My Story

My name is Michelle Renee Pasos, formerly Fernandez. Daughter of Caroline, granddaughter of Caridad and Miriam.

I am the daughter of a Nicaragua-born father and a Philippines-raised mother. Both of my parents carried significant histories of generational trauma, though we didn't have that language growing up.

My father immigrated to the United States as a young boy. My mother returned here as a teenager. They eventually became pastors, educators, and later, marriage and life coaches. My father planted churches and served Latin communities for decades. My mother worked with teen mothers and incarcerated youth through the Los Angeles County Office of Education, eventually becoming Teacher of the Year twice.

Education mattered deeply to them. They both eventually earned their doctorates—all while serving their communities, raising five daughters, and becoming grandparents to eighteen grandchildren.

I grew up inside both deep service and deep survival.

As the fourth of five daughters, I became the "high-achieving" one. I was the first to graduate from college. I earned my master's degree in Kinesiology and became an adjunct professor, yoga teacher, studio founder and owner, doula, and eventually, mother to three children born within a few short years of one another.

I wore a lot of hats.

And I worked tirelessly to create a meaningful life centered around wellness, service, and community care.

But while I was helping other people pursue wellness, I was slowly becoming unwell myself.

When the body finally said enough

After the pandemic, I tried everything I knew to keep my yoga studio alive. Eventually, it closed.

This wasn't just a business that didn't make it. My husband and I had sold our first home to help build—and later try to save—it. There was grief in losing the studio, but also grief in beginning to understand the long-term consequences of choices we had made while trying so hard to survive.

My body was struggling, too.

I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Anxiety and depression worsened. Burnout became something deeper. Suicidal thoughts I had quietly carried on and off since eighth grade resurfaced.

And despite years of yoga, spiritual practice, study, and having all the "tools," I reached a point where I had to admit:

I needed more care, too.

I began therapy and medication.

Around the same time, my second child's neurodivergent journey led me toward questions about myself I had never known to ask. Eventually, I was diagnosed with both autism and ADHD.

Suddenly, so much of my life had new language.

Learning what I had learned to hide

At the same time, I was deconstructing my faith.

Becoming a mother had already started changing everything. I remember looking into my firstborn son's eyes and realizing I no longer believed in original sin.

That one realization unraveled so much.

I began confronting religious trauma, codependency, perfectionism, and the particular pressures of growing up as a pastor's daughter. I also began looking differently at my experience as one of the few brown girls growing up in a predominantly white town with its own history of white supremacy.

I started recognizing how much of my life had been spent learning to mask, assimilate, mirror, camouflage, and make myself understandable—culturally, spiritually, and neurologically.

In 2019, I watched a TED Talk about decolonization, and something cracked open.

I started reading. A lot.

Learning. Unlearning. Grieving. Questioning. Remembering. Reclaiming.

I participated in a decolonizing wellness course with Eliana Constanza that profoundly affected me. I will never forget what it felt like to sit in a space made entirely of BIPOC participants and recognize how much energy I had spent filtering myself through the white gaze.

Later, trauma recovery training gave me language for another realization: I wasn't simply "the sibling who escaped trauma."

I had experienced trauma, too.

Collective trauma. Intergenerational trauma. Religious trauma. Cultural trauma. The trauma held by a nervous system that had spent years adapting in order to belong, achieve, serve, and survive.

Remembering where we come from

As a teenager and young adult, I participated in—and eventually led—global mission trips through the church.

Years later, I had to reckon with the grief and shame of recognizing the ways missionary work can reproduce colonial systems, even when the people participating believe deeply that they are helping.

That reckoning opened another kind of grief.

Grief over disconnection from ancestry.
From culture.
From indigenous ways of knowing and being.
From practices that existed long before wellness became an industry.

Around this time, I entered yoga therapy training.

Once again, I found myself navigating predominantly white wellness spaces. I felt a deep resonance with many of the practices alongside a growing discomfort with how easily those practices could become separated from culture, lineage, history, and lived experience.

All of these threads were beginning to meet.

The body. Trauma. Neurodivergence. Ancestry. Spirituality. Colonization. Community. Movement. Rest. Grief.

And then my life asked me to stop.

Becoming a daughter again

A couple of years ago, I stopped taking clients.

I stopped leading retreats. I stopped teacher trainings. I pulled inward.

Something in me kept saying that I needed to care for myself because something big was coming.

That "something" became the final stretch of my father's cancer journey.

Over the next year and a half, I accompanied my parents to appointments, coordinated care, translated medical information, asked questions, advocated, listened, and sat beside them.

Without intending to, I became a kind of doula to my father and mother.

Sometimes I facilitated practices for my parents that ended up being just as meaningful for me. Sometimes care looked less like knowing what to do and more like simply staying.

Then, this past April, my father died suddenly—not from the cancer itself, but from a devastating brain bleed.

Nothing prepared me for the intensity of that loss.

Grief has brought me into another education entirely.

Even in death, I began seeing systems differently—the funeral industry, our cultural discomfort with dying and grief, and the ways capitalism and colonization have separated so many of us from communal practices of tending to death, mourning, and one another.

And so, here I am.

Still grieving.

Still learning.

Still unlearning.

Still remembering.

Still becoming.

Where I am now

I no longer understand healing as fixing ourselves. I know now so much of it is learning how to be with what is most human about us.

To listen.

To feel.

To wonder.

To tell the truth.

To receive care.

To remember what our bodies know.

To reconnect with what and who came before us.

To reclaim the parts of ourselves and our ways of knowing that became quiet somewhere along the way.

Today, my work sits at the intersection of embodied care, nervous system awareness, neurodiversity, trauma-informed practice, community care, ancestral reconnection, and decolonization.

I don't believe healing happens because someone else has all the answers.

And I am not the expert on your life.

My role is to walk alongside you as you root, reconnect, remember, and reclaim—to offer practices, questions, education, presence, and space as you listen for what is already there beneath the conditioning, expectations, trauma, and survival.

Whether we're moving through birth, loss, identity, burnout, parenting, athletic performance, or personal transformation, I hope to create spaces where we can be more fully embodied, more fully ourselves, and more deeply connected to one another and to something larger than ourselves.

Because I don't believe we're meant to do any of this alone.