Depth-Oriented
Psychotherapy

The call to begin therapy usually begins with a difficulty of some kind: various forms of emotional suffering, persistent challenges in relationships, destabilizing encounters with the effects of trauma, an elusive sense of "stuckness" or existential uneasiness, and other crises mild or severe. These "symptoms" call us to bring caring and curious attention to where it is needed — below the surface of whatever it is that troubles us.

This is the essence of depth psychotherapy: creating the conditions for making contact with what ordinarily lies beyond our conscious awareness. Very often, our suffering calls us to a deeper life, leading to unexpected places.

In many cases, it turns out that psychotherapy is not only about contacting and tending the hidden sources of wounds that lie beneath the surface, but also about discovering and unfolding the innate potential that lies deep within. In my experience, these two dimensions — healing and becoming — go hand in hand.

Occasionally, individuals are called to psychotherapy because they are seeking a container where they may discover more of themselves.

It is with all this in mind that I summarize my deepest intention as a psychotherapist:

may all beings bring forth what is within them.

My approach is always initially nondirective: we begin by making space and listening, together, for what feels most relevant here and now.

I welcome all parts of you, just as they are, within a caring and inquisitive atmosphere so that we may collaboratively explore the fullness of your inner world with a symbolic attitude. This means sensing into deeper meanings and themes underlying the dominant patterns and sufferings in your life.

This approach entails more than just thinking and talking. Engagement with the body, emotions, and imagination is also essential in the process of therapeutic relating, granting access to deeper currents of experience that may otherwise go neglected.

It is also very important to acknowledge that many approaches to psychology have failed to consider the ancestral, historical, and social forces that uniquely shape every person's experience and struggles. I aim to understand and be an ally to every person I work with, seen in their full context.

Depending on your particular disposition, situation, and needs, I may introduce any number of the ways of working outlined below.

Beyond my formal education and training, I am also a dedicated practitioner of meditation and imaginal contemplative practices — including Vajrayana Buddhism (i.e., Mahamudra, Dzogchen) and Rob Burbea's teachings on Emptiness and the Soulmaking Dharma.

I have also been a longtime practitioner of Ria Baeck's Collective Presencing and have extensive personal experience with relational imaginal practices. Both of these practices rest on the cultivation of what we might call subtle sensing — a posture of listening with full-bodied presence that welcomes subtle forms of information often disregarded in our modern culture.

The capacities trained by these practices, in addition to lifelong learning through ongoing scholarship, significantly inform my therapeutic presence and style.

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