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 Is Lived Forward But Understood Backwards

Life rarely unfolds the way we imagined it would. We make decisions based on the information, beliefs, and conditioning we carry at the time. Education, marriage, career, money, family, religion, politics — most of it is shaped long before we ever question whether it truly belongs to us. We move forward believing our choices make…

The Cost of Being Right

There’s a quiet cost to being right, and most people never calculate it. You win the argument, prove the point, stand firm in your position… and slowly, almost invisibly, lose connection. The mind is brilliant at building a case. Like a skilled attorney, it gathers evidence, reinforces belief, and shuts down anything that threatens its…

I Shot Myself In The Foot

Deflection is subtle. It hides behind humor, intellect, and clever wordplay. A question about a sacred trip to India becomes a joke. A moment of vulnerability gets redirected into wit. It looks harmless, almost impressive, but it serves a purpose: to avoid discomfort. To stay safely out of reach. Most people don’t even realize they’re…