Unbridled Change: How a Coma, a Horse, and the Language of Animals Rebuilt Her Life – An Interview with Michelle Holling-Brooks

What does it actually mean to find your way back to yourself — when you never knew yourself to begin with?

That is the question at the heart of this remarkable conversation with Michelle Holling-Brooks. After a coma at thirteen erased every memory, every feeling, and every sense of identity she had ever known, Michelle had to rebuild her understanding of what it means to be human from the ground up. What she discovered along the way through horses, trauma work, somatic healing, and a profound connection to intuition became the foundation for everything she does today. 

As a trauma-informed specialist and intuitive healer, Michelle helps others find the same secure, soul-level connection to themselves that once saved her own life. This is a conversation about survival, yes — but more than that, it is about what becomes possible when we stop just enduring life and start fully living it.

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I’m very curious to hear what was happening in your life at the age of 13, and then what changed everything?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: Thirteen is definitely a pivotal year for anyone. It’s that time when you’re going into middle school, trying to figure out who you are, and beginning to break away from childhood. For me, though, thirteen became a defining year in a much deeper way.

I was heading into my eighth-grade year, trying to navigate all of those typical teenage changes, when I was bitten by a mosquito carrying equine encephalitis. The virus entered my brain and caused viral encephalitis, which then also led to viral spinal meningitis at the same time. So I was dealing with two extremely serious viral infections simultaneously—and that combination created what I like to call a very unhappy brain.

Almost overnight, I went from being a typical, gregarious kid—out playing, having fun, and living a normal life—to being a child in a hospital bed, in a coma, with a halo brace on my head. The doctors were preparing my parents for the possibility that I might not wake up. And even if I did, they told them they had no idea what condition I would be in.

That moment changed everything.

Did you know it was a mosquito bite, and how long did it take before you went into a coma?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: I’ve been told the timeline because one of the things that came out of that coma was that it wiped my memory completely—I’ll talk more about that in a moment.

From what I’ve been told, it happened incredibly fast. That morning, I was feeling sick, complaining of nausea and a headache. By that evening, I could barely move. I was vomiting, had an extremely high fever, and my condition was deteriorating quickly. It also happened to be Halloween.

My parents rushed me to urgent care, and from there I was transferred to the hospital. Once I was admitted, things kept getting worse. At first, the doctors didn’t know what was wrong with me. Eventually, they performed a spinal tap, and when the culture came back, they were able to identify the infection.

At the time, I had been horseback riding. We didn’t own horses—I rode at different stables—but a group of horses had just returned from a show in Florida. I was living in Northern Virginia then. There had been an outbreak of Eastern Equine Encephalitis among horses in Florida, and what doctors later concluded was that a mosquito had likely traveled back with those horses, bitten me, and my body simply couldn’t fight the virus.

That’s when I slipped into a coma, which lasted seven days.

My goodness. As a parent, that must have been terrifying. You mentioned that the coma wiped you clean—do you mean you have no memory from before the age of thirteen?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: Yes. When I was in a coma, a number of things happened in my body. The swelling in my brain from the encephalitis and the meningitis created immense pressure. The meningitis caused swelling around the brainstem, while the encephalitis caused the brain’s lining to swell inward. Both areas—places that should never experience such pressure—were under extreme stress.

As a result, I woke up deaf because fluid had built up in my ears. If you listen carefully, you can still hear traces of that in my speech. I went through years of speech pathology and rehabilitation. It took about two years for my hearing to return.

When I first woke up, I was also blind—but not in the way people usually imagine. It wasn’t darkness. It was what I describe as white blindness. Everything looked like an overexposed photograph, and the light itself was incredibly painful.

I was also paralyzed from the middle of my back down. I couldn’t move my legs at all.

Those physical challenges were severe, but the most profound thing was something else entirely. When I woke up, I had no sense of self. There was no “Michelle.” There were no memories, no reference points—nothing.

I didn’t know I was human. I didn’t know what a human was. I had no understanding of language, identity, or the world around me. The only thing I knew was that I had awakened in a place that felt overwhelming, painful, and impossible to communicate within.

That was the world I woke up to.

Could you speak?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: No. I didn’t know how to speak. All I could do was make guttural sounds.

I know you’ve told this story many times, but I’m hearing it for the first time, and it’s like I’m right there at the bedside, wondering what is going on. How long did it take for you to heal into the person you are now, and what kinds of modalities or resources were used along the way?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: I always like to pause at this point and invite people to do something that might sound a little unusual—put yourself in my shoes. Not literally, of course, but emotionally. Because in some way, you’ve already been there.

All of us have experienced moments of feeling unseen, unheard, or misunderstood. We’ve all had times when our bodies didn’t cooperate the way we wanted them to, or when we felt powerless in our circumstances. So as I share this story, I often remind people that you probably have more in common with my experience than you might think. The difference is that in my case, it was very physical and visceral, while for many others, those experiences happen internally.

When I first woke up, I was completely reactionary. My body was in a constant state of fight, flight, or freeze. At first, I tried to fight—that’s simply what our bodies do when we’re overwhelmed and terrified. But I had a halo brace on my head, IVs everywhere, and medical equipment attached to me, so when I tried to fight, the hospital staff had to restrain me.

Of course, I had no idea they were trying to help. I didn’t understand that anyone was attempting to communicate with me or care for me. All I knew was that whenever I tried to reach for something or do something that felt like it might help me, I was restrained and immobilized.

So the conclusion my mind came to was simple: Earth was a place where you were overwhelmed, shut down, and completely alone. No one was coming to help. No one was going to figure it out.

That became the cocoon I settled into.

Eventually, though, I began noticing patterns in the hospital environment. I started sensing and tracking the energy around me. At the time, I called them “shadows,” because that’s what they appeared to be.

Those shadows were actually people.

Over time, I started recognizing when certain shadows would enter the room and what they wanted. If I did what they expected—let them poke me, move me, or examine me—they would eventually leave me alone. I even discovered there was a button I could push that would bring one of those shadows into the room.

But I didn’t experience myself as separate from anything. I had no concept of “me” versus “you.” As far as I understood, the entire hospital and everyone in it were part of the same thing—and I was part of that too.

You can imagine how confusing and overwhelming that was.

There were three particular shadows, though, that felt especially difficult for me. Over time, I began sensing them from a distance before they even entered the room. I could feel that they desperately wanted something from me—but they weren’t getting it.

It felt like something was constantly reaching toward me, pulling at me, asking me to respond in some way. But I didn’t know what they wanted.

Those three shadows turned out to be my mother, my father, and my sister.

They wanted their daughter back. They wanted their sister back. They wanted the Michelle they knew. And of course, they were terrified and overwhelmed themselves.

I always say they deserve to tell their side of the story, because I can only describe what it felt like from my experience. But from my perspective at the time, their energy didn’t feel safe. It felt desperate. They wanted something from me that I didn’t know how to give.

That created a lot of tension for me, because those were the energies I felt the least safe around.

Eventually, about three months into this process, my body had stabilized enough that the doctors said medically I could go home. I had figured out basic things, like eating when they wanted me to, and my body had become organized enough for discharge.

So they sent me home.

But when I left the hospital, I was still blind. I was still deaf. I was still paralyzed from the middle of my back down. No one knew whether I would ever speak again, or even interact meaningfully with the world.

In the hospital, I had adapted to the rhythms and patterns of that environment. My system had synchronized with the routines, the sounds, the movements of the place.

At home, everything was different.

Now I was surrounded by the three energies that felt the most chaotic and overwhelming to me. And the space itself was filled with expectations—rooms they believed I would recognize, routines they thought would help me remember who I was.

From my perspective, it felt like entering an environment that was a hundred times more overwhelming than the hospital.

They wanted me to become the person they remembered. They needed me to come back to them as their Michelle.

But that wasn’t happening.

At that point, I had developed a very specific idea of what Earth was. To me, it felt like a torture chamber. It didn’t feel safe or welcoming in any way.

So I learned how to leave.

People sometimes ask me where I went during that time. At the time, I didn’t have language for it. I simply went into what I now call the void—complete numbness and nothingness. I didn’t know to search for anything else, so that’s where I stayed.

The first six months after the coma were incredibly difficult. I didn’t want to do anything. Physically, my body was undergoing intense changes. While I was in the hospital, I had grown three inches. I went in at a little over 5’8″ and came out about 6’1″.

That kind of rapid growth is extremely painful. My body needed more space to disperse all the excess energy it had been holding.

So I essentially became what I jokingly describe as a six-foot snake. People would move my body hand over hand when they needed to reposition me. I stopped fighting. I stopped trying to engage.

Because I was deaf and blind, I didn’t feel the need to interact with anyone.

What people around me didn’t realize, though, was that I was communicating constantly. I just wasn’t doing it in the way they expected. I believed I was talking to them—but I later learned it wasn’t happening verbally.

I was communicating on a completely different level.

At the time, I didn’t understand that. I simply assumed I was speaking normally. Eventually, I realized that what I thought was communication wasn’t happening through spoken words at all—it was happening on an entirely different wavelength.

So that was my world at thirteen.

And it remained a pretty dark place until a moment when I returned to the barn again—but I’ll pause there before going into that part of the story.

I don’t even know what to say. I’ve never heard a story like this before. I just feel so bad for you. And to think that I’m talking to you now—you’re talking to me, you can see me, you can hear me. Obviously, there has been a massive transformation in your life. So what happened next?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: As I said, I was willing to participate—but not really. If someone picked up my hand, I would push my wheelchair, but the moment they let go, my hand would just drop. I had no desire to do anything on my own.

Even the idea of remembering felt like a four-letter word to me. If anyone came into my space carrying that expectation—trying to get me to remember—I would send out what felt like a very strong, energetic wave that basically said, “No.” It was not a pleasant response.

Eventually, though, my parents began exploring different possibilities. This was back in 1990, so honestly, I’m still amazed they came up with the idea they did. Someone suggested therapeutic horseback riding. I had loved horses before everything happened, and one of the physical therapists thought maybe reconnecting with horses might help spark something in me.

My dad was very against the idea at first because, in his mind, the barn was where I had gotten sick. But at the time, he was on active duty during Desert Storm, and my mom used that moment to move forward with the idea.

She reached out to the barn where I had been riding before and asked if they would be willing to bring me back.

The barn staff was hesitant. They told her, “We’re not a therapeutic riding barn. We’re a full-fledged show barn—a jumper barn. Our horses are high-strung off-the-track thoroughbreds. We’re not sure this is a good idea.”

But eventually everyone agreed to try, including my dad.

So they packed me up, and we headed back to the barn.

And by the way, at this point, could you hear? I know you were sensing things energetically, but were you able to hear voices or distinguish what people were saying?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: No. Everything sounded like it was underwater.

I had so much fluid in my ears that sounds were distorted. You know that feeling when you’re underwater, and you can hear muffled, garbled noises—but you can’t actually understand what someone is saying? That’s exactly what it was like.

If someone made a loud enough sound, I could feel the vibration of it and sometimes turn toward it. But most of the time, I didn’t even want to do that. I usually kept my head down.

By that point, they had figured out that if they kept very dark glasses on me—the kind that completely cover the eyes—and a baseball cap pulled low over my face, I wouldn’t make those guttural sounds of pain.

So they kept me in the dark glasses and the cap, because it reduced the pain from the light.

Another practical question—were you able to take care of yourself at that point? Were you feeding yourself, going to the bathroom, showering, or did someone have to take care of you all the time?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: By that point, I could feed myself if someone positioned me correctly. If they sat me up and nothing pushed against me, I could stay upright.

But if I tried to reach for something—because I could still move my arms—I had no core strength at all. Imagine trying to sit upright with no abdominal muscles to steady you. The moment I reached for something, I would tip over.

So they would tie me to the chair to keep me upright. Sometimes they even had to secure me to other things, so I wouldn’t fall. Wherever someone placed me, that’s basically where I stayed.

Technically, I could move if I wanted to—dragging along what I jokingly describe as a six-foot snake behind my arms—but I didn’t want to. There was nothing in that world that made me want to move toward anything.

Until the day we went to the barn.

One thing many people don’t realize is that scent works through a different neurological pathway than memory. Smell can access memory through a kind of back door in the brain.

When the barn door opened, and I smelled it, something happened for the first time since the coma.

I felt familiarity.

It was the first sensation that felt recognizable. I knew that smell somehow, even if I couldn’t consciously remember why. And suddenly I wanted to know what it was.

For the first time since the coma, I lifted my head.

When they picked me up to put me into the wheelchair, I didn’t fight it. Instead, I felt curious—almost excited. I didn’t know where we were going, but I wanted to find out.

They wheeled me around the corner into the barn. If you’ve ever been in a show barn, you know they often have a large center aisle with stalls on both sides. This one had Dutch doors, with the top half open so the horses could put their heads out.

The barn was dim and shadowy, which actually helped my eyes because the light wasn’t so painful. But at that point, I was still perceiving the world mostly through my energetic, intuitive senses.

About four stalls down on the left, I suddenly saw what looked like this brilliant yellow, sparkling highlighter—just this radiant light. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

In reality, it was a dark bay Thoroughbred named Schedule A.

But to me, he was pure light.

And in that moment, I recognized something. I recognized a being.

It was the first being I had recognized since the coma.

I lifted my hands for the first time and wheeled myself toward that stall. I crashed into the stall door—which normally would have scared an off-the-track Thoroughbred—but it didn’t scare him at all.

Instead, he reached his head over the door and pulled me in close.

For the first time since the coma, I reached out willingly. I touched him. I opened myself to the contact. I buried my face into his neck, and he simply stood there with me.

He held me.

It was the first touch I wanted to receive—and the first touch I wanted to give back.

And in that moment, something inside me shifted. I thought, Okay… I’ll give this Earth thing a try if this being is here.

Luckily, my parents didn’t take that personally. Instead, they recognized it as an opportunity. They saw that I wanted the horse and realized it might be the key.

Schedule A, and I were having a very different kind of conversation than what everyone else thought was happening.

He was helping me find myself again.

He helped me find my way back into my body. He helped me reconnect with who I was.

I started riding him three or four days a week. Over time, things began returning. It took about a year and a half, but by the winter of my freshman year of high school, I was trying out for the basketball team and running again.

It took another year for my hearing and eyesight to fully return through my five physical senses. During that time, I relied heavily on my intuitive senses to fill in the gaps.

That’s a whole other story in itself.

But ultimately, the thing that brought me back to life was a horse—a beautiful Thoroughbred named Schedule A.

And the feeling from your chest down—or from your waist down—did that come back gradually, or was it sudden? How did that process unfold?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: It was definitely gradual. What happened was that once everyone realized I was willing to do things with the horse that I wouldn’t do anywhere else, they started leaning into it.

My parents spoke with the barn owner and the instructor, and they came up with a plan. They dusted off an old Western saddle—because every English barn has one somewhere—and they basically did the same thing they had done with the wheelchair.

Now, I always say this very clearly: don’t do this. It’s not safe. But they tied me into the saddle so that if I slipped, I wouldn’t fall very far.

Again, not something anyone should actually try.

But Schedule was incredible. If I started slipping to one side, he would stop and wait. Someone would come over, lift me back into position, and we would continue. If I slipped too many times, they would eventually slide me down and say, “Okay, she’s tired.”

But because I didn’t want to get off the horse, I kept trying.

What I was essentially doing was shining a flashlight on parts of my nervous system that had been damaged. The horse’s rhythmic movement, combined with my desire to be there, began waking things up in my body.

And that’s a really important point for me. It wasn’t just mechanical therapy—someone moving my body on top of a horse. It was a connection.

I wanted to be with Schedule, and Schedule was attuned to me.

That relationship is what allowed my nervous system to start healing.

After about six months, I was able to walk using a walker. Six months after that, I was mostly out of braces. And from there, things continued improving.

So yes, riding helped physically move my body. But the deeper healing came from the relationship—the connection I had with him.

I’m somewhat familiar with equine therapy. I’ve been around horses a little bit, but I don’t have the kind of awareness or connection you’re describing. For someone like me, how would you explain that? What kind of connection are you talking about?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: It’s a soul-level connection.

Think about whether you’ve ever had an animal in your life where you could almost feel a thread between you—even from far away, like you could think about them and feel that connection tug.

Have you ever experienced that?

Yes.

Michelle Holling-Brooks: Exactly. And when you feel that connection, if you were struggling, could that animal sense it?

For me, one of the reasons this connection was so powerful was that I didn’t have a human mind getting in the way.

My memory had been wiped. I didn’t have all the conditioning telling me what animals are supposed to be, or how humans are supposed to communicate with them. I didn’t have an idea of what was real or not.

So when people later tried to explain those rules to me, I was confused—because my direct experience told me something different.

Let me give you an example.

By this point, I had become a little more mobile. I was wearing walking braces, and I had a friend who lived next door. Her family was also military, so there was a sense of familiarity and safety there. One morning after a sleepover, we were sitting at their breakfast table eating cereal.

Their family cat suddenly threw up.

I thought I heard the mom say, “Why did the cat just throw up?”

And I heard the cat answer, “Because of the divorce.”

Now remember—at that point, I was basically like a one-year-old mentally. I didn’t really understand the language or meaning yet. I just repeated things the way children do.

So while eating my Cheerios, I casually said, “Because of the divorce.”

The entire room exploded.

The dad knocked something over. The mom froze. My friend elbowed me—which made me fall over—and suddenly everyone was staring at me.

And I was confused. I thought, That’s just what the cat said.

Then it hit me.

They hadn’t heard the cat say that. They hadn’t even heard the question the same way I had. None of the communication I was experiencing was happening in the way they perceived reality.

And that’s when I realized something important: I didn’t yet understand the difference between what I was perceiving and what everyone else was perceiving.

That’s what was happening with Schedule too.

We were communicating in these beautiful ways—energetically, intuitively—but the people around us couldn’t see or hear that exchange.

And that made things complicated.

You have such an extraordinary story. I know that at the age of 23—about ten years later—you went through another profound season of transformation, which you begin to share in your chapter in Sacred Bonds. We’ll talk about that in a moment, but briefly—what was happening in your life at 23?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: From the moment with the cat onward, I essentially lived in two worlds. There was the world I experienced at the barn, and then there was the human world.

The horses taught me an important lesson: if you fight the human world, it usually doesn’t go very well. Their message, in a sense, was, Give them what they want, and they’ll leave you alone. Then you can go back out to the field. The more you fight, the more difficult things become.

That was their experience as horses in a lesson program—and it ended up being my experience as a teenager returning to high school after such a massive illness. I had been the strange kid in a wheelchair, and then suddenly I wasn’t. High school students don’t always know what to do with something like that.

I often refer to the ten years that followed as my years of abuse—and much of that abuse was self-directed. Imagine being someone who openly says, “I don’t know what I don’t know.” If someone came up to me and said, “Michelle, this is who you are,” I would accept it. If they said, “This is who you need to be so people won’t ridicule you,” I tried to become that.

It was not a healthy ten-year period.

By the time I was twenty-three, I was exhausted. Schedule had passed away, and he had been my anchor. A relationship I believed would last forever had just ended. I reached a place where I thought, This is just pain. I don’t see any reason to stay in this torture chamber.

So I tried to end my life.

I took a handful of pills and collapsed on the basement floor of our apartment. That’s when another animal—my dog, Baron—saved me. He licked into my mouth while I was unconscious and triggered a vomiting reflex.

I woke up lying in my own vomit.

But in that moment, Baron showed me something. I had a vision of a beautiful being of light—very similar to what I saw the first time I looked at Schedule.

And Baron said, Why don’t you love her the way I do?

He showed me this being and said, This is who you are.

My first reaction was disbelief. That’s not me.

But animals don’t lie. So I had to stop and consider it.

I didn’t recognize that version of myself. I didn’t know who she was—but I suddenly wanted to.

I went upstairs, took a shower, and pulled the pieces of pills out of my hair. Then I wiped the fog off the bathroom mirror and looked at myself. All I saw were hollow eyes staring back.

And I made a promise.

I said, I don’t know where you are. I don’t know who you are. But I’m going to find you.

I was speaking to that soul—the one Baron had shown me.

That was my awakening moment.

But as many people know, the awakening moment is only the beginning. After that comes the work. The trials. The “lions and tigers and bears,” so to speak.

Schedule had helped tether me back to Earth and helped my physical body heal. But after that moment at twenty-three, I committed myself to finding that deeper part of myself.

I went on what I call a seeker’s journey—studying somatic work, trauma healing, shamanic practices, parts work, and wisdom traditions. If there was a classroom teaching something about healing or consciousness, I was in it. If there was a book, I was reading it.

I was trying to piece myself back together.

You’ve shared a chapter with us in the book Sacred Bonds: Heartfelt Stories of Mothers and the Lives They Shape, which will be released for Mother’s Day 2026. I’m honored that you contributed to it. In your chapter, you share a very intimate moment—a meditation you experienced while holding your daughter about seventeen years ago. You describe feeling like you were about to take a universal exam for a class you never signed up for. Many parents know that feeling.

What did you learn about nurturing—both nurturing your daughter and nurturing yourself—during those early days of motherhood?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: That was my biggest fear.

I knew how to survive. I knew how to endure. I even knew how to create success. By that point in my life, I had become very accomplished in the field of equine-partnered psychotherapy and had worked my way up to becoming one of the leading practitioners in that field.

I was functioning almost like a machine—learning, producing, accomplishing, and helping people.

But nurturing life? That was different.

Up until then, I had mostly been trying to figure life out—trying to “hack” it, understand it, and help as many people as possible along the way. I was good at rescuing people, pulling them out of their metaphorical fires.

But that’s not the same thing as nurturing.

Motherhood confronted me with that truth. For a long time, I had been told that my body might not even be able to carry a pregnancy. Because of all my previous trauma and illness, doctors considered my body a “hostile womb environment.”

So when I became pregnant and the pregnancy actually held, it was frightening. And then suddenly she was in my arms.

And I remember thinking, Oh no.

This little being was completely dependent on me. She couldn’t go get her own water. She couldn’t meet her own needs. She needed me to nurture her.

And I realized—I didn’t know how to do that.

What motherhood became for me was an invitation to learn how to nurture. To nurture her, to nurture myself, and to allow her to nurture her own life.

When I talk about nurturing, I mean truly being present with life—the beautiful moments, the messy ones, the sadness, the anger, the disappointment. Being willing to stay present with it all.

Our souls want us to be in life.

For a long time, I believed spirituality was about transcending the human experience—about climbing some ladder toward enlightenment. I studied Buddhism, Taoism, and many other traditions that suggested we were meant to rise above the dense human experience.

Eventually, spirit challenged me.

It asked, Why would you be in a body if you weren’t meant to be in the body?

That question stopped me.

And that’s when I began waking up to the energy of nurturing.

Honestly, I don’t think I would have discovered it without becoming a mother. That responsibility opened something in me.

I believe nurturing is an archetypal healing force that flows through mothers of all kinds—biological mothers, adoptive mothers, stepmothers, mothers to animals, plants, communities, and creative work.

Interestingly, the same month my daughter was born, I also founded my organization, Unbridled Change.

Once that nurturing energy awakened in me, I wanted to give life. I wanted my life to become a channel for life itself.

And that’s something I never would have believed about myself before that moment.

What shifted for you when it came to nurturing a child versus nurturing an animal? You clearly had this deep connection with animals and a love for them. What was different about nurturing your daughter?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: Because I actually specialized in working with abused and neglected animals, helping them rediscover themselves and find safety again. So someone could easily say, “Michelle, you were already nurturing. You were already mothering.”

But that’s not how I experienced it.

When I worked with animals, I approached it more as a facilitator. I was there to hold space and guide the process, but I kept myself just slightly to the side—almost in a clinical position. There was always a subtle distance between me and the experience.

In my chapter, I talk about how spirit eventually invited me to look at that distance. What was that buffer about? Why was it there? And most importantly—did I still need it?

Earlier in my life, during what I call the “years of abuse,” that buffer was absolutely necessary. It protected me. But the question was whether it still needed to be there.

Motherhood challenged me to examine that.

I didn’t want to be clinical with my daughter. I didn’t want to simply check the boxes and guide her from point A to point B. I wanted to truly connect with her.

And the truth is, before that moment, my heart wasn’t fully open. It had a very solid layer of armor around it. Even though I had beautiful connections with animals—and even with plants and stones—there was still a slight separation.

After Schedule died, I didn’t want to feel that kind of pain again. It hurt too much.

So I kept a protective layer around my heart.

Motherhood invited me to soften that armor and allow myself to enter into a true relationship with another being.

You include a prayer in your chapter that says:
“Please help me remember I am my own mother. I have the power to nurture within. Help me remember that I can always ask for spirit’s help. The same golden thread will continue to connect me with the parts of me that are lost. Help me remember that this medicine is always within me, and that if I forget, my body remembers the way there, too. Help me continue to trust in my body’s wisdom to guide me in, through, and back to my true self.”

I’m curious about that phrase—the wisdom of the body. What is the body’s wisdom, and how can it guide us when we’re feeling overwhelmed or uncertain?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: The body’s wisdom was actually one of the last forms of wisdom I learned to trust.

For a long time, I saw my body as a problem. I felt like it had betrayed me. I believed it had made my life incredibly difficult. In many ways, I saw it as the thing that tethered me to a world I didn’t even want to be in.

Because of that, I couldn’t see its brilliance. I couldn’t recognize that it had healed itself, that it had survived, that it kept working on my behalf even when I didn’t appreciate it. My body was actually this incredible sanctuary for me—but I couldn’t see it that way.

Over time, through living life and eventually becoming a mother, I began to notice something different. I realized my body was always moving me in ways that were connected and intelligent.

It was my mind that would pull me out of that connection.

My mind would create stories. It would backpedal. It would disconnect me from what my body already knew.

But my body always had the attuned response. It knew how to move toward something, set a boundary, and respond with care or protection. It knew what was needed in the moment.

What blocked that wisdom was conditioning.

Once I began to see that, the prayer became a reminder to myself: My body knows the way. Even if my mind insists, “I don’t know how to do this.”

There were many reasons I believed I couldn’t be a nurturing mother. I had a complicated relationship with motherhood itself. The version of Michelle who woke up after the coma almost experienced her mother as someone who had “lost her child,” because the child she knew was gone.

So the idea of motherhood carried a lot of pain and confusion for me.

But my body knew something different.

When we go on a healing journey, we begin reconnecting these parts of ourselves. We quiet the protective mind just enough so that the body, the heart, and the soul can come forward.

And when they do, they offer very practical guidance.

They show us how to move. How to approach life. How to be present.

The challenge is learning to befriend the mind so it can step back and allow these deeper forms of wisdom to lead. The mind often doubts them because they don’t seem logical.

But they are real. And they are always there, waiting for us to listen. 

Soon after having your first child, you started the nonprofit Unbridled Change. What is Unbridled Change, and how do you help people through it?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: Unbridled Change was born in 2008, the same year my first daughter was born. At that time, the main focus was equine-partnered psychotherapy.

Along my healing journey, I discovered that while I love helping the body heal—and I still do bodywork and energy work—the body already knows how to heal itself. The real obstacle is usually the mind getting in the way.

Because of that, I initially felt most comfortable helping people through the doorway of the mind. And, to be honest, after my experience with the cat and the kinds of communication I had encountered, I felt safer presenting the work through a scientific framework—through the psychotherapy side of things.

So the original mission centered around equine-partnered psychotherapy, along with teaching and coaching to help people move through their healing process.

Seventeen years later, Unbridled Change has grown significantly. Horses will always remain part of the work because they were my first teachers. They helped me learn how to bridge the gap back to the heart.

But over time, that bridge expanded. The work now also includes energy work, coaching, and spiritual transformation—helping people reconnect with themselves and their deeper purpose.

At some point, the horses basically nudged me out of the barn. They seemed to say, “Go share this more widely.” So I began stepping onto larger platforms—online, speaking, teaching—reaching people who might not have a direct connection to horses but still want to reconnect with themselves.

Our mission as a nonprofit is simple: to support as many people as possible on their healing journey so they can fully live, love, and lead their authentic lives.

Who are the people you work with most often? What kinds of challenges bring them to you?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: People usually arrive through two main doors.

The first is emotional and psychological. Many people feel separated from themselves—like there’s a heart wall in place. They may feel numb or disconnected after life experiences, often involving trauma.

On the equine side of the nonprofit, we primarily work with children in foster care. We also partner with programs supporting veterans and individuals in recovery. Those groups are very close to my heart.

And that’s at your facility in Virginia?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: Yes. Most of that work happens at our facility in Virginia. Occasionally, we also offer workshops that are open to the public, and I travel to train groups or speak at events when people invite me.

The second doorway into the work is the coaching and spiritual transformation side. For many years, the people coming to me through that door were struggling with physical symptoms—chronic issues where trauma had become trapped in the body.

They had often tried everything: integrative doctors, therapies, treatments. By the time they reached me, they usually felt like they had hit a wall.

They would say something like, “I’ve tried everything, and someone gave me your name. I don’t know what you do, but maybe you can help.”

And I would say, “Great. Let’s start by listening to your body.”

For me, that’s natural, because the language of the body was my first language. English came later. My original language was energy—the language of body and somatics.

That’s where we begin.

What excites me now, though, is that people are starting to find this work earlier in their journey. For a long time, I was the last stop—people arrived when everything else had failed.

Now, more people are coming before things completely fall apart. I think collectively we’re waking up to a deeper understanding of holistic health.

For a long time, holistic health was simplified to “mind over matter.” But that’s only part of the picture. The full equation is mind, body, and spirit.

And now people are beginning to ask: What is the spirit part of this? Why does it matter?

That question is incredibly exciting to me.

When I finally regained my physical health, my body was functioning—but I was still just surviving. Then I began healing my mind after the experience with Baron.

But something was still missing.

What was missing was my true voice—my heart, my soul. Not the version of me shaped by trauma or by my past, but the version of me that exists right now.

And I believe that’s what we all want. We want to feel that authentic part of ourselves. We want to share it, and we want to recognize it in others.

When we reconnect with that part of ourselves—that’s where the real power for healing lives. 

I’m just imagining these Zoom coaching sessions with a horse standing behind you, maybe with its head resting on your shoulder. That would be amazing!

Michelle Holling-Brooks: There actually kind of is one behind me right now, so maybe you’re picking up on that. I think you mentioned you’re starting to learn to channel, so you might be sensing them. There are actually quite a few of them back there.

I’m thinking there could be a special option—here’s the donation level: if you want Michelle and a horse on the call, that’s the premium package.

Michelle Holling-Brooks: That would be great.

You use a framework in your work called the Bridges of Connection. What does that framework involve?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: I love frameworks, probably because for a long time I didn’t have one. My experience of the world was very loose and fluid, and I was constantly trying to make sense of this thing I call “Earth School.”

A good framework gives you something to hold onto—and then eventually you can let it go.

The Bridges of Connection framework is based on how our nervous system works, especially in early relationships.

Let me ask you something—you have kids, right?

Yes.

Michelle Holling-Brooks: When your children were little, what conditions needed to be present for them to feel safe showing up exactly as they were—fully themselves?

Well, I’d probably need to be emotionally regulated. I’d have to be present—not distracted or thinking about my to-do list. And I’d need to respond with empathy.

Michelle Holling-Brooks: Exactly. That’s perfect.

Your child needs to be able to predict what they’re going to meet when they walk into the room. They need to know you’ll be present. They need to know they won’t be judged or shamed for expressing themselves.

Maybe they walk into the room twirling in circles or wearing five mismatched layers because they’re excited to go to a friend’s house. They need to know that what they’ll meet in that space is curiosity, care, empathy—even if you still guide them and say, “Okay, that’s a beautiful outfit, but maybe we can edit it a little.”

When a child knows they will be met with that kind of presence, they can walk into the room fully connected to their true voice every time.

But when that predictability disappears—when they don’t know if they’ll meet curiosity or judgment—they start changing how they show up. They begin performing versions of themselves to try to maintain a connection.

And I always want parents to pause here for a moment, because none of us do this perfectly. We all miss the mark sometimes. The important part is repair—coming back with compassion and reconnecting.

Compassion and forgiveness are key energies in this process.

The bridge itself works like this: we create that same environment within ourselves.

Can we become that parent in the room for our own inner experience? Can we meet ourselves with curiosity, empathy, and care—while still offering guidance and boundaries?

That’s the first pillar.

The second pillar is respecting and honoring ourselves. Are we willing to treat ourselves with the same dignity we would offer someone we love?

The third pillar is dialogue. Can we have an honest conversation with ourselves? Can we question things, explore them, push back a little?

That’s actually how I interact with spirit. When guidance comes through, I don’t automatically say yes. I ask questions. I explore it. Spirit isn’t offended by that—it simply says, “Take your time. I’m here.”

When we create that kind of internal relationship, something powerful happens. We start connecting with our real selves—not the version we think we need to be to please others, and not the version that avoids getting into trouble.

We show up authentically.

And when that happens, the fifth pillar emerges: purpose. Our deeper reason for being here.

That purpose is about bringing balance, healing, love, and joyful service into the world.

You see it in a simple moment between a parent and child. A parent feels joy watching their child be themselves, and the child feels joy seeing their parent delight in them. That energy amplifies itself.

That’s the bridge of connection.

And it doesn’t have to be perfect. Just like we don’t have to be perfect. When we notice one of those pillars wobbling—maybe we’re being harsh with ourselves—we can pause and bring compassion back in.

The bridge reconnects.

Trauma and attachment wounds often separate us from ourselves like an ocean dividing two pieces of land. But a bridge can grow across that distance. It allows us to return.

I found my way back from a place where I didn’t even know who Michelle was.

In fact, there was a time when hearing the name “Michelle” made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like her. I didn’t want anything to do with that identity.

Now I can see the light within that name and hold it with compassion. Because it’s not the entirety of who I am—it’s just one part of the story.

And the deeper question becomes: Who is the soul behind it?

You’ve been holding up a few cards from your new deck, The Sacred Witness Oracle Deck, which comes with a guidebook and connects to your book Trauma-Informed Enlightenment: Awakening to the Healing Power of the Sacred Witness. Who is the book for, and who would benefit from the deck and guidebook?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: The book is really like having me in a box. When people use the full set—the book, the oracle deck, and the guidebook—it’s almost like sitting down and working with me over the course of six months to a year.

Together, they guide someone through that bridge of connection we talked about earlier. The process begins with befriending the body—learning to see the body differently and waking up to what it means to listen to the body as both a witness and a partner.

From there, we begin to befriend the mind. I always say the ego isn’t the problem. The real issue is the way it sometimes operates in a protective manner. I call that the lone wolf protector—a part of the mind that has been out there guarding us by itself for so long. The work is about inviting it back into a relationship.

As that happens, we can open the heart.

In the heart space, we start meeting the parts of ourselves that carry the imprint of past experiences—the parts that feel lost, separated, overwhelmed, or caught in what I call the trance of unworthiness. Those parts can finally be seen and healed.

Ultimately, the journey leads us to the soul—to who we truly are and the gifts we came here to share.

The entire system—the book, the deck, and the guidebook—is designed to be a companion for someone on that healing path. It’s meant to support people who want to awaken to their true nature through the power of what I call the sacred witness.

One thing that’s really important to me is that this work is about embodiment—not escaping the body.

In the early years of my own healing journey, I spent a lot of time trying to transcend the body. Then the spirit eventually caught my attention and said, “Michelle, you’re disembodying.” You’re meant to embody.

And I remember thinking, Oh… what does that mean?

So this work helps bring people back into their bodies in a grounded, trauma-informed way. It’s very practical. The book includes somatic practices and step-by-step guidance.

And over time, as people deepen into that relationship with themselves, they naturally open up to intuition—learning how to sense and trust their own inner wisdom.

Yes, I can do intuitive readings for people, but I like to think of those readings as jumper cables. They’re just there to help spark the connection.

Ultimately, I want people to be able to read for themselves—to trust the wisdom that already exists within them.

That’s my biggest passion right now: helping people wake up to their intuitive nature and integrate it into everyday life.

Do you have the book and deck there so we can see them?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: Here’s the book—Trauma-Informed Enlightenment.

And here’s the Guidebook for the Oracle Deck. It’s actually a full-size guidebook, not one of those tiny little booklets with eight-point print you can barely read in dim light.

Inside, each card has a short meaning for quick reference—just a paragraph explaining the core message. But then it goes much deeper. Each card includes somatic reflections, shadow work prompts, and practices to help you embody the lesson.

For example, if a card comes forward about releasing an old identity, the guidebook will offer both the meaning and a set of exercises to help you explore that transformation more deeply. It also references sections of the main book, so you can dive further into the process if you want.

The system is designed to operate at multiple levels.

You can pull a card and simply reflect on the word or message. Or you can go deeper—using the practices, reflections, and teachings to support your healing journey.

Everything is there for you, depending on how deeply you want to explore it. 

And what’s the best place for people to find the book, the deck, and the guidebook?

Michelle Holling-Brooks: The best place to start is my website, UnbridledChange.org, which serves as the main hub for everything. Since Unbridled Change is a nonprofit, the site also offers a variety of free resources where people can explore the work more deeply.

From there, visitors will find links to the book, the oracle deck, and the guidebook. Once Sacred Bonds is released, that will be linked there as well, so people can easily find it. You’ll also be able to find it through your website and through the other wonderful contributing authors.

People can also connect with me on social media—YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook—depending on where they prefer to spend their time.

And of course, through UnbridledChange.org, people can also book a session with you directly.

Michelle Holling-Brooks: Yes. At the moment, I do have a waitlist for private sessions. However, there are still several ways people can work with me.

I offer on-demand courses and ongoing small-group programs. For example, right now I’m running a group of about 10 people who are working through Eden Energy exercises together. Participants receive teachings from the course materials, and then we meet weekly so I can help them tune into what’s happening in their bodies and refine the practices.

So there are many different entry points—from larger programs to small group work and semi-private experiences.

Michelle, you are amazing. I’m so grateful that you’re here on this Earth with us, helping people, helping animals, and sharing this work. Thank you so much for joining us today and for everything you’re doing.

Michelle Holling-Brooks: Thank you. I’m really grateful to you as well for creating this beautiful community. From the books to the magazines and everything you’re building, you’re helping spread so much light and love.

So thank you—to you, to your partner Mindy, and to your entire team—for everything you’re doing.

All right. Be sure to check out Michelle’s books Trauma-Informed Enlightenment, the Sacred Witness Oracle Deck and Guidebook, and of course, the upcoming book Sacred Bonds, releasing on Mother’s Day 2026. Michelle, thank you again.

Michelle Holling-Brooks: Thank you.