Hello and welcome! I’m Michelle Swann Young, and I’m so glad you’ve found your way here. I’m a wellness educator, and everything I do here is designed to help guide and support you as you discover how to live your best, most meaningful life.

I believe that the world needs more love, more grace, more compassion and more kindness, and if we want to be part of that, we must start with how we show up in relationship with ourselves. The way we relate to others is a reflection of how we relate to ourselves, and vice versa – we can’t show up in our external relationships with the love, kindness and grace we want to bring if the way we relate to ourselves is hateful, judgmental and intolerant.

I also firmly believe that the best way to create true, lasting, real life change is to start with love and compassion. Shaming and rejecting ourselves when we make mistakes might motivate us for a few minutes to change our outward behavior, but ultimately it reinforces the belief that we’re not worthy of love and acceptance just as we are. And that keeps us from being able to truly love and accept others when they make mistakes and have shortcomings as well.

What if you could change that narrative? What if you started not by trying to change outward behavior, but instead by focusing on learning how to love, accept and care for yourself right now, just as you are? What if you could find simple, practical, potent practices that don’t take much time or brain space but continually support you and bring you back to a place of balance? What if you could do that in community with others who are also pursuing the same thing?

I’ve spent a lifetime pursuing what it means to live a meaningful life, 9 years and counting learning to take good care of myself so that I can live my best life and care well for other people, a year in formal wellness educator training, and a year teaching and mentoring in self-care and wellness. I’d love to come alongside your journey and guide and support you in your quest to live your most meaningful life. We’ll dig deep and work on listening to our own voices and honoring our own needs in a culture that’s deafeningly loud with all the things we “should” do. We’ll focus on just one idea at a time, exploring its different facets and discovering how it might serve us in this very moment of life – or how it doesn’t. And then we’ll honor what we’ve learned about ourselves and what we need right now as we choose what to practice and make into habit.

You are worthy of love and care simply because you are alive. You matter because you exist. Won’t you join me as we take the journey together in learning to live that way?

I invite you to join me in exploring some ways you can being right now to take good care of yourself, starting with reclaiming a calm mind in the stressful moments of your day. My series Cultivating Calm includes 5 simple practices you can use to bring your mind and body back to calm and is available for anyone who subscribes to my monthly newsletter.

Here on Patreon, I'm offering video practice sessions so that you can both explore what types of self-care work for you and help them become more of a habit. Included in your membership are twice-weekly emails to encourage and challenge you, remind you to practice, and help you dig deeper. I'm keeping the videos short - about 15-20 minutes - so that you can easily fit them into your schedule and focus on just one thing at a time. We make sure to give time for you to discern what truly serves you well in this season of your life, and you'll have the opportunity to practice the art of self-care along with other like-minded people.

As soon as you become a Patron, you'll have access to everything I've posted since January 2020. Please let me know if you have any questions - you can message me here on Patreon by commenting on any of my public posts, or you can email me at michelle.swann.young [at] gmail [dot] com.

Here's to continuing the journey of learning to love and care for ourselves deeply.

With much love,
Michelle