My journey

I was a tomboy raised in a conservative Catholic home, which is a particular kind of early education in fitting in.

My parents did their best. But intention does not equal impact. The message was clear: there are expectations about how you act, look, speak, dress. Certain versions of me were acceptable. Others needed to be hidden, or at least managed. As much as I would have considered myself a rebel, I spent a good portion of my life being very good at making myself fit... following the rules, exceeding expectations, proving my value, earning my keep. These were my survival strategies hard at work.

What I also learned, through decades of my own unraveling and healing, is that the body keeps score of every inauthentic choice. Every time I compromised the fullest version of myself to make others more comfortable, or maintain connection, my nervous system recorded it.

I felt very alone and out of place when I was young. Life felt unpredictable. I had the sense I could not fully trust or rely on the world around me.

One day, when I was six, I was particularly upset, crying and pacing under the canopy of shade and privacy provided by the willow tree in my backyard. I don't remember what the trigger was. I just remember thinking something was wrong, and I couldn't stay there.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, something landed.

Not a thought or a voice exactly. More of a knowing: "You're going to live in Portland, Oregon."

This was my first universal download.

I had no idea where Portland was. I didn't care. What I felt was relief. A feeling I wasn't stuck. Somewhere there was a place where I'd be free to be fully me.

I never told anyone. I wanted to protect it. This small, steady ember of knowingness kept me going. On the outside, I toed the line. Good grades. Rules followed. Not in too much trouble.

Anxious to get my real life on the road, I entered PT school at 16 and graduated at 21, ready to move to Portland!

But there was a short detour to Chicago.

My mother, hearing my plan to move across the country for the first time, was shocked and upset. The weight of the guilt, disappointment, and suggestion that I had made it all up made me question myself. I compromised my inner knowing to do the right thing by everyone else. It didn't last. It never does.

A year later than I wanted, I aimed for Portland and accidentally landed in Eugene. No matter. It felt right to be in Oregon. I took a job at a small clinic owned by the hospital. I learned a lot, but the bureaucracy was suffocating. Four years to the day, at the ripe age of 25, I walked away.

With no guaranteed salary, no safety net, and more certainty in my gut than money in my bank account, I started Bodywise Physical Therapy.

The name came to me in a dream — my second universal download. I had no idea of the immensity of what it meant at the time.

Over the years, I worked hard to build a thriving practice. I loved my co-workers and my clients, and they loved me — voted best PT in town on more than one occasion. I had created exactly what I intended: a culture of holistic healing.

Or so I thought at the time.

At 40, everything cracked open.

My body was speaking loudly — digestive issues, restlessness, a low hum of unease. Things I had been quietly overriding for years were becoming too loud to ignore. My truth was rising whether I was ready or not. I was deeply unhappy, and knew I had to leave my marriage. I needed to heal trauma from my family. My work was feeling monotonous. I wanted to understand myself... how did I get here? What was next for me? How could I do things differently?

I needed help. What I can only describe as universal guidance landed me with a therapist who practiced Hakomi. This was my introduction to the power of somatic psychology.

In our first session, I felt a shift in my body and my being. It was a powerful awakening — I was successfully surviving my life, but not thriving as my true self.

I left my marriage and leaned into my own healing journey. The shifts within me resonated outward and I could witness the impact on my clients. It became clear: holistic healing is not about alignment from the bottom of the foot to the top of the head. It's from the inside out. The body is the doorway, not the destination. The nervous system is the throughline of everything.

This was the missing link.

My therapist recommended me to the trainings she had taken... META, Mindful Experiential Therapeutic Approaches. These were geared toward psychologically educated practitioners — MSWs, counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists. I was coming with a physical therapy background. I didn't know how I would integrate psychology and neuroscience into my practice, but I knew in my gut this was central to the evolution of my work.

Once again skating outside the boundaries. I was cultivating something that was going to have to make its own home.

Over the years that followed, the universe kept presenting me with the next right thing. I said yes to TRE® Trauma Release Exercise, The Nervous System Resiliency Toolkit, and Embodied Coaching certifications. I'm beyond grateful that my practice — really my vocation — continued to expand in parallel with my personal evolution. Each feeding the other.

At 46 I was on a solo motorcycle trip in Spain — a story worth its own telling — and as I took off on a BMW 800 that had no business being ridden by someone my size, I was so fiercely proud of myself I could feel it in my chest. I had done this on my own terms — crossed the ocean, gotten on the bike, navigated my adventure in a foreign country alone.

That's when it hit me. I have the power to drive the adventure of my life! And I didn't want to wait until I retired to move to Portland.

So I said it out loud, inside my helmet, to no one but myself and the universe:

"Within one year I will be in Portland full time."

Three months later, in early 2014, I was splitting my time between Portland and Eugene. Six months later I was there full time. In 2016 I closed Eugene completely — finally, fully landing in the city the willow tree had whispered to me forty years before.

Over the next few years, I went from working solo to hiring and mentoring several therapists and building a beautiful new studio. We were busy and growing. Even through COVID, Bodywise was thriving.

But I could feel a familiar tension beginning to rise.

I was being called toward fully integrated body-mind work, and growing resentful of the boundaries of the western medicine container. I could feel myself wanting to break free. But the responsibility I felt for my staff, my clients, and the culture I had built kept me anchored beyond when my gut and heart knew it was time to evolve.

In hindsight, I recognize these patterns: old survival strategies, all of it — staying too long, working very hard, exceeding all the expectations, taking care of everyone, turning over every stone. Earning safety through belonging. Putting others before myself. Proving worth through doing. Anything but the one thing that actually terrified me: trusting myself completely.

Since I could not figure out how to fully be myself in the structure I had created, the universe weighed in and collapsed my practice — everyone quit at once. There I was, on my own. Again.

This was a shock and a gift.

It set me free.

In 2022 I closed Bodywise Physical Therapy.

Walking away from something successful, something I had built with such effort and integrity, something that cared for and supported other people, something the world recognized and accepted, was especially scary.

But I didn't have a choice. It was absolutely clear to me that the most transformative parts of what I do — cultivating somatic wisdom, building nervous system resiliency, and supporting trauma healing — could no longer live as a sidebar. I needed to create a container that could hold all of it, without apology, without translation, without making it smaller, but rather celebrating it.

"The most courageous step is to risk yourself." — David Whyte

Not your comfort. Not your security. Not your career. Yourself... the full revelation of who you are.

This is what I'm offering. No single credential or category contains it. No title fully translates it. Just what I've learned, what I've lived, what I know in my bones, and what I've integrated over a lifetime — combining into something uniquely and unapologetically mine.

It feels right to risk my authentic self. I actually can't live any other way.

Bodywise was always the name. Almost 40 years later, I feel like my work is fully embodying it.

The body is wise. Not metaphorically — literally. It holds our stories, our survival strategies, and the innate wisdom of our true path forward. It knows things our minds are still struggling to figure out.

Becoming Bodywise is about learning to listen to our innate intelligence. To stop overriding it. To come home to the truth of who we are.

So now you know a bit more about who I am.

I'm MEgan. I'll be 59 in September. Surfing the edge of 60, unafraid, and more fully myself than I have ever been. Physical therapist turned somatic practitioner. Licensed psilocybin facilitator. Lifelong student of the body and the nervous system. Someone who ran from religion but never stopped being a spiritual seeker. Someone who spent years helping others come home to themselves while consistently doing the same hard work in my own life.

I'm not writing from a place of having it all figured out. I'm writing from the middle of it — which, I've come to believe, is exactly where the most honest work happens.