Nature’s Mosaic

How we get there…

“Not everything that is faced can be changed,
but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

~ James Baldwin ~

UNDERLYING Philosophy

I have a deep and abiding respect and love of exploring and seeking harmony both within and between the inner and outer landscapes of our lives.  We each carry with us a rich and complex inner ecology, one that emerges from the dynamic interrelationships between our essential nature and the layers of experiences from childhood to the present that have shaped and encrusted that essence.  These internalized past experiences in combination with the insistent, demanding, and at times overwhelming and caustic elements of our present lives can make it quite hard to find ourselves and what sustains and feeds us most deeply.  The burdens of the past and present can often eclipse and blind us to seeing the present clearly… and yet they also harbor the elements necessary for resilience and recovery.  Therapy is about collaboratively breaking up the hardened ground within our body and mind and nurturing and tending the seeds of new growth until they can flourish on their own.

The Mosaic

Towards supporting the healing journey for myself and others I have traveled many different therapeutic paths and come to build an inclusive mosaic that takes the best of each, serves my client’s best, and which seeks to balance the essential tension between our competing needs for…
– safety, comfort and rest with
– growth and healing…
this necessitates travel into activating and intense places within ourselves and the world.

Our body-minds have an inherent capacity to heal themselves and the job of therapy is primarily to reveal and remove the obstacles which prevent that process from unfolding.

At the core of my work I am inspired most by ecological approaches arising from the deep wisdom of nature… 

  • Attachment-informed psychodynamic perspectives for their understanding of the foundational influence of early relationships with our caregivers, attunement to emotional experience, and safety in present relationships as a precursor for the curiosity and courage to face and heal old wounds and explore new territory…
  • Mindfulness and Buddhist perspectives for articulating the essential nature of suffering, the importance of helping a wayward mind to return to embracing present-moment experience, practices of loving-kindness, and discernment of truth from artifice, distraction and intrusions of the past…
  • Parts-work approaches for their capacity to help us understand and appreciate the burdens and wisdom of many different facets of our complex inner ecology as well as for fostering encounters helping our parts to work more harmoniously…
  • Somatic Experiencing for it’s nuanced understanding of the  survival-based (autonomic) nervous system and how to harness the bodies intrinsic wisdom in order to renegotiate the impacts of smaller and larger traumatic experiences and thereby find wholeness.
  • Nature encounters for their intrinsically & deeply healing properties… from simply bathing in nature to actively exploring it in ways that support our recovery. 
  • Nutritional & dietary support to address factors like inflammation and their impact on our emotional health.
  • Cognitive behavioral and positive, strengths-based approaches for their direct and practical capacity to provide a solid platform in the midst of life’s tumult.