SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO BURN THE HOUSE DOWN TO FIND HOME.
Not always, but sometimes. (Don’t let that scare you.)
For a long time, I talked about “finding your authentic self,” and I still believe deeply in authenticity. But I understand it differently now.
I think what we're really trying to find is what’s true.
What’s underneath the roles, the expectations, the coping, the proving, and all the versions of ourselves we learned to become because they worked, kept us safe, made other people happy, or simply got us through.
There’s something underneath all of that, and I call it your flame.
Your flame is what is true in you, and Awaken Your Flame™ is the work I've created to help us reconnect with it and practice living from it. Because knowing your truth and actually living it are two very different things.
We can know we need to say no and still say yes. Know we're exhausted and keep pushing. Know something isn't right anymore and stay. Know what we want and talk ourselves out of it. Know who we are and still walk into a room trying to be who everyone else needs us to be.
Truth takes practice.
That’s why my work is experiential. In my keynotes, workshops and Awaken Your Flame™ experiences, we don't just talk about authenticity, courage, connection or leadership. We practice them.
Through the body, breath, movement, music, expression, choice, reflection and connection, we create a place to notice what's here, loosen our grip on what we've been holding, awaken what wants to be expressed and listen to what we already know. And then comes the real practice: taking that truth back into our lives.
KNOWING YOUR TRUTH IS AWARENESS.
PRACTICING YOUR TRUTH IS EMBODIMENT.
LIVING YOUR TRUTH IS LEADERSHIP.
I know something about the distance between knowing and living because my own life has required me to face truths I didn't always want to face.
I've moved through major physical pain which led to double hip replacement, addiction and recovery, grief, the ending of a 20-year marriage, motherhood, reinvention, and the uncomfortable work of questioning versions of myself that no longer felt true. For a long time, I was also incredibly good at functioning through it all. I could teach, facilitate, create, lead, take care of people and keep going, even when underneath it all I was becoming increasingly disconnected from myself.
Getting sober changed everything.
It required much more than knowing what needed to change. I had to start living differently, listening differently and choosing differently. I had to look honestly at my relationships, my work, the way I cared for myself and the parts of my life that no longer matched what I knew to be true.
And I had to learn how to return to myself again and again.
That practice has profoundly shaped the woman I am, the leader I am and the work I now bring into the world. It’s also why I don't believe we arrive at some perfectly authentic version of ourselves and stay there. Life changes. We change. We disconnect. We get pulled back into old patterns and expectations.
So we return.
Every return gives us another opportunity to notice what is true now, listen to it, trust it and make choices that bring the way we're living a little closer to what we know.
That’s the work I practice in my own life, and it’s the work I create spaces for others to practice through Awaken Your Flame™.
Because the flame is your truth. And truth takes practice.
MEET MICHELLE
Michelle Hillier is an Embodied Leadership Strategist, TEDx speaker, educator and creator of the Awaken Your Flame™ Method. For more than 25 years, she has been creating experiences that use movement, breath, music, expression and connection to help people access what is true and practice showing up from there.
Michelle has brought her work to more than one million people across schools, organizations, conferences and communities. Her keynotes, professional learning and experiential sessions have been commissioned by organizations including the Canadian Mental Health Association, PHE Canada, Sun Life, WestJet, Loblaw/Shoppers Drug Mart, Bank of Canada and BMO.
A longtime educator and facilitator, Michelle has taught in B.Ed. programs at Ontario Tech University and Niagara University and created movement programming used in more than 800 schools and sites across North America. Her work today brings those decades of experience together through Awaken Your Flame™ and an emerging body of work centred on embodied leadership.
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