Approach

Humanistic & Client-centered

I don't like formulas. My intention is to meet people where they are and invite them to actually meet themselves there, maybe for the first time. At some point in this work doors will appear. I may catch a door's flash of color and shine a light there. It's a person's choice how they respond. Some people call this client-centered or humanistic therapy. It is founded on respect for the unique path of each individual. 

The Unconscious

My approach draws from Jungian psychology and dreamwork, contemporary psychoanalysis, body-oriented experiential therapies for treating trauma, attachment-based psychotherapy, Buddhist psychology and practice, Nondual wisdom traditions, and current research in the neurobiology of transgenerational trauma.

Most notably, my approach is guided by curiosity in the unconscious as explored by C.G. Jung, contemporary psychoanalysts such as Christopher Bollas and Michael Parsons, and mystics and pioneers of consciousness from all times and places. Relating to what is unconscious has many entryways: it can be literally felt in the body, met in our projections onto others, and experienced in nature, altered states of consciousness, and many kinds of dreams. This kind of inner work, often dismissed as intangible or unreal by mainstream culture, carves channels to a boundless source, reminding us that the most private and individuated aspects of our experience are inseparable from life as a whole. Although many of us live in a time of unimaginable technology, vague distraction, and over-saturation, the simplicity of turning inside to listen within silence is always there. Perhaps it always feels risky. “That sweet night: a secret,” writes St. John of the Cross in Dark Night of the Soul. “Nobody saw me;/ I did not see a thing./ No other guide/ Than the one burning in my heart.”

Given the runaway train of what neuroscientists are now calling the ‘default mode network’ (essentially the untrained mind), and the kind of global circumstances this human mind creates, I often wonder if the future of our species rests on cultivating the capacity to stand back and witness the river of experience on one hand, and intimately relate and respond to/with/as it, on the other. "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you," says the gnostic gospel of Thomas. But “if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” C.G. Jung wrote in a similar vein about what is at stake: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Meditation and the Wilderness

After a spontaneous awakening experience that blasted everything open and gone for a few hours during a depression at the age of 13, the secret was out. I knew like Emily Dickinson must have known: “I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you- Nobody- too?” But I had no way to stabilize, let alone grasp what had happened to me until I formally learned how to meditate when I was 22. Someone sitting next to me at my brother’s wedding mentioned there was a place one could live without cost for ten days, wake at 4 am, take a vow of silence, and learn the Buddhist method of vipassana, a Pali word that means ‘to see things as they really are.’ I was sold (maybe it was the mandatory silent part because I was painfully shy) and sometime during those excruciating ten days that thing cracked open again, but this time didn’t stitch back up. There was a boundless reservoir of love— ‘I’ was not what I had imagined myself to be, and the world was no other than this ‘I.’ I had the context of a practice to hold it now, and so much support, visible and invisible. Of course this proved to be only the beginning, like breaking through the clouds only to discover it was actually a lesson in a special kind of kindergarten. Over and over the mystery continues to unfold anew.

In the midst of sitting a number of Vipassana meditation courses in my twenties, I lived, worked and trained at S.N. Goenka’s center in rural England. While I was there, I learned how wily the mind is and how boundlessly quiet its quiet (I also learned how to chop onions so I wouldn't cry— and that people in spiritual communities including myself are as psychologically knotted and creviced as anyone). Over fifteen years later, I've benefited beyond description from a handful of teachers in both the therapeutic and spiritual worlds and continue to be surprised: body-oriented trauma psychotherapists, Thai Forest monk and shaman Ajahn Jumnian, vision fast guides, Jungian analysts, and Adyashanti to name a few.

In 2020 I began individual study with a Zen master in the Sanbo Zen lineage. It is a lay branch of Zen that focuses on awakening, or kenshō, continued training with a teacher in koan study, and the ongoing path of embodying and personalizing and clarifying this awakening in the daily life of 10,000 things in this human form with all its twists and turns and imperfections— a path that I’ve been taught (and I sincerely believe) never ends.

I'm intrigued by wilderness rites of passage. After doing my own vision fasts with guides in Death Valley, I birthed a desire to train with the School of Lost Borders in 2012. I'm interested in the vividness of relationship we unwittingly step into with everything that is unresolved inside us when we are in wild spaces. And what comes up is unexpected, whether it’s disowned pain or beauty, unhealed knots from past generations, both/and what is emerging to be seen and felt in collective humanity right at this moment. Perhaps we need nature to re-member our fractured selves as much as it needs us to do so.

As a therapist, I'm inspired by my own inner work, whether in koan or meditation practice, my personal Jungian analysis, or the continuous, spiraling conversation with everything that arises in me in relationship to other people, dreams, the written word, body sensation, and the non-human world. Sitting with old trees and old rocks and mountains has guided me, over and over, in ways I cannot intellectually understand.

I'm also a mother. The never-ending practice of caring for my children laughs at the idealist in me, showing me again and again what an infallible, absurd, whole human being I am, in a different kind of wilderness. As I travel along the groove of daily life with chaos on all sides, then looming from within, how do I meet what comes my way? How do I totally freak out, smile (even if I’m not totally smiling), knowingly shake my head, and love the truth of right now, again and again?