work from an integral view of psychotherapy.  In essence, this integral view honors our painful experience of mental, physical and emotional distress and also recognizes that we are far more than our suffering. We are more than our “egoic identifications”—our likes and dislikes about ourselves, others and the world we live in.  We are more than our fears and anxiety, more than our depression and our fixations, more than our addictive impulses and our anger.  Yet when we are caught in the tenacious grip of painful thoughts, sensations and emotions, we feel utterly bound by and even imprisoned by theses chains of experience.  We want relief from suffering—from trauma, loss, grief, agitation, confusion, paralysis, bewilderment.  But for painfully long periods of time—days into nights, weeks, months and not uncommonly even years —we can feel as if there is no way out.  We can feel like there is no one who could ever understand our experience.

Then there comes a turning point when the suffering is no longer tolerable.  It is too much to hold alone.  At this often delicate, humbling, and vulnerable crossroads, we become willing to take a risk to get the help we need.  We need help accessing our own internal resources.  We need help learning new ways of being with ourselves and others and the world we live in.  We need to be able to lean into the support of another person in order to cross what can feel like an unbearable and oftentimes even un-nameable undertow of distress.  Often we need permission to practice living from the freedom and fullness that is our birthright.  To pacify the insidious cycle of suffering, we first need to be heard.  Through a basic willingness to relate, with a trusted, accomplished and competent guide, we are able to take the leap and begin to cross what appears to be an ocean of anguish.

What is needed in this precious window of opportunity is a reliable ground of compassionate exchange and genuine wisdom.  My job is to help you connect with and resource that ever-present and continuous stream of compassion and wisdom—through our therapeutic relationship, through your work between sessions, and through an increased awareness of your direct experience.  Your role is to risk the journey.

From my view, it is right within this experience of misery and our awareness of it that genuine healing, transformation, and growth can take root.  The moment we admit defeat, the possibility of true victory in life can be won.  We stand ready to contact the depths of love.  That glimpse contains an ocean of wisdom.  Resting within that ground of love, we are able to realize our potential.

In large part, effective counseling and therapy is about helping someone who is caught in a cycle of suffering to do two things: to access openness in order to approach that suffering with loving kindness, and to instill compassion in order to work with that suffering from a place of wisdom.  There are a host of effective therapeutic techniques and methods to access openness and instill compassion that I have trained in, including cognitive/behavioral work with core beliefs, somatic work addressing sensory experience; humanistic/transpersonal work addressing how we give meaning to our lives; family systems work with multigenerational streams of habitual patterning; couples work on intimacy, attachment, gender issues and sexuality; and expressive arts work that taps the creative spirit.  Perhaps my greatest strength as an integral practitioner of the healing and therapeutic arts is my capacity to precisely identify and employ those particular methods that will best suit an individual client.  Based on your particular needs, style, goals, culture, beliefs, history, aptitudes and comfort zone, I will help you to summon great courage, patience and diligence to inquire into the feelings, sensations and thoughts that suffering and its alleviation are composed of, so that new pathways of fulfillment open up for you.