What I Offer
I help my clients to...
Engage more intimately with a wider spectrum of experience
Discern and implement their own spiritual practice
Improve their agency and effectiveness in the real world
Resolve anxiety and relieve depression
Recover from past trauma and embrace a more spontaneous lifestyle
Understand a mystical experience or spiritual crisis
Follow a call along a path of transformation
Revise their relationships with money, intoxicants, and death
Develop rich, well-grounded friendships
Develop patterns of radical self-care
The key vehicle for our work is structured conversation. We meet regularly to talk, for a limited number of sessions. Expect significant changes within 12 weeks.
How my approach is like traditional psychotherapy
As it is for traditional psychotherapists, my primary concern is with my clients’ well-being; I seek to create and to nurture a healing relationship that will spark positive change in my clients’ outlook, behavior, and understanding, leading to increased insight and profound tranquility. Like most therapists, I use a special form of thoughtful conversation as the key vehicle for promoting and encouraging this change. I use the methods of “talk therapy” that have been developed and well-honed by the clinical community over the last several decades. Meeting regularly with clients in structured sessions, by videoconference or in person, I seek to develop a therapeutic alliance with each client, and this alliance serves as the key vehicle for transformation.
How our work together might feel different from traditional psychotherapy
1. Our approach is radically non-medical
My fundamental belief is that the wisdom and direction of your path forward is divinely inspired and is within you, although you may not be fully conscious of it. Part of my role is to bring this wisdom into your conscious awareness, as well as to reflect, guide, and facilitate your changing. Similarly, I believe that all behavior is equally “normal” and that is it is not clinically helpful to label activities as either “healthy” or “abnormal,” although it is certainly the case that some life choices can result in greater happiness and peace of mind. I do not follow a medical model -- I do not diagnose, do not prescribe medication, do not develop a treatment plan, and do not report your progress to insurance companies. I proceed, instead, on the fundamental assumption that the power of transformation, as well as the motivation for it, is within you.
2. You will take an intensely active role
The goal of my work is to help you manifest your own transformation. I do not use “manualized” methods, and do not offer “textbook” programs. Spiritual difficulty and blockage can manifest in very worldly and troubling ways – challenges in physical health, difficulties in relationships, strong emotions, anxiety, and depression. Although these signs can always be starting points for our work together, nevertheless, the long-term goal is not merely to defray symptoms, but rather to facilitate spiritual change; relief of symptoms may follow, too, but the freedom, power and confidence that also results from deep spiritual work is even more striking. Working in this way does require that you, as client, be more active and involved than you would need to be, were you the passive recipient of a standardized treatment method.
3. Our work is ambitious
Working together, we will seek significant changes to your fundamental worldview and behavior, focusing on your relationship with the immanent and transcendent. Our approach is proactive, envisioning the spiritually-based life that you want to live, and then seeking pathways to implement it. This is different than working reactively, making small changes to try to fix manifested problems.
4. Our work is spiritual
Our work together is firmly grounded in a spiritual world view. My belief is that we are each “a spiritual being, having the human experience” (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) and as such, we are primarily seeking spiritual fulfillment.
Religion can aid spiritual transformation, but it also can hinder it. A religion is a set of formalized spiritual traditions that has the benefits and shortcomings of being recognized by a formal academy. We know that spiritual transformations occur every day that are entirely without religious reference, but that others are deeply enmeshed in particular religious traditions. See Corneille, et al. (2021); Taylor & Egeto-Szabo (2017). I believe that all transformative processes share a spiritual grounding, and that while transformation is a large part of most religious traditions, these traditions have no monopoly on transformative methods. I work with people of all faiths, including many who are “spiritual but not religious,” as well as those who seriously doubt the existence of God or the basic tenets of religion.
5. Our work is transpersonal
“Transpersonal” psychology is a branch of the field that seeks to integrate our scientific understanding of human behavior with our faith in the spiritual. A fundamental tenet of this approach is that we cannot understand ourselves by focusing on our individual personalities, histories and experiences – rather we must see ourselves in social and spiritual context, recognizing each of ourselves as players in a more complex interaction. Transpersonal psychology also recognizes that interactions and influences may be important even if they cannot be readily observed. We stress the importance of “non-rational” approaches and of developed intuition; we recognize the influence of spirits, as well as the reality of clairvoyance, past lives, out-of-body experiences, and other phenomena that our current science cannot explain. We use concepts from theology as well as mystical tools.
We each, naturally, are most comfortable with what is familiar, but for spiritual transformation, there is nothing quite like encountering people, ideas and circumstances that are very different from ourselves. I encourage my clients to invite the discomfort of the unfamiliar.
6. Our work is intensive by design
You will feel prompted to take our work together very seriously, and to ride through the initial sense of disorientation. You should expect to feel more engaged and more alive, and start to see things differently, within about 12 weeks.