"Healing proceeds from the depths to the heights."
—C. G. Jung
In depth psychotherapy, we cultivate a relationship with the Self in its largest sense—the totality of our souls, including parts of ourselves that have been rejected. We approach this larger Self with respect and patience, with intelligent inquiry and honest curiosity. Read more . . .
My psychotherapy practice is grounded in a Buddhist perspective. I’ve studied and practiced Tibetan Buddhism since 1988, and have found meditation practice to be extremely valuable in my therapeutic work, offering many ways to cultivate wisdom and compassion. Read More …
The root of inner work is a deep attention to what’s happening in your body in the present moment—directly experiencing your process as it is, rather than thinking or talking about it. When you inhabit your body, you are living consciously in this very moment. Read More …
Inner integrity is our basic nature—the effortless emotional wholeness that is our human birthright. When we tune into our direct experience as it actually is in this moment—not what our heads think about it, but what we actually experience—we find ourselves acting in alignment with life, rather than wrestling with it.
Sounds simple? It is—and yet it’s not. Most of us have years of practice in dissociating from our inner experience, or in struggling to control it. Somewhere along the way we started believing that life is too painful to fully accept and experience just as it is. Somehow we became convinced that we are too much, or too little. We started shutting down, judging ourselves (or others), criticising ourselves (or others), filtering our raw experience through a subconscious tape loop of old voices.
The therapeutic work I do aims at clearing away this confusion so that we can reconnect with our actual experience. As a presence-centered psychotherapist, I blend the insights of depth psychology with the tools of meditation practice to focus on the truth of the present moment.
Talk therapy excels at articulating your head’s version of your painful life. This work is the next step: bringing your awareness down into your body with conscious compassion, so that you can know the full range of your emotions—your shadow, your pain, your longings.
To be able to stay with your own experience and allow it to be just as it is—this is the practice of awareness and compassion combined. Healing comes about through relating to your problems and yourself with the spacious awareness that is your basic nature. Releasing the illusions of control as expressed through the addiction to answers and agendas, you learn to embrace the flow of life as it arises in each moment.
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“When the time comes for the ego to set forth on its journey toward wholeness, strange and paradoxical things happen; fate chooses strange emissaries. . . But when we grow wiser we learn that the disasters of life are often the genius of the unconscious, forcing our egos into a new experience of the self.”
We come to learn that while we can’t control what life brings us, we can deal with whatever comes up. When we are solidly grounded in our body and able to experience the free flow of our own emotions, we gain a powerful sense of our own being–our strength as well as our vulnerability. Working from this calm center of inner awareness, we find ourselves increasingly able to accept life’s challenges. Difficult experiences transform us as much as we transform them, as we learn to navigate our way through life with grace and an increasing sense of wholeness.
Opening more and more fully to our own experience, we gain a sense of peaceful grounding within ourselves, and the confidence to allow whatever arises to manifest. The end result is inner integrity—our complete and undivided self, the whole self, shadow and light.