We’re Erica Ando and Michelle A M Miller
We honor the life you’ve built and the strength it required.
We also built full lives that required self-override. Then we started asking different questions — about worth, identity and what it’s like to live a meaningful life.
Erica grew up as the child of immigrants and learned early to set the bar high and keep raising it — through owning a design business, solo parenting and now caring for aging parents. Chronic health issues made the old pace impossible.
Michelle is the daughter of an immigrant mother and an American father. She absorbed early the pressure to excel at everything — work, studio practice and years of caregiving — until her mental and physical health nearly gave out.
When our bodies stopped cooperating with our ambitions, we had to ask deeper questions.
Not about productivity, but about conditioning.
About how immigrant striving, cultural narratives and nervous system adaptations shaped the way we worked and lived.
Erica draws on decades of somatic study and mindfulness practice to understand how striving gets wired into the body — and how it can be unwired.
Michelle draws on decades of journaling, meditation and training as an End-of-Life doula to ask what actually matters when time is finite — and what is simply inherited pressure.
We stopped overriding ourselves and began building lives that didn’t require self-abandonment.
That's the work we now do with others at INTERVAL PAPER.
About Us
Erica Ando, PhD (she/her) is a certified somatic educator and writer whose work explores the relationship between achievement and self-worth. Drawing on three decades of study in the Feldenkrais Method and meditation, she works with reflection, embodiment and nervous system awareness to shift long-held patterns of striving.
Earlier in her career, she owned a design business whose clients included the MoMA Design Store, Takashimaya and design galleries and boutiques across the U.S., Asia and South America. Her writing has appeared in more than 25 international publications, including artpress (Paris), Aesthetica (London) and BOMB (New York). She has worked with more than 1,000 students and clients across nine countries. She co-founded INTERVAL PAPER and co-created The Good Enough Guide.
Michelle A M Miller (she/her) is an artist, writer and End-of-Life Doula whose work explores memory, mortality and meaning through reflective practice. Drawing on decades of journaling, meditation and thoughtful inquiry, she creates spaces for people to engage life’s hardest questions with honesty and care.
Her artist books are held in more than 20 public collections, including Harvard University and the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. Her work has been supported by the Puffin Foundation, Women’s Studio Workshop and Atlantic Center for the Arts. Through her project Room for Dying, she has guided more than 100 community members in death awareness conversations exploring our finite lives. She co-founded INTERVAL PAPER and co-created The Good Enough Guide.