Michael Sala
/Michael Sala
Spiritual Mentor and Yoga Teacher
Michael is a retired LICSW who spent the majority of his 20-year career working with children. His interests expanded over time as he adopted a more holistic view of well-being. Michael became a yoga instructor, Thai bodyworker, and an energy medicine practitioner. After a perspective-changing, mystical experience while on a yoga retreat in 2007, he added spirituality to his growing list of pursuits. From 2013 to 2015, Michael enjoyed a sabbatical from working life while moving across the world to live in Mumbai, India. Upon returning to Minnesota, his passions expanded again to include end-of-life care. He volunteered and worked full-time as a hospice social worker for three and a half years. Michael currently works as a classroom assistant at a Montessori preschool and is also a death midwife. All of these roles and experiential learnings contribute to the ways in which Michael moves through and attempts to serve the world.
Michael completed the Sojourners Spiritual Guidance program in 2017. From this, he added to his skills and tools from the mental health field to utilize the knowledge within spiritual frameworks . He begins with a foundational belief in every individual’s True Nature (spirit, soul, core health, etc.) that is concealed in each of us by socio-cultural conditioning and other life experiences. Our True Natures can be revealed to ever greater degrees over time through both persistent practices and sudden insight. Michael is interested in exploring the apparent paradox of the need for self-love and self-acceptance just as we are and for the simultaneous need and desire we feel for change and growth.
As a yoga teacher since 2007, Michael focuses his yoga classes on gaining a better understanding of the innermost self. He strives to make his classes accessible, emphasizing that you can practice yoga just as you are. You are enough just as you are. You can accept yourself just as you are. And through your practice, you can discover more of who you are. While Michael takes yoga practice seriously, he also likes it to be fun.
Spiritual Mentoring
Many of us believe that we are more than our manifested embodiment and intellect, that we exist more meaningfully as spirit, soul, energy, awareness, consciousness, or some other ethereal term. Spiritual Mentoring offers companionship and guidance to explore and cultivate greater attunement to the spiritual aspect of life. It can be pursued with or without influence from other religious tradition and beliefs. As an analogy, you might think of religion as a map outlining a particular route to spirituality, whereas Spiritual Mentoring functions more like a compass - a useful tool whether you are following a map or forging your own path.
Spiritual Mentoring offers supportive guidance from a spiritual perspective just as a counselor, psychotherapist, or life coach brings expertise from those particular fields. Like other types of counseling, Spiritual Mentoring can help you to address certain issues, move through life challenges or transitions, and pursue goals of personal development. However, it’s not necessary for you to have a definable problem or objective. Spiritual Mentoring might simply (or complexly) be an avenue to deepen your relationship with the Sacred, however you conceive of it, or perhaps to help you to explore, identify, and articulate how you conceive of it. Sessions can look different, depending upon your needs, personal style, and the topic at hand. We can simply maintain space for you to be in touch with your true nature and see what comes forth. Whatever that idea, intuition, emotion, message, or image is, we can be curious about it, nurture it, and otherwise shine light on it. Alternatively, more directive techniques might be incorporated, such as gentle questioning and prompting, providing alternative perspectives, suggesting tools to try, or proposing resources to investigate.