temple: my approach
I’m an integrative therapist, which means there’s no one path or passage; we build the approach around you. Much of my attention goes to what happens beneath the words: shifts in your body, your energy, your tone, your emotions, which often show where change is ready to begin. Some of our work is practical, and some is about slowing down enough to notice what’s true. I bring a mindfulness-based, Buddhist-informed perspective, and humor is welcome.
Allow
In India, there exists a temple where the instruction has been given that it be always being built, always worked upon, forever under construction. Symbolically, this is the human condition; we are not a completed product, and it does not benefit us to behave as if we were. The eternal unfinishedness of the temple is an illustrative acknowledgement that we are ever in flux. This acknowledgement reminds us of the ongoing need for humility (not to be underestimated!).
This section of the site is dedicated to our flux-ness, to the undeniable fact that change is the only thing that is constant. Therefore, it will be regularly unfolding, mutating, transforming, just like us and this glorious earth upon which we have been graciously granted temporary residency.
Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times. Come, yet again, come.
~Jalal al-Din Rumi
hot messes
As you likely have noticed, our very human lives are not neatly packaged and tied with a bow. They are complex, multi-dimensional, often messy, ramshackle events. These disparaged qualities, as well as our more favorable qualities, are all welcome in therapy. Finally a place where all can be allowed and acknowledged, felt, explored, examined– ultimately understood in some sense.
No need to be perfect, or even try to be perfect (trying to be perfect is a coping strategy with unattainable goals). The light, the dark, the complicated, the simple, the joy, the anguish. The good, the bad, and the ugly. After all, are they really so different? Is one really better than the other because we prefer it?
Tell me, I’ll forget.
Show me, I may remember.
But involve me
and I’ll understand.
~Chinese proverb
inherent goodness
Like many of us, I was raised to conclude that there must be something wrong, something inherently flawed at my core. Not that this was the intention on anyone’s part. Dang-blasted conditioning! Dang-blasted intergenerational trauma! The process of turning back to our true nature is one that transforms the so-called bad, clarifying its greater purpose, which, it turns out, is not to make us miserable, but rather to breed empathy.
This is a lifelong process, which is not a bad thing. And it usually not as rapid as we think it should be, also not a bad thing. The truth of the matter is: who we are is inherently good. Perhaps to help us to feel the soundness of this truth, it necessarily takes some time, some trials and tribulations, some process. In this way, we remember, we experience, we reconnect with a strange, familiar authenticity, one that resonates through our hearts and on into our bones. “Our love (is real) will not fade away.” ~the grateful dead, adapted from buddy holly
Live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
ever under construction
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it is safe to be here now
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letting go is not the same as forcing out
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acceptance doesn’t just grow on trees; it’s a process