An awakening is not something that arrives at the perfect moment, when the stars are aligned and the weather is flawless and everything is in its right place. You could spend a lifetime waiting for a moment like that, and the truth is it might never come. A real awakening is a much quieter event. Rather than something that happens to a person, it is something that happens deep within the self. It involves the ability to see wonder and wholeness in any weather, whatever chaos or disorder may be taking place around you. It is the ability to feel fulfilled and inspired, empowered and complete, day in and day out. The key to cultivating this state of being is taking charge of your emotional life and learning to feel at home with yourself.
To find peace in the midst of whatever life throws at you requires serenity, grace, and enough self-knowledge to know when the messages your brain is sending you are driven by trauma, anger, or fear, rather than confidence, power, and strength.
Our brains are programmed to see the negative. In our history as human animals, this was a genetic adaptation necessary for our survival: fear the predator; don’t let the food supply run low. In our modern lives, we have become obsessed with doing, doing, doing. We act out of fear, rather that love. There is no time or space for experiencing the sacredness of the world. And yet nearly every religion calls for a practice of prayer, meditation, or ceremony. This can take many forms, but essentially what is called for is taking a moment to see how unbelievably magical and fundamentally amazing things are, as they are. For me, this means reconnecting with what is sacred. It means diving into the divine.
With training and grounding in both psychology and ancient spiritual practice, I help clients to see the beauty within, to awaken to the inner landscape, and to discover the dynamics that keep them from reaching their full potential—in their career, their relationships, in life.
Most individuals are preoccupied with the outer world. Like an iceberg whose mass is mostly underwater, or a desert plant whose roots reach deep into the earth, our inner world is significantly more vast than our outer world. And yet very few people take the time to explore it, discover it, understand it. In my practice, I invite people to open up to their inner landscape. I invite them to connect with the sacred, and to engage it. I help them utilize nature as a vehicle to understand their own inner nature. My goal is to ignite the inner fire, the spark, the sun—that essence that each individual is born with, along with the unique gifts that they have.
When I was in my forties, I left a life of high-stakes marketing jobs and a competitive lifestyle. I walked out of a male-dominated environment and set out to reclaim my inner world, my divine feminine, and my relationship to nature. I sought the wisdom of a variety of traditions from around the world, including shamanism and Buddhism. In the process, I lost all interest in a life ruled by unnecessary drama over mundane things. I wanted to learn how to become more aware of my own behavior, more conscious of things before I act. I set out to deepen my understanding of mindfulness.
This spiritual journey eventually led me to Greenland, where I was formally trained in the teachings of the Kallalit Eskimo tradition. During this process, I came to realize that there’s nothing more important in this world than learning the tools and skills for shifting your inner world and deepening your connection to the earth, to nature, to life itself. I came to understand that one’s connection to the inner world is essential in order to be able to attend to the outer world. If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love all your relations—not just your human family, but all cultures and peoples, plants, the mineral world, animal world, all the different worlds on this planet and beyond it.
Equipped with this deep sense of mindfulness and ecological awareness, I set out to match my spiritual teachings with an understanding of science, getting a master’s degree in somatic psychology and a PhD in transpersonal psychology. Somatic psychology is focused on understanding how certain stimuli, such as stress or trauma, affect our nervous system, our moods, our emotions, as well as how our thoughts can create states of mind, and how we can change our state of mind by cultivating different thoughts. For my PhD I studied Buddhism and ancient contemplative practices from various traditions, building an understanding of how each of these practices can cultivate wellbeing.
This mixture of science and spirituality, Eastern and Western traditions, is a hallmark of my work with individuals, families, children, and teens. The question that leads and inspires me is: How do you get people to be in their light, in their beauty, their essence, and to share that beauty with those around them, rather than be stuck living in and reacting from a place of fear? I help people to cultivate behaviors that come from the place of the heart, asking, who are we when we are not in fear, and who can we become?
Happiness is a state of being that is cultivated from within. Everyone has the capacity to achieve it for themselves. Sometimes I imagine what the world could be like if every person on the planet understood how to use these tools and practices to creating lasting, unshakeable happiness. That is the vision that drives my practice, and I am inspired to work toward it, step by step, workshop by workshop, client by client. Are you ready to dive into the divine? I would love to help you on your journey.
