Meet Mel Morris
Your Courage & Authenticity Guide
This work begins where self-help ends
Hi, I’m Mel and my philosophy is simple, your transformation begins when you remember your worth. My work exists to help you trust yourself again, not “fix” you, you don’t need fixing.
The work I do here is about rebuilding the relationship with the person you have always been. The one under the fear. The one beneath the performance. The one who knows what is true.
Self-trust is not a theory.
- It’s a lived experience.
- It sounds like: I can handle what comes next.
- It feels like: I am safe in myself again.
- It becomes: I move through the world like I belong to my own life.
My work lives at the intersection of courage, belonging, and identity, and that’s the foundation that This Is What’s Next and Shine Sanctuary is built on.
Why I Created A Sanctuary Space
There are plenty of programs and religious institutions that tell you how to change in their image. What I’m building is a space for you to discover who you want to become and why you want change for you alone.
Shine Sanctuary is where that growth can thrive and gives your journey a community to explore within. It’s a spiritual home for rebuilding trust in yourself and living with courage. It is not about perfection, purity, or performance. It is a place for you to become yourself.
Inside this sanctuary, we practice:
- Truth over performance
- Nervous system over hustle
- Alignment over obligation
- Courage over approval
- Spiritual growth over religious constraints or self-help gimmicks
This is where you learn to meet your own life with both feet on the ground.
How I Came to This Work
My path was not a straight line, pretty, or painless. I’ve lived through seasons that could have ended my story entirely. I learned to rise by trusting myself one truth at a time.
As a mixed-race, gay, late-diagnosed ADHD woman who has survived trauma, burnout, identity rupture, systems that were not designed for me, and the quiet ache of becoming someone I had never seen modeled, I know the struggles of continuously having to reinvent myself to survive.
It’s taken decades of personal work, trying and failing, and starting over to learn that the journey looks different for everyone – there’s no perfect path or quick fix to buy. Every turning point taught me the same lesson:
Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is choosing yourself while afraid.
And that’s what I offer to others, lived experience, understanding, and safe spaces to try, fail, and get back up again even wiser.
I don’t lead from theory. I lead from embodiment.
Where My Work Lives
These are the spaces where my work takes shape. Each one reflects a different way to rebuild self trust and practice living with courage in real time.
Shine Sanctuary
A spiritual home for courage, community, and coming home to yourself.
Soul Sessions
Private intuitive work for clarity, internal shifts, and next step alignment.
Project: Becoming
Group coaching to rebuild self-trust & alignment with who you’re becoming.
Speaking
Keynotes and workshops for audiences ready to trade fear for courage.
My Background & Experience
You deserve to know who is guiding you and why this work is safe in my hands. For over 30 years, I’ve trained, coached, taught, and facilitated in environments where courage wasn’t a luxury, it was survival. My work has lived across nonprofits, higher education, community advocacy, and leadership development. I’ve led programs for:
- Nonprofit and corporate leadership teams
- LGBTQ+ organizations and statewide advocacy campaigns
- College departments, student programs, and DEI initiatives
- Grassroots groups building safety and belonging from scratch
I’ve trained hundreds of professionals, facilitated groups of 10 to hundreds, and built programs that continued long after I left.
I served as a Department Director for Diversity in higher education and later as a Statewide Public Education Campaign Manager for Pennsylvania’s marriage equality movement. I’ve built programs for people who were told their voice didn’t matter, then watched them lead rooms they once shrank in.
This isn’t theory for me. It’s lived experience. It’s professional experience. It’s earned experience.
You’re not just held. You’re held by someone who has stood where the work actually happens.
Why Work With Mel
Not because I promise certainty. But because I teach them how to stand steady in uncertainty.
Not because I remove discomfort. But because I show them how to navigate it without abandoning themselves.
Not because I make them fearless. But because I help them become brave.
This work is not about becoming someone new. It is about remembering your truth and learning to live it.
And we’ll definitely have laughs along the way!
If something here resonates, you don’t need to decide your forever. You just need a next step.
