hey you, i’m mick
My name is Shannon McLeod — but I go by Mick.
I've always been drawn to shaping things.
For years, that impulse lived mostly in the physical world — building furniture, renovating spaces, working with wood and tools and materials. I loved the process of taking something rough or unfinished and slowly finding what wanted to emerge.
Over time, I realized I was drawn to another kind of shaping too. The invisible kind. The energetic and emotional architecture of being human.
I'm fascinated by the ways our nervous systems adapt. Our bodies carry stories — patterns, protections, grief, and longings that quietly shape how we move through the world. I became focused on what allows a person to feel more open, more grounded, more fully alive. What helps love move through someone with greater ease.
That curiosity led me into my own long healing work: therapy, meditation, energy work, community healing, and eventually training as a Somatic Channeling Practitioner. But more than any modality, it has been lived experience that has shaped this — burnout, grief, connection, loss, nature, and the ongoing practice of learning how to come home to myself more fully. I spend a lot of time near water. Each morning, as I greet the day, I feel the presence of my heart warrior ancestors beside me — and I vow to make love my guidepost. I believe the land teaches us things our minds can't quite reach on their own.
In building, you work with the grain of the wood rather than against it. You learn to listen carefully to the material in front of you. You create stability and enough support for something beautiful to emerge naturally.
I believe people are much the same.
Underneath the coping, the striving, the armoring — there is an essential self that is already whole. Loving. Expressive. Connected. Wise. My work is about helping people reconnect with that self. To feel more inhabitable to themselves.
More able to rest, feel, soften, and receive. More able to let who they actually are come through — without working so hard to protect it.
Because when the nervous system finally feels safe enough, and the body no longer has to hold everything so tightly, something begins to emerge on its own.
And it tends to be beautiful.
Acknowledgements
As a settler of Scottish descent, I am grateful to live and work across two territories. In Toronto, I am on the lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, covered by Treaty 13. In Hastings County, I am on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Wendat, Mohawk, and Algonquin peoples — Algonquin title here has never been ceded by treaty. I honour the enduring presence of all these peoples and commit to supporting land back and rematriation in whatever ways I am able.
I have deep gratitude and reverence for my teacher, Taylor Unjaara Bratches, who developed Somatic Channeling and has spent years honing it into a rigorous, living practice. What she has given me — a framework for this work, and the trust to carry it myself — is not something I take lightly. She has also built something rare: a genuine community of practitioners committed to bringing this medicine into the world with integrity. I am honoured to be part of that lineage.