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
Life Changed In An Instant
Most people think the difference between those who change their lives and those who remain stuck is intelligence, discipline, or even courage. I don’t think it is. I think it is awareness. One of the concepts that changed the way I understand personal transformation is meta cognition or self reflection, the ability to think about…
Sitting In The Alone
There is a difference between being alone and being lonely. We often treat them as the same thing, but they are not. Being alone can be uncomfortable. It can feel like something is missing, something that needs to be filled. So we reach for our phones, television, food, work, anything to keep the silence away.…
Don’t Look Away, Each Moment Is Precious
Cycling matters to me. It is exercise, challenge, freedom and community. It has introduced me to people I might never otherwise have known. Recently, two of those people reminded me of something I would rather not think about: life can change in an instant. Wayne is 84 and has been cycling for more than 40…