About Michaela
Michaela Evanow is available as a guest writer, podcast guest, keynote and guest speaker, and workshop facilitator.
Michaela’s relationship with grief and embodiment began long before she had language for either. At 16, she underwent spinal fusion surgery and was told she would have to stop dancing. The surgery left her with limited mobility and ongoing pain, changing her relationship with her body and shaping how she moved through the world.
Today, this experience informs her understanding of embodiment—not as a performance of what a body can do, but as a practice of listening to, respecting, and becoming curious about the body we inhabit.
Michaela has come to understand that the body remembers. The griefs, losses, adaptations, and experiences we carry can remain with us long after we have stopped consciously thinking about them. Sometimes our bodies hold stories we have not yet found the words for.
Grief is a language Michaela knows intimately, one that was once her greatest fear. When her three-month-old daughter received a terminal diagnosis, Michaela entered a journey that would lead to her daughter’s death at age three and decades of learning to live alongside loss.
For 25 years, grief moved like a storm through her life as she birthed and mothered her four children. After the birth of her fourth child, during another difficult postpartum period, Michaela began to recognize that the anxiety she was experiencing was connected to a much deeper story. Despite years of mourning, she wondered whether she had truly begun to accept the losses she carried.
Her healing has been a long, ongoing practice of turning toward grief rather than away from it. Through conscious dance, and intentional communion with others, she has found ways to meet the fear, sorrow, anger, and love that grief holds. These practices have helped her discover that grief need not be something we overcome, but something we tend to over time.
Michaela believes we cannot diminish the power of grief by trying to fix it. We can, however, learn to live alongside it and allow it to change us—to soften us, deepen us, and move through us. With tending, the tendrils of grief can coexist with the profound beauty and goodness of being alive.
Today, Michaela brings this lived understanding into her work as Parent Faculty with the Serious Illness Pediatric Education Program at Canuck Place Children’s Hospice, where she teaches clinicians how to hold heart-centred, grief-informed conversations with parents navigating serious illness.
She also facilitates embodied conscious dance in Victoria, BC, and has practiced and attended 5Rhythms intensives for years. Her work lives at the intersection of embodiment, grief, presence, movement, and the deeply human experiences that arise when life cannot be fixed or made certain.
Increasingly, Michaela is bringing these threads together through grief tending and companionship for bereaved parents and parents whose children are living with serious illness or medical fragility. She is developing online grief circles that offer parents a place to be witnessed, to move, to connect with others, and to bring whatever grief they carry without needing to explain it away or make it smaller.
Her approach is rooted in a simple belief: grief needs tending, not fixing. And we do not have to tend it alone.
I serve as a Parent Faculty with the Serious Illness Pediatric Education Program at Canuck Place Children’s Hospice: I have the honour of using my lived experience of parenting a medically fragile child and as a bereaved mother to facilitate meaningful and grief informed conversations with clinicians across the country and train them to have an effective and compassionate Serious Illness Conversation.
My previous work as a DONA certified doula and global experiences as a traditional birth attendant, formed my great love and respect for welcoming life and death cross culturally.
I’ve had the pleasure of speaking numerous times about my grief experience to small and large gatherings.
My approach to grief tending is informed by some dear teachers: my motherhood experience, the work of Francis Weller (‘The Wild Edge of Sorrow’), Dr. Hillary McBride, and Sophy Banks.
Grief Tending Facilitation Training:
Apprenticing to Grief mentorship with Sophy Banks, Jeremy Thres, Sarah Pletts and team.
The Art of Grief Tending with Nici Harrison and guests.
My grief story.
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I began my own intensive grief work after the birth of our fourth child, and second daughter. My body could no longer maintain the crisp edges, and I began to bleed outside of the lines.
My cup was full of joy and grief that manifested as anxiety. I found I could no longer hold it all. I wanted the anxiety gone, and quickly. I was desperate for relief. The only way through it, for me, was to face it head on. Nothing else was working: medication, prayer, counselling, wine, distraction, or doctor’s appointments to address the physical discomfort.
I was deeply grieved that I was carrying so much inside of me, and it was changing my body and mental health. I could not outrun it, and I no longer wanted to. I rolled up my sleeves, while weeping, while the pandemic raged, while trembling, while nursing my baby, and dove in.
In the middle of the vast ocean of grief, I recognized I felt a kind of addiction to feeling my grief. It felt spooky and kind of shameful to say aloud. I knew other bereaved parents might feel offended. I knew it sounded strange, but it’s what made sense to me. I liked to pull off the cork and take a big gulp, feeling the depth of my pain, crying, longing and then, euphoria would flood in. It was akin to how I felt in early motherhood after being told my baby was going to die. Unfathomable sorrow in my heart, and then, pure joy in my arms.
This dipping in and out kept my memories fresh. But I needed more than letting it out. The catharsis that came after these releases left me feeling depleted, and that felt a lot like healing at the time. It was surprising to me how far down the roots of grief went, how unseen and intertwined they were. Surely grief was good? Grief was love. Life seemed to be ticking along. I couldn’t go back, could I? Who would sit, stand, rage, move through this with me now? But that’s exactly what I needed.When the acuteness of grief wears off, the stark reality sets in, the secondary losses seem to pile up and it can feel overwhelming.
I always considered myself to be a big feeler, an open book, and I had written often and honestly about my grief. I wanted to stay close to the feelings of sorrow, pain and the euphoria that comes after, because so often those were feelings I carried in my body as I mothered my dying daughter. It felt necessary and normal to keep this part of her alive. The alternative felt unbearable and I didn’t feel equipped to do it on my own, nor did I want to. I was unconsciously holding onto the grief, because I felt that if I went all the way in, I would lose a sense of connectedness with my daughter.
The emotional release I speak of can feel powerful in the moment, offering a sense of relief, but integration is what I really needed. I needed my body to fully accept this part of my story, and allow it to settle. I worked to metabolize my emotions, which essentially meant I turned toward my pain and allowed it to transform into understanding and acceptance. This process required patience (it took years), presence (I had to learn to stay with the discomfort, sensations and truth) and willingness (I had to keep showing up, when I felt good and when I felt awful).
I wanted to be fully alive and accepting of my life, experiences, body and spirit after a loss that society calls “the worst”. I wanted to find the skills and resources to fortify myself, knowing full well that I would be companioning with grief again in my life.
I remember thinking, I just want someone to hold my hand, hold my face, be with me in this, whatever this is, whatever it sounds like.
I know the loneliness that often accompanies deep grief, particularly as a bereaved parent. Having a neutral and loving witness moved the needle immensely for me in my own grief journey. No friend, parent, pastor could seem to reach me. Even counsellors didn’t feel like a good fit. It took some time, however, and I found a therapist to guide me through my compounded grief. Being on the other side, I feel such awe, curiosity and expansiveness when I look back at how I survived and coped, how my body allowed me to carry on, until there was enough room to tend to myself and the lodged grief and fear inside.It took me close to eight years to find my way back to myself after my daughter’s death. When I was able to move through the losses that came with that monumental experience, I could then turn to other grief that needed attention: physical pain in my body, death of dreams, difficult pregnancies and postpartum periods, changing faith, disappointment.
There was no framework I could follow, no checklist or formula. I had nowhere else to turn but toward myself, into the wild unknown of my inner being. I had to learn the art of nursing joy at one breast and grief at the other.
For over four years I kept turning toward the pain, learning from incredible teachers, matriarchs and guides. When I recognized that I was fully accepting my grief, it began to release its grip on me. It flowed through me, like the breeze flows right through the open windows of a home. Instead of being caught up inside, where it had no real room to breathe, the cross breeze, as they call it, gave relief.
My offerings were born out of the desire to sit with others and witness the kaleidoscope of grief in their lives.