When Melissa was approaching her 40th birthday, she took stock of her life and realized she hadn’t been fully living it. Although her life looked stellar from the outside, she felt like a hollow girl in a woman’s body, performing life and hiding shameful secrets. In a soul-searching conversation with a long-time friend she admitted that she’d been running from her calling for 20 years and that it was time to uncover it.
 
Their conversation launched her into the mysterious unraveling of life as she’d known it. She began to study Core Energetics. She experienced a crisis and awakening during that time, which she writes about in her memoir, Unguarded. Her journey led her to become a Core Energetics practitioner and faculty at their Institute. She’s also studied Cultural Activism at the Orphan Wisdom School, Sexological Bodywork with Pamela Madsen and Energy Healing with Lynn Kreaden.

Growing up in Georgia, the daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher, Melissa learned that her sexuality and erotic connection to her body were not to be celebrated but submerged in the hidden corners of the basement. Separation from nature and internalizing the patriarchal view of dominion over others further exiled her instinctual spirit-child.
 
But now, several decades later, her hollow girl has been filled with the truth of her own body. Her sexuality and spirituality have been reclaimed from the dark corners they were once relegated to. Hand in hand with her spirit-child, Melissa continues to whisper her longings to invisible beings, animals and rocks and knows they are speaking back to her. She is deeply rooted into self and devoted to her erotic, wild nature, living radiant, unguarded and wide open.