Mind activity feeds on itself until it creates an enormous complexity of suffering. At the core of all mind activity is a search for self-definition, but the mind searches in all the wrong places...The permanence of your true nature is recognized to be the continuous presence of awareness that was exactly the same when you were five, fifteen, fifty, or ninety years old.    —Gangaji, The Diamond in your Pocket

 

I am semi-retired and most interested in working with people who have a high degree of self-awareness and are motivated to go beyond talk therapy. I'm especially interested in individuals who are in the process of spiritual awakening and seek to integrate that with  psychological development. 

  

My approach to therapy is informed by three overarching principles:

I work holistically, assisting and teaching my clients to listen to their bodies, minds, and souls. My 50+ years of a daily meditation practice deeply influences my work. My approach is gentle, respectful, interactive, experiential, and collaborative. LGBTQ+ friendly.

 

My services include individual therapy, supervision, and consultation. I lead trainings, run a number of advanced groups for Hakomi students, and provide group supervision to clinical interns.

Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychology offers an elegant, comprehensive, and uniquely effective approach to psychotherapy, growth and change. Originated by Ron Kurtz in the early 1980s, Hakomi integrates Eastern principles of nonviolence and mindfulness with a comprehensive and experiential body-centered methodology. 

 

Hakomi practitioners use the body as a map of the psyche – a door that can be gently opened to surface clients’ implicit memories and reveal their entire unconscious belief system. The body’s structures and habitual patterns, such as gestures and posture, become powerful indicators that provide subtle access routes to evocative unconscious core material.

 

Hakomi is paradoxically powerful: it is gentle and nonviolent, yet yields dramatic and rapid results. Its highly experiential approach evokes a deep “felt sense” that allows clients to take genuine ownership of their core material, its transformation, and resulting changes.   Read More

Over the course of my participation in various spiritual communities as well as various reported incidents, it has perplexed me how an apparently enlightened being can act in abusive or immoral ways. Maharishi's teaching (and many others) maintain that once awakened, you are guided by a deeper knowledge that transcend egoic desire. 

 

Ken Wilbur and Adyshanti really helped me with this one. They suggest that spiritual development does not necessarily include psychological maturity and that it’s essential to deeply know ourselves psychologically to minimize the chances that our advanced spiritual development/state is not usurped by ego or self-centered psychological tendencies. 

 

Too often I've seen this happen.  Case in point, I know a teacher who claims to be an avatar and hence, it follows in his mind, that people should follow whatever he says because it’s divinely inspired. While someone may be living in a state of perfection, it does not mean that their thoughts or actions are perfect. I’ve seen this conflation many times with various spiritual leaders often with injurious, abusive, or traumatic results. 

 

I’ve come to vividly see that without the development of both psychological and spiritual dimensions -- and their integration — danger exists, minimally, for imbalance, and more so, for egos to subtly or not so subtly co-opt the powerful spiritual energies.. It’s a fascinating subject for me and it may motivate me to write a book or article about it.