Michele Kolakowski

Michele Kolakowski, LMT, CD & CPD(DONA), CLC, has decades of diverse experience serving women and babies since 1992. This passion began after watching a video of an Indian mother on the other side of the world lovingly massaging her baby outside her simple lean-to home. Michele became fascinated with the baby’s experience of touch and the transformative bonds between mothers and their wee ones. She believes how women and their infants experience pregnancy, birth, the “fourth trimester” and beyond, matters for all of us. She is an authorized instructor of Pre- and Perinatal Massage Therapy workshops and has taught maternity massage at massage schools, spas, destination resorts, hospitals, and conferences nationwide. Michele studied with a number of maternity massage pioneers before designing and teaching 150- and 200-hour maternity and infant massage certificate programs for the Boulder College of Massage Therapy and Cortiva Education. She also led a hospital-based integrative medicine program providing inpatient maternity massages to thousands of new mothers. She has joyfully attended births in homes, birth centers and hospitals. She is passionate about improving maternity care’s interdisciplinary teamwork and bringing high touch, patient-centered care practices to the care of childbearing women and their babies. She founded Sanctuary Healing Arts LLC specializing in hands-on care of women and their wee ones including massage therapy and doula care in Boulder County, Colorado. Michele is passionate about improving maternity and newborn care – one pregnancy, one birth and one new family at a time. She treasures the opportunity to help families, nurses, midwives and physicians improve family-centered care and interdisciplinary teamwork. Michele enjoys sunshine, gardening, Carolina blue sky days, hikes to the summer mountain wildflowers and lakes, her meditation and yoga practice, and being witness to her sons becoming amazing young men. Visit her at sanctuaryhealingartsllc.com