Levels of Support

Life Coaching

Are you not able to change old habits or make important decisions? Do you find that emotional pain and disorders of sleep, eating, mood, or worry are making your life feel out of control? Then Life Coaching is the level at which we would need to work, at least at first. Though my license and one of my graduate degrees both use the word “Counseling”, I now find “Coaching” to be a more accurate term for the most pragmatic level at which I can facilitate your growth. Coaching is a form of interaction that measures results less in the realm of understanding than getting results on a chosen field of play (work, family, love). By your setting intentions and my holding you accountable for results, we can work on short-term changes to begin easing the pressure of current symptoms and rebuilding your sense of personal power.

Depth Psychotherapy

The shift to Depth Psychotherapy involves a shift away from what you consciously understand about issues to their unconscious roots. If Life Coaching is not getting results, there likely is an unconscious belief that is blocking change. 

Do you find you get in your own way and don’t recognize what’s driving you? Are there certain types of conflict that keep repeating themselves in your life? Establishing a healing relationship encourages your unconscious as well as conscious mind to begin expressing and exploring the guiding beliefs, fears, self-images, and life-maps which need to become conscious so that you can release their hold on your life.

Spiritual Unfolding

The most fundamental level at which healing happens occurs when you are in tune with the Life that creates you and holds you in Being. Do you hold resentments at Life itself? Have you been wounded by religious tenets that were held up as unquestionable truth? Do you practice meditation, yoga, spiritual reading or prayer and yet feel stuck in your unfolding? I draw on the 40+ years of my own spiritual journey to help you attune to the direction Life is attempting to guide you in so that you can know the peace “that passeth understanding.”

Areas of Concern

With this scope of services, I specialize in the intersection of three human concerns.

Relationships

All suffering ultimately comes out of relationships – how we relate to all aspects of ourselves, others, and Life itself. The patterns we formed to deal with early relationships keep influencing how we relate to external others (family, friends, colleagues, and strangers) and the inner “others” we find acting out through us when we experience ourselves as “not being myself.” Exploring our various relationships often leads to awareness of their “stuckness”

Stuckness

I offer this word instead of “trauma” and the huge category of “psychological disorders” for all those terms are ways of pointing to ways we lose the flexibility and spontaneity to respond freshly to the present. Something in us resists change so that we continue to use old strategies instead of what’s called for by the unique character of the ever new moment. Healing stuckness involves developing the capacity to digest past experiences which we couldn’t fully face when they first happened. "Stuckness" also points to the patterns of perception that blind us to the larger story of which we are a part. This leads to “Spirit.”

The Big Picture or Spirit

By “Spirit” I don’t mean necessarily a belief in a divinity or a particular religion. I mean how you relate to the Big Picture, which can be via a belief in the discoveries of scientific research. When we are connected to our “spirit” we can relax and trust our true nature, the aliveness and presence that we share with the true nature of all of life. No matter how much we have been impacted by our lives so far, who we really are is still available. The world wisdom traditions all point in different ways to how we suffer as a consequence of mis-taking ourselves for some thing we are not. Where psychological and spiritual healing meet is in loving Reality enough to want to be true to it more than wanting to be right.