I’m trying to change the world through personal development.
My name is Meryl. I'm a Somatic Sex & Intimacy coach based in Brooklyn, and I've spent the last five years helping people get out of their own way and into their own lives.
I am not a blank screen. I bring myself into the room - my heart, my history, my own ongoing process. I will tell you the truth about what I see, with deep love and zero judgment. My friends call it "loving, hard truths." I call it the only way I know how to be.
“Meryl has excellent experience and training, and always knows how to make progress with me. But the key to success for me has been the mutual trust that we developed together. That trust comes from her authentic desire to connect with me, understand me, and help me from a place of empathy.”
Here's something you should know about me: I will send the food back. Not rudely. With a genuine apology to the server that they have to face the chef, and a "it's not your fault, I just really hate cold soup."
I can hold the hard thing and the warm thing at the same time.
I've been told that quality makes people feel safe.
I think it comes from spending a long time learning to tell the truth about how I was actually doing, what I actually needed, what I actually felt in my body. I couldn't see where it was heading at the time. I just kept following what felt like the right next thing.
“Working with Meryl was like having dedicated time each week to meet with your most empathetic, intuitive friend and talk about life.”
For most of my adult life, performance was my profession.
I spent 13 years training as an opera singer - impossible standards, playing a role in the most literal sense. Then I bartended for over a decade, and I was still performing. Just in a different costume.
I had a version of myself ready for every interaction. Charming. Capable. Toootally fine. Showing up as the right version of myself, all day long, for everyone, and slowly losing track of where the performance ended.
I was so burnt out on performing, feeling totally deflated, when a friend gave me simple advice: when people ask how you're doing, just tell them the truth. Most people aren't really listening for the answer anyway, so what was I actually risking? The next time someone asked how I was, I told them something real. And instead of the awkward silence I was bracing for, they said: "Oh god, me too."
That was the beginning.
I've been met in my hardest moments by people who stayed.
A fourth grade teacher who let me sit in her classroom after school during my parents' divorce and handed me a journal with no strings attached. A partner who got down on the floor with me when I needed it most and held my hands until I could breathe. A therapist's office where my mother and I finally learned to see each other clearly, after thirty years of trying.
Every one of those moments changed something in me. Not because someone fixed me. Because someone stayed.
That's what I know how to do. And it's what I do for you.
I know it works because it worked on me.
I've been in my own process long enough to know the work is never really finished. It just gets richer. I didn't know it while I was living it, but all roads led me here - the precision of opera, the humanity of bartending, every moment I was met and every moment I learned to meet myself.
When I found somatics, I could suddenly hear my body for the first time. And it was loud as fuck in there. So. Many. Feelings. No wonder I'd spent so much of my life dissociated. Somatics taught me to hear it, listen to it, understand it, tend to it. Then I found parts work, and I could finally separate out each voice that had been screaming inside of me. So I could really hear. Really see myself. And really know what to do for myself.
Now, I have a cappuccino cup collection, a wall of art just for my inner child, and a cat who believes every plate of food is for her.
“Her philosophical and theoretical grounding supported my decision to be compassionate with myself, finally, which was difficult and ultimately a great gift. Her reads are consistently kind, but accurate, and help me gain not just insight but compassionate understanding and practices that allow me to stretch and flex.”
I believe that personal development is how we create societal and cultural change. Unlearning the systems that shaped you into the uncomfortable pretzel you are now. Unlearning the beliefs that you were given in order to make room for the ones you choose. The imperceptible choices you’ve been making are the residue of a world that needed you smaller, quieter, easier to manage.
White supremacy, late-stage capitalism, misogyny, fatphobia - these aren't abstract politics. They're the water we swim in. The voices that have been quietly narrating your relationship with your own worth, your own body, and your own desires since before you could name any of it. Our choices are our politics. And the way we treat ourselves becomes the standard for everything else. My hope is that you treat yourself with preciousness and compassion.
That's why this matters. That's why I do it.
I am passionate about building real trust and relationships with folks in my orbit. If you have a deep sense of wanting to shift your relationship with yourself, your partner, and your patterns let’s chat.
30 minutes, just you and me. No pressure… just possibility.
