Blog Posts

Stop Looking For What’s Wrong!

Lean Into Your Life: Life Coaching Stop always looking for what’s wrong with you. It sounds almost too simple, which is exactly why most people ignore it. Instead, they scan themselves daily for flaws, gaps, weaknesses, subtly reinforcing the belief that something must be broken. But here’s the hard truth: when your attention is trained…

You Can’t Always Know Why!

The mind craves explanation. Why did this happen? Why can’t I change this? Why does my life look like this right now? The search for answers can feel intelligent, even responsible. But often it becomes a trap. The constant need to know why keeps you stuck in analysis while life continues moving forward. Growth rarely…

Lost In My Head

I was out doing a fairly challenging bike ride. Breathing hard, feeling fully in my body. I stopped at an intersection, and in a blink of an eye a bird drops from the sky, precise and ruthless, and in a flash a mouse is gone. No hesitation. No debate. Just pure instinct and power. Nature…