There’s always a deeper story.

It’s 2013. I’m sitting in a backyard in West LA with the most impressive social entrepreneurs I’ve ever met. We’re going around introducing ourselves.

And I’m terrified.

A few months earlier I’d quit my job as a nonprofit financial management consultant, following a deep, soul-level, totally irrational call to recalibrate my life (more on that in a bit).

A former colleague had invited me to this dinner. Each person is sharing about their work: one had just collaborated with the White House on social impact investing, another had written an op-ed in the New York Times, a third had founded a company giving ex-convicts jobs in electronics recycling.

As my turn approaches, panic sets in. What would I say? “Hi, I’m Michael and I quit my job and now I’m trying to figure stuff out and gosh you all are very impressive!”

My mouth goes dry. I take a drink.

My turn arrives. I open my mouth and pray that something coherent comes out:

I’m Michael and I work with amazing people like you and your organizations to help them discover and harness the power of story to create change.

After what feels like an hour, everyone begins speaking at once. They all want my card—which I don’t have because the business didn’t exist until I spoke the words. I tell them I’d run out, dash home, create a website, and start figuring out how to be of service using my creativity, imagination, and deep curiosity about people.

That moment planted the seed of all that followed. A moment of beginning... that was also the ending of another story.

When I was about 11 years old. . .

I looked up from a book of Celtic myths and told my parents that I wanted to spend my life exploring the ways story reflects and shapes culture. My parents immediately panicked and sent me to science camp.

For the next 27 years, I found myself caught in a tension between following my curiosity and passion and following the well trodden path cleared by my parents, family, and schools.

That tension showed up when I was about to graduate with my MA in Theater and my mentor at school had offered me a part time job teaching acting and Shakespeare to at-risk youth in Chicago. My mother had asked a friend of hers to meet with me and offer me a job as a manager of programming at a new Nature Museum.

I wanted nothing more than to give back to the community and inspire people with art using my hard won skills. So, of course, I took the job at the Nature Museum.

my life got a little bit smaller

These small choices showed up everywhere.

Career, dating, friendships, even my choices of places to live. Each of them both created and reinforced my core belief that I would never amount to much. That, despite being fairly intelligent and not without talent, my life was destined to be mediocre at best.

Let’s take a moment to acknowledge that I had a pretty great life.

In addition to having the basic privilege of being born white in America, my parents loved and supported me. I got a first-rate education, fantastic grades, was able to support myself, had friends. I’d acted on stages in Chicago and Los Angeles, some pretty fancy ones. I had built a reputation as a compelling storyteller at events like The Moth even as I pursued a career in nonprofit management; real save the world kind of stuff. On the outside, it all looked fantastic.

But inside, I felt like a misshapen slug.

Unworthy of fulfillment.Unworthy of the life I had built around me.Unworthy of love.

Ooof.

Those are heavy beliefs to carry. And when I hit 35, they brought me to my knees.

I had trouble getting off the couch. My friends, to whom I am forever grateful, came over to clean and cook for me. I ate sweets obsessively and experienced a ton of anger, mostly directed at myself.

The clinical term for all this is ‘dysthymia,’ or long term, low grade depression that may get deeper over time. Because of how deeply ingrained the beliefs, the stories, driving the depression were, my therapist advised me that healing could take five or ten years.

I’d wanted a life of magic, exploration, creativity and service. Now I looked into the future and saw endless decades of deskbound drudgery and pasta dinners eaten alone over the kitchen sink.

I didn’t have five or ten years. I needed to take action now.

My soul was calling and I couldn’t ignore it anymore.

So I did the most terrifying thing I’d ever done: I started to make big choices.

I quit my job as a financial management consultant for nonprofits and went to South America to work with Indigenous healers. And I dove into a breathwork meditation practice.

Each choice, each conscious decision, chipped away at the beliefs that had driven my decisions for three decades.

Six months after I returned from South America,
I found myself at that dinner table.

Working with leaders on their stories…

naturally led me to executive coaching certification and healing modalities like breathwork that work with story on a deeper, somatic level.

A desire to bring humanity and the sacred to organizational work led to developing principles in ethical storytelling that have helped shape global conversations.

Facilitating story-work opened doorways to convening design, helping craft transformational experiences for teams and leaders.

Through all of it a core question has emerged:

How do we meet the times?

It’s not a question to be answered, but rather to be walked with.

In many ways, the work we do together is an opportunity to walk with that question and see what emerges.

Once upon a time. . .

As a kid, I loved magic.

I was lucky to have parents who read to me (with voices and everything), immersing my young imagination into worlds where trees spoke, energy flowed through everything, and the right word spoken at the right time could reweave the fabric of reality.

The first movie I ever saw was Star Wars. My first word, I’m told, was Yoda. For a while, everything and everyone was Yoda.

(In retrospect. . .it feels a little on the nose.)

As a kid, I felt magic all around me.

In the tickle of the waves against my feet during my family’s occasional off-season trips to the Maryland shore.And the flickering of a fire warming the bone-cold feet of a bunch of third graders who had gotten caught in a downpour.And in those moments just before sleep took me, my eyelids filled with shifting colors and my mind merging with a formless ocean.

I suspected that magic was real. That there really was a force that flows through everything.

I KNEW it was real.

. . .and then I forgot.

At the age of 35, I sat on a therapist’s couch as she regarded me with concern.

I’d just let her know that I was having trouble sleeping. And eating. Getting off the couch. That a few friends had taken it upon themselves to clean my apartment and make sure that I ate something.

‘You know you’re depressed, right?’ she asked.

It honestly hadn’t occurred to me.

I had a pretty great life. In addition to having the basic privilege of being born white in America, my parents loved and supported me. I got a first-rate education, fantastic grades, was able to support myself, had friends. I’d acted on stages in Chicago and Los Angeles, some pretty fancy ones. I had built a reputation as a compelling storyteller at events like The Moth even as I pursued a career in nonprofit management; real save the world kind of stuff.

On the outside, it all looked fantastic.

Inside was different.

For 25 years, I’d found myself caught in a tension between following my curiosity, creativity, and innate wisdom and following the well trodden path cleared by my parents, family, and schools.

Again and again, I chose that path. . .

An internship with a research institute instead of performing in a musical when I was 15.A ‘real job’ with a museum instead of teaching Shakespeare to kids part time.Constantly telling self-deprecating stories to delight audiences in the hopes that if I made fun of myself, they wouldn’t have to.

That kid who loved and believed in magic had, one choice at a time, been relegated to a small, hidden corner of my being.

The belief in magic and simple joy of playing in the forest replaced by a belief that my life was destined to be mediocre at best. I felt like a misshapen slug. Unworthy of fulfillment. Unworthy of the life I had built around me. Unworthy of love.

That, I guess, was what depression looked like for me.

something needed to change

Not long after that moment on the therapist’s couch, I found myself stumbling into the ballet studio of a local community center for a ‘breathwork’ class.

The invitation had landed in my email promising

Miraculous healing and transformation.Access to the secrets of existence.Relief from anxiety and even depression!

It sounded like absolute horseshit. . .and at that point, I was open to anything.

Putting misgivings aside, I dragged myself up the stairs to the studio, walked through the door and instantly regretted my decision.

Everyone smelled like patchouli. The facilitator was a white dude dressed all in white with dreadlocks. People were hugging each other and giving each other deep, soulful gazes.

This was not my scene.

. . .but I was there, so I stayed. The facilitator taught us a simple breathing technique, told us that we might experience everything from waves of strong emotion to tingling to a sense of oneness with the Universe.

Then we breathed.

And it was hard.

I’d had no idea how much not breathing I’d been doing.

After about five minutes, I was drenched in sweat. No emotions. No tingling or sense of oneness. Just effort.

All around me, I heard people crying or laughing. Bodies moving, presumably filled with ‘energy.’

Finally, after some time, I felt something shift. Nothing dramatic, but. . .

for as long as I could remember, a boulder had lived in the pit of my stomachit was heavy and dark and invisible and always therewhispering all sorts of cruddy things to meI’d come to regard it as part of myselfIt would never move.

It moved. Barely perceptible. But it moved.

When the practice ended, people shared about their experience. One person had felt the presence of their grandmother who had recently passed. Another experienced the resolution of an old wound. I stayed silent, but my mind was racing.

If that boulder could shift, maybe it wasn’t me.

If the impossible had happened, what else might be possible?

When you’ve lived in a world that seems fixed, without possibility, even the possibility of possibility is a healing.

Yoda yoda. yoda yoda yoda. yoda!

. . .after that, a lot happened.

I quit my job and traveled in South America working with Indigenous healers. Those experiences formed the backbone of what became an award winning storytelling show that I performed all over the country for four years.

I got really curious about breathwork and pursued certification. Through a series of events that could have only been choreographed by Spirit, I ended up facilitating group sessions in the same ballet studio that had hosted my first experience. Between 2013 and 2019, hundreds of people joined us to breathe. No patchouli necessary!

I fasted in the Wilderness and cried out for a vision. To which Spirit replied: ‘Buy a new couch.’ So I did.

Saying ‘yes’ in improbable situations led me to speaking about Ethical Storytelling in Dubai, sharing breathwork and other modalities with international CEOs, and working with men experiencing incarceration to help them connect with their inner worlds.

It’s not that all of this unfolded without friction, doubt, or uncertainty. Far from it. But that boulder

the one that would never move

was gone. Replaced by a steadily growing trust that I was being woven—storied—back into a much larger narrative that holds us all.

As these stories have unfolded, I’ve had the opportunity to spend lots of time with that kid who believed in magic and talked to trees. I’ve learned from him and, time and time again, traveled back to those moments in his life, in my life, where the magic flickered. I’ve shared with him and let him know in a gentle whisper that I can feel reweaving the fabric of memory:

You’re onto something.

Because the only possible explanation I can come up with for how it’s all unfolding is that

Spirit is real.Magic is real.Trees are teachers.Oceans speak to each other.Children carry the wisdom of elders.And it’s never been more important that we remember so that we can change our livesto live in greater harmony with Nature and our own HeartsSo that we may become the wise ancestors ofa beautiful future for all Beings.

Yoda.