Something deeper is calling you. My work is to help you hear it clearly, and to tend the parts of you that have not yet answered, or don’t know how to walk the new territory it is leading you into.
Whatever brought you here, the approach is the same at its root. We work with the whole of you: psyche and spirit, body and story, the inner life and the life you lead in the world.
Now in my sixties, I come to this work as an elder. I have walked many paths and trained in many ways of healing: somatic psychotherapy and Internal Family Systems, bodywork and dance, meditation and ceremony, and years in the working world as a human resources director. Over a lifetime those threads have woven into one cloth. That weave is what I bring: the breadth to meet you wherever you stand, and the depth to go all the way down with you.
Who I work with
I work with people who are ready to do the work. Most of them have already built something: a company, a practice, a marriage, a spiritual life. They have ground under their feet, and they want to know what lies beneath it. Or the ground that once held them firmly has started to groan: a hairline crack, a tremor at night, a hollow sound where there used to be stone.
If you are a founder, entrepreneur or executive, you built the life, and now it is asking something of you that strategy cannot answer. Perhaps success came at a price, and the parts of you that paid it want to be heard. Perhaps you’ve reached the middle of the road and success needs to mean something different. Perhaps a marriage is ending, or the children are leaving home, and the old answers about purpose no longer hold.
If you are a therapist, coach or healer, you hold others all day, and few places hold you. You want somewhere to go deeper in your own work, or to learn from the inside out with someone who has walked the edges of this field: someone to consult with, learn from and be mentored by.
If you walk a spiritual path, you have a practice, and it has carried you far. Something in you knows it is time to live closer to the sacred, in the body and in the ordinary hours of your day.
If you stand at a threshold (a loss, a midlife turn, an ending or a beginning), you need an elder who has crossed this ground before and knows where it holds.
Again and again, people come to me after years of sitting across from other therapists, circling the same ground and never reaching the center. Many of them are brilliant, and over the years many of my clients have been members of Mensa. A mind like that can talk its way around anything, and it often has: around the grief, around the small one waiting at the bottom of the well. It needs a companion who can follow every turn of the maze and keep walking toward the center, where the way home has been waiting all along.
What lets me walk that maze is more than intellect. I carry four decades of trainings and ceremonies, teachers and clients, woven into one cloth by an elder’s hands, so when one map runs out, another is already unfolding. Beneath the knowing runs something older: a deep care for the person in front of me, and a thread that ties me to my own greater Source. That thread is what holds when the path drops into the dark.
Everyone is welcome here. Whatever your race, politics, beliefs, orientation, gender, age, religion or ability, you are welcome as you are.
Some conditions call for specialized clinical care, such as OCD, eating disorders, active suicidal thoughts or addiction. If that is your struggle, or if my rates are beyond your means right now, I have several seasoned colleagues you can reach out to today.
How I work
At the center of my work sits Neoshamanic Internal Family Systems: Internal Family Systems woven together with the body and the sacred. I work with the psyche and the spirit in the same session, because you live in both at once, and both are too often left at the office door.
Internal Family Systems (IFS), sometimes called parts work, gives us a map of the inner world. We meet the protective parts that got you this far, the driver, the critic, the pleaser and the one who can never stop, and we come to know them instead of fighting them. Behind them wait the parts they have spent years guarding: the tender ones and the playful ones, the grieving ones and the ones who needed rest and never got it. As those parts come home, you begin to lead your life from your deeper Self.
For a founder, those protectors often built the company. For a therapist, they often keep the practice running. They have worked overtime for years, and they are tired.
Most of our wounding happens in relationship, so healing must happen there too. That is why the bond between us is the ground everything else grows from. Deep work is vulnerable work, and I hold that vulnerability with care. At the root of this work is my deep conviction that your core self is vibrant and whole. Pain, old burdens and ways of operating in the world that come from protective parts can snarl the thread that runs to it. My work is to help you ease the knots loose so that thread runs clear again.
We spend much of our time inside your experience rather than talking about it from the shore, staying with sensation, feeling and thought as they rise, including the parts that feel hardest to face.
The body is part of every session. Sensation, breath, posture and movement carry wisdom the busy mind can talk right past. In person, and where it serves the work, I may also use psychotherapeutic touch, a specialty I have practiced and taught for many years.
Some thresholds need more than insight. Ritual marks what the mind alone cannot mark: an ending, a vow, a beginning, a return. Journeying and expanded states open doors that thinking cannot reason its way through.
If you have tried therapy and it only took you so far, you are in good company. I am a licensed psychotherapist, trained in somatic psychotherapy, but I work beyond the limits of the field: ritual, journeying, expanded states, and the old ways of knowing the clinic left out.
Some come to me after years of IFS therapy or trauma therapy. Some come for Internal Family Systems coaching. Some come for executive coaching that reaches below strategy, into who is doing the leading. Some come to learn the work themselves.
We look at the whole of your life, because all of it feeds your wellbeing: the inner world of thought, feeling and belief; the outer world of work, family, culture and community; and the unseen world of energy and spirit.
Medicine weaving
When people hear medicine work, most think of psychedelic therapy: psilocybin, ayahuasca and the other plant medicines or the chemical medicines like MDMA that have moved from the edges of culture into the headlines. Those are medicines. But so is movement. So is breathwork, authentic relating, music, nature, community, and so is deep relationship, the kind where you are finally met. Medicine is whatever heals.
As a medicine weaver, I work with many medicines and help you find the ones that are yours. For some, that means preparing for their own plant medicine journey and weaving what it opened into the life they go home to, the work often called psychedelic integration. For others, the medicine is breath and movement, or the company of people who see them whole.
I am a member of Soul Full Bloom™, an entheogenic church and a spiritual community, designed for those who feel the call to remember who they are, trust the answers within, and free themselves from somatic turbulence and survival cycles.
Ways the work takes shape
- One-to-one guidance, for founders, executives and anyone ready to go deeper
- Retreats and rites of passage, for thresholds that need deep medicine
- Eldering the elders, for people in their later years stepping into the role of elder, with someone who has walked that ground
- Consultation, teaching and mentoring for therapists, coaches and healers: Neoshamanic IFS consultation and training in psychotherapeutic touch, with mentoring for those bringing the sacred into their practice
- Talks and trainings for organizations, conferences and professional groups
What I believe
Integration is the path to peace. Inner conflict comes from parts of us we have not yet reconciled. Compartmentalizing buys a little relief, but it is a patch, and patches wear through. Weaving the inner, the outer and the unseen together is what lets us feel whole.
The mundane is sacred. Bathing a child, stirring the soup, sorting the recycling, holding a door open: ordinary acts become holy when we recognize them as such. Every person carries a spark of the divine, and seeing it softens us toward one another. When the sacred drains out of everyday life, something in us goes missing. The old healers called it soul loss. Today it sounds like running on autopilot, moving through meetings and inboxes like an automaton, efficient and far from home. Bringing heart and spirit back into the working day, in the boardroom and the therapy office alike, is part of how we find our way back.
Each of us has a Wise Self. Even our most troublesome behaviors are attempts to meet valid needs. When the wounds underneath them heal, our own wisdom comes forward to lead.
The burdens we inherit
We carry burdens that were never ours alone. Internal Family Systems calls them legacy burdens: beliefs passed down through families and cultures until they feel like the way things simply are. Four of them shout loudest in the people I work with.
- Hyperindependence teaches us to need no one. Yet biologically we are social creatures, built to steady ourselves in one another’s presence. A life built on going it alone leaves the nervous system braced and hungry.
- Patriarchy harms men and women alike. It hands each of us a role before we can speak, the man who must never falter and the woman who must always tend, and it snips every thread in us that does not fit the pattern.
- Capitalism measures success in money and possession. It keeps us reaching for the next acquisition and devalues joy, pleasure, rest and the satisfaction of enough.
- Racism divides us. It tears the one cloth of humanity into pieces and teaches the pieces to fear each other, and it wounds everyone it touches, including those it claims to favor.
These burdens live in the body and in the parts that carry them for us. They can be released, one part and one life at a time, and each release frees a little more of us to belong to one another.
Toward your own inner compass
Over the long run, my aim is to work myself out of a job. I offer what I know so you can trust your own inner compass and walk on without me, befriended by every part of yourself.
I walk beside you as a partner, close rather than at a distance, following your path as much as guiding it. I am warm and direct, with loving compassion held up by a strong backbone, and if you need a reality check along the way, I will give it gently.