Later in life, towards the end of my journey with my previous corporate career in healthcare (goodbye South Node, hello North Node!), I began learning about these other realities directly myself, first through meditation and Buddhist practice; then through deeper meditation practitices like Vipassana; moving into the world of psychedelics, empathogenic states, non-dual environments, float tanks, energy work, astrology, and deeper and deeper layers of consciousness and human experience.  Sprinkled with a fascination with neuroscience, neurochemistry, neurobiology ... all things brain-related.  The infinite world within us became as curious to me as the infinite expanse of our universe. 

Through it all I've always been deeply driven by both helping and understanding people.  

So why not combine them?  

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Since 2013, I've worked with thousands of people to help them explore their own consciousness, their own minds, their own inner workings.  I enjoy few things more than sitting as a friend with someone and helping equip them with a personal flashlight as we together peel back the layers of their spirit and self, their traumas and wounds, their patterns and shadows, their behaviors and beliefs.  We explore - always - with a compassionate, non-judgemental lens, discovering whatever comes up without criticism or shame, only oppeness and curiosity, holding it in the light to be fully seen and acknowledged, and then released so the energy that's been containing it can be freed up to become something new and more helpful.  

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What are my credentials?

My years of experience, my thousands of clients, and the reviews they leave me, are my credentials. 

 

I was, quite honestly, a poor student in school.  But I am an excellent student of life itself.  I don't personally feel the need for letters on the end of my name or a piece of paper on my wall that helps others feel comfortable.  My ego and confidence in my experience and expertise are quite secure enough without that. If those are important to you, that's great.  There's endless therapists and counselors that can provide you that comfort (goodtherapy.org is a great place to start).  

But if you want to work with someone who dedicates the vast majority of their life to curiosity about and personal study of the human experience and all the mechanics and drivers of consciousness itself, who is a tenacious researcher of his clients' challenges, states and physiology ... you'd likely have fun working with me.  

So, you're not a therapist? 

I am not.  And I'm always emphatically clear with my clients about that, so there's no confusion.  I practice as a minister.

Many of my clients are therapists, though.  They come to me for alternate perspectives, or to work through their own burnout and sense of disenfranchisement with traditional talk therapy.  And many of my clients are referred to me by their therapists; the ones that recognize that healing sometimes doesn't happen only in the mind.  

 

The type of counseling I provide pairs really well with regular psychotherapy, and I encourage my clients to utilize both, because both approaches have their benefits.  I love multi-pronged approaches to healing and mental-emotional health and always do my best to never step on another provider's toes or give you conflicting advice.  It's not my job, or my authority, to diagnose or undiagnose any mental health condition or to question any prescription that another provider may have given you.  I will, however, always give my holistic perspective on what integrated health and balance looks like in the entire system of being a human being and equip you with the agency to make the right decisions for yourself.  

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How is it working with you?

Challenging, and fun.  I challenge my clients.  With love, care, compassion and non-judgement, always.  But I challenge them, to lean in to their shadows, rather than run from them with endlessly avoidant behaviors that tend to manifest as anxiety, depression or addictions; to take accountability for their own thoughts, patterns and behaviors, rather than exist in victim consciousness or in blaming dynamics; to try and understand the perspectives and lived experiences of all parties - their traumas, wounds, epigenetics and patterns - in any given story.  Sessions can be hard, because the material we usually end up working with - years, decades or even generations of suppressed reactivity to a trauma - can be hard to bring up and face.

That avoidance of fully, openly, vulnerably dealing with the hard stuff is precisely what causes energetic compression, constriction and imbalance in the first place.  This work aims to put all the parts and pieces on the table, where we can together fully examine them.  Gently, with curiosity, patience and love, but with bravery and commitment to change.

Sessions are usually also, believe it or not, fun.  Laughter is the best medicine, as they say, and I try to inject some humor into the heavy work as much as I can.  If I can make you cry and laugh, we know energy is moving, and change is happening. My clients typically leave a session feeling lighter, happier and more enlightened (not in a grandiose Buddhist sense, just in the sense that they now hold more truth than they came in with). 

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I believe you'll see this reflected a lot in my clients' testimonials. 

 

What kind of modalities do I work with?

I study a LOT of different systems, methods and modalities, and I bring what I learn into sessions.  I spend most of my life learning about one system or another.  It's what I'm most passionate about.

I'm also fully confident in simply saying "I don't know" if we get into an area that I'm not studied in or qualified  to work with. 

I love Internal Family Systems, Compassionate Inquiry, Gottman Method, Attachment Theory, and the works of Bessel Van Der Kolk, Gabor Mate, Karla McLaren, and David Hawkins, to name just a few masters in their respective spaces.  

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If you have any questions about me or about sessions with me, feel free to reach out and let me know.