Meet Michaela Smith

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Michaela Smith. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Michaela below.

Michaela, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?

It has been quite a path to discover what my purpose is and to create a life that allows me to share that with others. I guess you could say that this journey started when I began practicing yoga and it very slowly evolved over the course of many years.

I started yoga when I was 16 and instantly connected with it. It ended up being a saving grace for me during my first year of college when I experienced significant anxiety and depression. My regular yoga and meditation practice helped me to get through that year, while also giving me the insight I needed to take some time away from school to re-ground before continuing with my education. During that year off, I enrolled in a yoga teacher training program and started teaching weekly classes.

Yoga sparked my interest in holistic health but it all came to a head when I began to put the pieces together that the various gut, mood and hormonal symptoms I’d been struggling with for years were related to the birth control I started as a teenager. I went off the pill cold turkey and switched to a copper IUD, but that didn’t give me the results I had hoped for. I felt like I couldn’t get the answers I needed from a conventional medical lens

This lit a fire in me to gain a deeper understanding of the body and how to support it. I decided to pursue a degree in Nutrition and Dietetics from Bastyr University. Over the course of many years chasing symptoms and desperately grasping for solutions my list of “acceptable” foods had narrowed significantly and I’d become hyper focused on eating only what I deemed as healthy. This was, ironically, taking quite a toll on my mental and physical health. Instead of pursuing the next steps towards becoming a Registered Dietitian, I once again, pressed pause.

I spent the next two years working as a chef at a private school while continuing to teach yoga on the side. This is where my relationship with food and health shifted. Instead of looking at food only through a clinical lens of optimizing health, I began to see food as a way to care for myself, show love towards those I was cooking for and as a form of self expression and creativity. Sourcing seasonal ingredients from local farmers and cooking delicious, nutritious meals from whole food ingredients was the missing piece my body and soul had been looking for. As I loosened my grasp around achieving a “perfect” diet, my capacity to handle the curve balls of life improved, I started to feel more like myself. As I nourished my body, it started to heal.

When my husband and I moved back to our home town in upstate NY, I decided to dive into teaching yoga full time. Since then I have earned my personal training certification and grown my small business specializing in women’s health. Nutrition has always held a special place in my heart, but I knew I wanted to find a way to help others get to the root of their health instead of wasting time chasing symptoms as I had. When I found Nutritional Therapy I knew this was the missing link I had been looking for. I finished my program last year and now, as a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner I get to weave together all the pieces of education and experience I have gathered over the last decade plus into a system that addresses your foundational needs through a holistic, multidimensional approach.

Over all of these years, and after what may be considered many “set-backs” along the way I have finally found that my purpose is to support women in transforming the way they approach health and healing to feel at home in their bodies. In my business I work with women to support their health through a variety of modalities both movement and nutrition based that focus on addressing the root cause of symptoms so they take control of their health without restrictive diets or fear around food and use movement as a tool to feel strong, powerful and more capable in their day-to-day life.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I’m a Yoga Medicine Therapeutic Specialist, Personal Trainer, and Nutritional Therapy Practitioner. I’m passionate about supporting women to feel empowered in their health and bodies throughout the various phases of their lifespan. Using movement and nutrition, I help women to take control of their health to achieve better cycles, improve fertility, support their bodies postpartum and navigate menopause with confidence and clarity.

There are many moving parts to my business…

I offer one-on-one classes that blend all of the different movement trainings I’ve done to create a holistic and multidimensional approach that can easily be adapted to each individual. Most of the people I work with are in their 50s-70s and are either looking for support with pain, coming back from injuries or want a movement practice that improves strength, mobility and ensures they can stay strong and live independently as they age. I also have training in corrective exercise for pregnancy and postpartum and work with women one-on-one to support healthy movement during and after pregnancy. I work both in person and virtually with my private clients.

I also run specialized OsteoVitality in person group classes with my business partner (Sarah Avery) which utilizes strength training and yoga to maintain and improve bone density. We currently have about 30 participants weekly across different class times. Skills learned in class translate into feeling more capable in day-to-day activities: things like being able to safely lift heavy objects, improve stability and balance to prevent falls and moving with more ease and confidence.

We partnered with Kaari to put out a virtual version of the Osteoporosis program that runs multiple cohorts throughout the year. This allows our program to be available to a wider audience that may not have Osteoporosis specialized coaches available near them. This virtual program is truly unique because it offers a digital delivery of our proven effective system while also giving participants access to a coach and personalized advice throughout the program rather than being self paced and self directed. This is so important for Osteoporosis where form and exercise selection are extremely important variables to ensure safety while training. We also have meetings over Zoom to provide community support and feel connected even through the virtual space.

Through nutrition, I work one-on-one with people to address their health using a root cause approach. This means that I don’t simply address their symptoms with temporary solutions, but dig into the deeper WHY behind the symptoms to address them from the root. The two women I love to support the most are seemingly quite different populations, but these two topics just light me up. First I love working with women looking to improve fertility and support a healthy pregnancy. I also love addressing osteoporosis and menopause through nutrition along with our various movement programs.

My website where you can find 1-1 movement and nutrition information: https://www.michaelamoveswell.com/https://www.michaelamoveswell.com/
In Person OsteoVitality program: https://www.inmotionintegrativept.com/osteovitality
Our Virtual Osteoporosis Program through Kaari: https://www.inmotionintegrativept.com/osteo-strength-training-program-1
Instagram (fertility, pregnancy & postpartum) @michaelamoveswell
Instagram (osteoporosis, peri/menopause health) @betterbonesmovewell
We have some great educational webinars and opportunities available through Kaari, so I recommend following them on instagram as well to hear about events as they come up! @kaariprehab

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I would say three things come to mind that made the biggest impact in getting me to where I am today – trust, compassion and perseverance.

My path was not clear or linear and there were many times along the way where I felt like I was doing something wrong or had made yet another bad choice. Examples of this are when I stopped school after my first year of college, didn’t pursue the next steps in becoming an RD or even when I first started teaching yoga full time with no plan and was actively losing money to pay for gas to get to all the classes I had to teach in a week. All of those times were really hard, confusing and definitely didn’t make sense from the outside. However, those choices came from a deep gut feeling. Every time that I listened to and trusted my gut, even when the immediate result didn’t logically make sense, the way it played out in the long term brought me to the right next step. If you can get really good at trusting that gut feeling, it will help you to move in the right direction. Mindfulness practices, like meditation and yoga have been so helpful for this, but I find even just spending more time in silence helps develop a great capacity to tap into those gut feelings. Being a business owner means you have to make a lot of decisions, the more you can develop trust in yourself the easier it’s going to be to make those choices.

Working so closely with people, especially in a health care capacity requires a great deal of compassion. People come to me because they need support in their health and they often find me after years of not feeling heard or understood through a conventional medical perspective. Being able to sit with people in their challenge, to reflect back to them and to show that you truly care and are listening changes the dynamic. It creates a partnership rather than a hierarchy of practitioner and patient. It builds trust between the two of you and creates a team like mentality around supporting their health. This meaningful connection is the first step in helping people to heal.

Lastly, perseverance. It’s not easy to choose entrepreneurship and it requires constant dedication to yourself and your purpose. However when I say perseverance, I don’t mean it in the sense of gritting your teeth and getting through it – I mean it in the sense of continually dedicating yourself to your goals, your growth and serving others. Adopting an attitude of “everything is figure out-able” allows you to see problems as opportunities and setbacks as places for growth.

Looking back over the past 12 months or so, what do you think has been your biggest area of improvement or growth?

This last year has been really dedicated to growing my business to be the best that it can be, but in a sustainable manner. This has meant investing in some business support that addresses systems, business skills and mindset. The mindset work has been some of the hardest!

I’m really good at implementing new systems, organizing spreadsheets and being very intellectual about growth, but having to dig into my own mindset blocks is much harder. As a business owner, your nervous system plays a big role in your success and your mindset can be a really limiting factor in building the business and life of your dreams.

It can be really easy to get caught up in a go go go lifestyle and get swept up building something without really asking yourself exactly what YOU want to create. To me, a successful business is one that allows me space from my business, time for rest and hobbies. The last few years of being so engrossed in building from the ground up resulted in me burning myself out. This year I still have big goals for growth, but I also want to prioritize my own down time. It’s a really hard balance and honestly, I still haven’t quite figured it out but I’ll share a little about what I’m doing to get there.

Visualizing exactly what I want my idea life to look like and giving myself permission to let it be different than the examples and expectations I see around me
Writing it down and coming back to it
Engaging in more down regulating practices like coming back to a regular pranayama/meditation practice, going on walks, being in nature
Working when I work. Phones away, being intentional with my work time and trying to do the create the same intentionality when I’m not working (ie. not taking work messages after certain times, this is hard and a boundary I am still working on)
Coming back to trust, I mentioned trust as one of the skills that has been most impactful in my journey. Whenever I feel overwhelmed I just try to lean into trusting myself, the process and the fact that it will all work out.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.michaelamoveswell.com/
• Instagram: @betterbonesmovewell @michaelamoveswell

Image Credits

Molly Leon