I'm Karli McNeill. I spent fifteen years inside a major U.S. utility before leaving in April 2026 to build the leadership practice I couldn't find from the inside. My work helps leaders build the nervous system regulation and decision-making capacity their organizations have been quietly waiting on. It's translated through corporate experience and rooted in the healing practices of my lineage.
For fifteen years inside corporate energy, I watched smart, capable people walk into meetings already activated, running on a kind of low-grade urgency the metrics couldn't account for. I watched non-emergencies get treated like fires while real crises required the opposite kind of attention. And I watched wellness initiatives roll past it all without ever quite reaching the layer where the work was actually happening.
I left to build what I couldn't find from the inside: leadership work focused on the regulation, capacity, and clarity that has to be in place before any other initiative can hold.
Years ago, I was the leader the wellness program wasn't reaching. I was sitting in those same meetings, walking into those same activated rooms, carrying more than I had language for. I tried therapy. I tried fitness. I tried the strategies a high-functioning professional reaches for first. They helped, just not all the way.
What actually moved the needle was different. Breathwork. Somatic practice. The ancestral healing traditions I'd inherited but never named. The tools that sit outside the corporate wellness vocabulary, and that quietly do the work the conventional ones can't reach.
Somewhere in that process, I came to believe something the wellness industry hasn't quite caught up with: this kind of work doesn't have to live on a retreat. It doesn't require linen pants on a beach in Bali, a weeklong sabbatical, or stepping outside the life you're currently in. (Full disclosure: I would love to be on a beach in Bali right now.) The people who need it most are often the ones who can't take a week off to find it. They're the ones leading meetings, holding teams, making decisions inside the actual hours of their actual lives. The practice belongs in those hours, too.
I'm also a working parent of two boys with complex medical needs, navigating my own neurodivergence and chronic conditions alongside their care. My nervous system has never been theoretical. It's been the ground under everything I've learned about regulation, capacity, and what it actually takes to lead from a body that's working with you instead of against you.
I name all of this not as disclosure but as context. The leaders I work with often discover, somewhere in our work together, that the gap between how they're expected to perform and how their body actually operates is the gap their wellness program isn't closing. I know that gap from the inside, and I built this practice to meet it.
I don't separate the formal training from the lived experience, because they were never separate.
There are a few clear ways into the work.
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"Why Your Wellness Program Isn't Working" — a survey-based brief built for L&D, People, and ERG leaders.
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