I provide awareness-centered psychotherapy and life coaching to adults and couples who want to know themselves more deeply, experience less personal suffering or want to live a more authentic life. On this path we call life, I find it essential to have a place of support that provides emotional safety, compassion, clarity and assistance to know ourselves more deeply. I have been providing counseling or psychotherapy, consultation and trainings for individuals, couples, families, groups and agencies for over 34 years. And for over 20 years, I have been immersed in mindfulness, meditation and spiritual practice training which I have slowly incorporated into my therapy practice. The psychotherapy process can be highly deepened by including the practical application of Eastern spirituality wisdom such as meditation, mindfulness and somatic awareness-centered praxis. Mindfulness alone is helpful, yet bringing this awareness into the body is key to fully transforming or dissolving entrenched patterns that are troubling us. This type of synthesis has been beautifully described by several authors who are therapists or Buddhist teachers such as John Welwood and Tara Brach, both of whom are clinical psychologists. I find that any difficult or "negative" experience we are having, whether large or small, can be an opening to find a deeper space of embodied presence or pure awareness inside ourselves, and this awareness reveals clarity about one's self and the circumstances at hand. This process necessitates learning how to slow down, recognize the habitual egoic defense patterns that obscure clear perception, dis-identify from them, and connect with a deeper more conscious part of oneself which will naturally provide helpful ways to navigate the situation. This is not easy to do without guidance in the beginning. I have had incredible mentors on my path for learning ways to navigate life, especially midlife, and I am committed to helping others with what I have learned. Currently, I provide therapy and life coaching to adults and couples who want to know themselves more deeply, experience less personal suffering or want to live a more authentic life. I have training and experience in several modalities which include: Developmental Self Psychology, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Couples Therapy, Integral Psychology, Undefended Love Principles, Midlife Transitions, Mindfulness Training, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, Somatic Awareness Practices, Vipassana and Tibetan Buddhist Meditation, and using personality inventory information such as the Enneagram and Meyers-Briggs. I have extensive training with my primary mentor, Jett Psaris, Ph.D., the co-founder of the Undefended Love approach to relationships and the author of Hidden Blessings, a text for using midlife as a transformational process to authentic living. If you are unfamiliar with Undefended Love principles, they contain amazingly effective ways of working through the layers of defended personality to access our essential strengths and true self. They are some of the most advanced practices I have learned to deep relationship intimacy, self-understanding, and psychospiritual transformation, and the midlife period is a particularly rich and opportune time for these types of changes to occur if one is open to the process.
