"I want to ask you, as clearly as I can, to bear with patience all that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were rooms yet to enter or books written in a foreign language. Don't dig for answers that can't be given you yet: you cannot live them now. For everything must be lived. Live the question now, perhaps, then, someday, you will gradually, without noticing, live into the answer."
Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet
Our inner psychic landscape is human and poetic, not clinical. We are born with an incredible instrument called a mind; yet no one gives us any operating instructions or helps us learn about how to employ it so that our relationship and work lives are fulfilling for us. With the advent of Western psychology, there was a vehicle for studying the mind and its results; yet the study of it was from outside the mind. Meditation practices provided a way for us to come to know the mind from the inside and actively see into its nature and activity. Many of us had less than perfect histories, sometimes full of traumas, acute and/or on-going. It becomes imperative, then that we learn of our history's impact on this delicate and strong instrument so that we can live a life more free of the negative impacts of this history.
To this end, I employ tools from my knowledge of the mind from my psychological training, deeply grounded in an understanding of what it means to be human (existential-humanistic and Jungian) and from over three decades of practice of meditation (Zen and Vipassana). When appropriate, I use meditation actively as a clinical tool, working with a client to set up a meditation practice to address their specific suffering. Both my psychological and spiritual training have given me an unusual capacity to work with a large population of clients with a wide variety of problems. It also enables me to embody a quality of unconditional presence so that someone's experience can be explored with a spacious, non-judging and healing awareness. Most of my clients over the years have commented on this quality as being critical to healing their suffering.