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
The Need For Self Reflection
Many personal development professionals suggest that seventy-five percent of people lack the capacity for self-reflection. Whether the exact number is debatable isn’t the point. The point is this: most people think all day long, but rarely examine what they think. We assume that because a thought appeared in our mind, it must be valid. It…
Stress is Often the Fertilizer of Growth
There is no growth without stress. That isn’t motivational fluff, it’s biology. Your nervous system is wired to prefer the familiar, even when the familiar is keeping you small. So when you choose change new standards, new habits, new boundaries, your body reacts before your mindset catches up. The discomfort, the second-guessing, the urge to…
Your Boundaries Illuminate Your Center
You will not find your center by staying comfortable. You find it by testing your edges. By stepping into conversations you’d rather avoid. By taking risks that expose your fear. By noticing what triggers you instead of numbing it. The boundaries of your life are not problems to eliminate, they are invitations to discover who…