about melissa

Hi! My name is Melissa McConnell, and I am an artist, mother, certified Holistic Health Practitioner, and a devotee of the creative spark. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and facilitate creative containers which devote to the art of daily creative practice utilizing watercolors, somatics, creative writing, and connection with the heart and nature. 

I have been painting, creating art, journaling and being creative since I was a little girl. I became very interested in the intersection between healing, the body, and creative expression during my studies in college. In 2003, I received a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree from Fairhaven College at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. My self-designed major is called Women's Holistic Health: The Expressive Arts and Body Awareness as Tools for Healing and Wellness. This experience greatly informed my weaving of art into somatics, ritual and healing, and was an incredible base to support me in my future studies.

The year after I graduated college, I enrolled at the Heartwood Institute in Garberville, California, where I became certified as a Holistic Health Practitioner (HHP). Here, I completed a twelve-month, full-time, 1000 hour program in Zen Shiatsu, Polarity Therapy, Swedish and Deep Tissue Massage, Somatic Emotional Clearing, Myofascial Release, Cranial Sacral Therapy, and Whole Foods Nutrition. At the time of my training, I was creating art daily in my journal and thus was born my unique understanding of art, healing and somatics. (My art and creative writing practice supported me SO deeply during that year, and really highlighted the importance of creativity as an essential tool on the healing journey!) 

I practiced massage therapy for many years, and held licenses in both WA and OR. I also completed a Sacred Doula Training at Breitenbush Hot Springs in 2013. I traveled the world to Europe, SE Asia, and India several times, always with my journal and watercolors in tow. 

In 2018, when I moved back to my hometown and began preparations for becoming a mother, I felt called to stop doing massage therapy and focus on my art practice. My partner and I conceived our daughter Runa in the fall of 2019 after I embarked on an ancestral pilgrimage to Ireland and the UK in the summer of that year. The journey of becoming a mother has been humbling and profound. I feel like I’ve been preparing for it my entire life, and mothering has really put all of my studies into practice! 

Through all of this, I have become even more deeply in love with art as a vehicle for healing and for the integration of profound rites of passage. Over the years, I have had many people tell me that they wished they could devote to their personal art practice in the ways that I do. I realized that I could share my unique blend of art, body awareness, healing, and daily creative practice with others. In 2016 and 2017, I taught Art as Ceremony at two different women's gatherings (Spirit Weavers Gathering in CA and OR, and Sisters of the Tide on Orcas Island, WA). This class was a blend of my art practice with meditative tea ceremony. These were my first times sharing my unique process with others.

For the last two and a half years, I have been teaching art classes online from my home. In these, I weave in so much of what I learned through receiving my HHP Certificate, my BA, and my whole life's art practice. I absolutely cherish the opportunity to help others connect with their creativity and resource nature, the elements, intuition and the body for inspiration.