Today we’d like to introduce you to Hilary Lake.
Hi Hilary, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
As is true for many of us, I got started on my path long before I had any inkling of what I would be doing now. It started with me growing up for nearly two years from age one to three in Taiwan because of my father’s work with Ford Motor Company. My father was a British immigrant to America as an engineer in the mid 1960s and my mother is a 2nd and 3rd generation Polish American who grew up in Detroit. In Taipei, Taiwan, I had a nanny, Atsu, who was an indigenous woman. She carried me around on her back and taught me her language. We left when I was three years old and I forgot about Atsu. It took me over 20 years to realize that my brain had formed in a different way from most of my American friends and family as a result of learning an indigenous language alongside English and being carried around so much of the time. I came to realize this after living in Thailand and studying sustainable development in indigenous villages as well as Buddhism in temples for a year during my junior year of college at Kalamazoo College. Through this experience I woke up to the emotions of grief that I had buried for my whole childhood and adolescence and that I was now coming back into relationship with again. I also came to term with other traumatic experiences from my childhood that I hadn’t felt through including the death of a number of family members. It was a disorienting and painful time of being in the unknown yet necessary for my personal growth, healing and an ability to be in more intimate relationship with myself and others through their own healing journeys.
Through my process, I came to understand that I carried deep grief, trauma and a sense of isolation that I had pushed away and hadn’t felt through because of the culture that I grew up in my family and the wider middle class American cultural context. It took many years of my own personal mental health healing, somatic movement therapy, meditation, yoga, dance and attachment wound healing to come to understand myself, to heal and to get to the place where I feel that I and am able to support others in their healing journey. Along the way, I studied Buddhist ministry at Harvard Divinity School and became a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist and Educator through the International Somatic Movement Therapy Association (ISMETA) while working at somatic retreat centers called Earthdance and Nine Mountain in Western Massachusetts. I also lived in India and Nepal studying and practicing Buddhism and Nepalese dance. I then became an interfaith chaplain at an inner city hospital in Hartford, CT and was there during the pandemic, which was a challenging and eye opening experience.
I have learned from many different teachers from around the world including His Holiness the Dalai Llama, Llama Willa Blythe Baker and other Buddhists, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, the founder of Body Mind Centering, many trauma healing practitioners including Steven Porges and Peter Levine, and grief healing teachers including Shauna Janz and Grandmother Kaariinna Saarinen among others to whom I’m so grateful.
Amidst all of this I created a somatic (meaning of the whole body) movement practice called Moving in Grace that I have shared and experienced with hundreds if not thousands of people around the world. This practice invites us to rest into our bodies in relationship with the Earth and to move with greater ease, curiosity and energy as we learn about our bodies and beings from the inside out. There’s no particular movements or positions like in yoga and you don’t have to sit still like in meditation yet you can bring yoga, meditation or any movement modality into it if you would like to. I offer gentle verbal guidance, inquiry questions and imagery over evocative music that helps us to reconnect our mind to our body, our body to the Earth and to all beings to feel more whole. It is about welcoming our bodies back into their natural state of aliveness and learning about who we are in relationship with all of life. I invite us to trust ourselves as being nature again and to remember what our ancient ancestors likely knew about being connected to all of life.
I currently live in Petoskey, MI, the land of the Anishinaabe and call myself a Healing Arts Community Minister as well as being a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist and Educator. I now support empathic individuals to feel more embodied (or connected with their own bodies and their environment) as well as to heal through their grief and feel more resourced in relationship. I see that we are often moving through states of change or thresholds, sometimes its explicit when we lose a loved one, when we are going through initiations or big life changes and other times it’s more implicit or subtle when we feel disoriented or confused about who we are and what we are called to do with our lives now. I offer integrative embodiment counseling and mentoring, grief guidance, ritual and ceremonial guidance, embodied astrology guidance, speaking, sharing art, workshops and retreats as well as healing products that are used for ritual practice.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The challenges have been many and without them I wouldn’t be who I am or feel as connected to my inner resources as I do. I shared about feeling isolated and alone as a child and I also had some early family loss that I didn’t feel through until later as a young adult. As an adult I moved at least every two years for 20 years and went in and out of many communities. While this was exciting in many ways, it was also very tiring and disorienting and led to less stable relationships and burnout. Over the last five years I’m grateful to have been rooting in Northern Michigan with family and to be building my own family slowly. I also lost three family members to death within six months and had a pregnancy loss during this time so grief has become a great teacher for me. I am able to support others through their challenges and grief because I know the journey myself.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’m known for my ability to welcome people into a deeply safe, nourishing and restorative spaces to feel more connected to themselves, the Earth, to Spirit and the unseen world as well as others in their life. Throughout the years I’ve offered many different kinds of spaces and currently I’m offering 1-1 integrative embodiment counseling and mentoring sessions that help empathic folks and or caregivers to learn about themselves from the inside out and to return wholeness, presence, aliveness and creativity in all their relationships. I do this through listening deeply to you and to your whole being. I offer gentle guidance and embodied practices that you can do on your own in your daily life.
These practices can go along with any religious or spiritual perspective and I do invite an understanding that we are all equal, we are all love and loved and that no perspective is better than any other. It is all based on the natural systems of life and our body systems that are connected through the five basic elements (earth, water, fire, air and ether). You then get to take the practices and use them as you are inspired!
Look out for the Creating Through Change online course that you can take at your own pace, which will support you to hold sacred space for yourself and others to move with and through change with more creativity and perspective.
I’m also excited to be offering a Soul Song Circle on a monthly basis to be in harmony with others through simple soulful songs. This is on the 2nd Thursday of every month through January at the chapel at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Petoskey.
Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
I am grateful to have found a mentor myself by trusting my intuition and through a lot of learning. I have had many mentors who didn’t meet me in the past and I found my current mentor by following my curiosity and connections with patience. If you don’t feel safe, seen and respected than they aren’t the person for you, keep looking.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://hilarylake.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hilarylakehealingarts/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hilarylakehealingarts/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuqSk2ANjcv4X4r1NlrxBhg
