SWIHA Blog

When Micah Lunassential speaks, she immediately commands your attention. Warm, kind, smart, and engaging, she brings experience, understanding, and enlightenment to people with her successful YouTube channel Ms.Micah. With a focus on love and relationships this channel embraces the discussion of uncomfortable topics that so often hold us back, like fear, forgiveness, addiction, and trauma.

Micah grew up knowing trauma, having PTSD as a child from a serious accident and later getting complex PTSD from abuse as an adult. These experiences dramatically affected her view on love and on herself. After years of feeling hopeless and being trapped in a victim mentality, Micah went to a Holistic Gathering at SWIHA in October of 2012 where she had a Toe Reading that would change her life.

“I was being mentored by the then Director of the Psychology department at Ottawa University for a class I was taking entitled Trauma Psychology,” Micah shared. “The Toe Reading reminded me of what I was avoiding because I was trapped in a victim mentality. True healing was learning to feel safe in the body after trauma or domestic violence.”

Author and Life Coach Loree Bischoff was always intrigued by what makes people tick, why they think the way that they do, and what motivates them. In 2007, she and her sister noticed that many of the mothers they knew were struggling on some level to find balance in their lives. Recognizing a need for moms to have access to new tools and strategies for achieving a more balanced and fulfilling life, they developed a special event called “Motherhood Redefined”— a weekend seminar for mothers consisting of speakers, interactive workshops, and fun for everyone in attendance. What she didn’t expect was that her event to help others find balance on their path would lead her to the beginning of finding a new path for herself.

“Motherhood Redefined” was extremely well-received, and Loree knew then and there that what she really wanted was to begin her own private coaching practice. “I was not familiar with life coaching as a profession at that time. One of the speakers we hired happened to be a life coach and suggested I check out SWIHA,” she says. “I had begun studying spirituality in the early eighties (thanks to my mother)… being an important aspect of my life, it was a priority for me to find a life coach training program where spirituality wouldn’t be excluded.” To her delight, that was exactly what she found when, in the spring of 2008, she enrolled in SWIHA's life coaching training program. Loree feels that, “There couldn’t have been a more perfect fit.”

High in the mountains of Northern Arizona, in a little town called Pinedale (population: 588), you’ll find SWIHA graduate Lisa Kaiser carving out her dream of a self-sustaining community.

In 2015, Lisa graduated from Southwest Institute of Healing Arts with a degree in Mind-Body Transformational Psychology and a diploma in the Mind-Body Wellness Practitioner program. The focus on body energy work, Ayurveda, aromatherapy, urban farming, raw food preparation—as well as the tools and support she got from entrepreneurial classes—provided the foundation of success that led to the beginning of Lisa building her dream.