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
My Mood Is Not In Charge
Here’s the rule most people avoid because it cuts through every excuse: never let your mood dictate what you do. Your mood is unreliable, it shifts with comfort, distraction, and habit. If you follow it, you stay exactly where you are. Progress demands something firmer. A life coach will challenge you to operate from standards,…
Giving Up The Need to Know: Stop Waiting, Start Evolving
Personal growth is not comfortable, it never has been. Your nervous system is wired to resist change, to cling to the familiar, even when the familiar is what’s keeping you stuck. Stress is not the problem; it is the signal that something is stretching, evolving, breaking open. Yet most people spend their lives trying to…
Destiny or Choice: Where Your Responsibility Begins
Is your life already written, or do you actually have free will? That question sounds deep, but for most people, it’s a distraction. You’re not really confused about destiny. You’re avoiding the harder question: where does your responsibility begin? Life hands you situations you didn’t ask for. That part is real. But what happens inside…