Transpersonal
Integration
Finding wisdom in trauma,
courage in fear, power in pain,
joy in living.
My Offerings
Partnering to uncover your capacity to engage the joy in living
Bringing heightened awareness and intention to the how of relating
Offering white and white passing community a place to lean into our role in racism
Individual Counseling
Partnering to create a safe container for your genuine expression, exploration and expansion.
I believe that in every painful experience embedded in our body, there is the potential for wisdom within it. Our task in the counseling relationship is to unpack that potent experience. We will separate the parts that are leading to suffering from the parts that lead to empowerment. Eventually we will integrate all the parts into the service of your wholeness.
There is an agent that acts as a catalyst to make those parts for empowerment accessible. That agent is LOVE.
Love is not an emotion in this case. Love is akin to a chemical agent that when added to how we understand ourselves and others, it transforms our pain into power, our fear into courage, and our life into joy.
This is not an experience of romantic love, infatuation or possession. Rather, it is an involuntary affinity and connection that a person encounters when they can see the essential, inherent beauty in a being.
We are creating the space in counseling where you are able to perceive the unfettered essence and inherent beauty in your Self. With that agent, the catalyst of LOVE, you can perceive and discern the gifts that otherwise remain inaccessible. Once you can apply that catalyst to yourself, you will experience a profound shift in your ability to access the joy of life.
Refer to my about page for more information regarding my approach.
Couples Coaching
Bringing heightened awareness and intention to the how of relating
When there is a commitment to being aware of the way you are relating, intimate relationships are a powerful opportunity for growth. Safety, deep listening, self reflection, mirroring and consent are key components of a growth relationship.
Physical, emotional and sexual safety are a pre-requisite to growth in an intimate relationship. The first step of a couples coaching session is to assess the presence of safety.
Deep listening means that there is space devoted to hearing the other with an open heart and mind. We protect the space from other distractions and put aside our own perceptions to receive what needs to be heard. The listener remains spontaneous. They do not try to predict what is going to be said. Nor do they prepare their own response.
Self reflection is a space to really notice how your body reacts to what is being said. What sensations, images, and memories arise as you let your intimate partners share impact you? The places where your body is activated is a key to where potential growth can occur. You will become aware of your habitual response to that activation.
Mirroring is an opportunity to provide as accurate as possible reflection of the other partner's share. Repeating this back to the partner is a powerful opportunity to allow your own body to sense what is real and true for your partner.
Noticing the body's activation in relation to a subject or topic is to tune into your true level of consent. Is there a free and clear "yes?" Is there a pressured "yes?" Is there a free and clear "no" or is it a reactive "no?" Consent is free of activation.
During a couples coaching session, we tune into the joint nervous system and the coregulation between the participants. We will practice the components of safety, deep listening, self reflection, mirroring and consent with awareness and intention to uncover the potential for growing together.
Those of us who are racialized white or white passing, have a very skewed experience of "race". We have had access to housing, education, social support, entertainment, and medical care in a very different way that people who are racialized as Black, Indigenous, and Latinx. The relative ease of access to the life makes our racial muscle weak and underdeveloped. AS a result, our ability to think, feel and act in regards to racial equity is impaired. During conversations about race we may become defensive, feel overwhelmed, feel ignorant, or guilty. We may not have learned about our own racialized trauma and how to work with and digest its energy.
Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother’s Hands, Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies offers us material to work. His material can help us build our racial stamina, digest our racialized trauma, stay in our bodies, hearts, minds and in the room as we confront “white body supremacy”. Resmaa offers us a path to build new norms and mores for a “somatic abolitionist culture”.
I invite you to join me in diving into the material, to explore it with our body and our whole selves together. We meet for two hours, once a week with appropriate protocols for health and safety. The group runs for 8 consecutive weeks. It is a closed group and the group only happens if all of the participants are able to show up. This is important to the integrity of the container and keeping the relationships woven in a balanced manner.
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Group Format
Each groups experience is unique to the particular constellation of the participants and each one is a soul gift. It is an absolute honor to be part of the shared nervous system we will be creating.
Group Guidelines
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This is a closed group. This means that once we start the work, new members will not be added. Ideally, members that start the group will attend each session until we are complete with the 8 sessions. I ask that we all arrive on-time to the best of our ability and we end on time to the best of our ability.
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The membership in the group, and what is shared in the group, will not be shared as common knowledge. We will hold confidence and care to create safety for each other to allow us to participate with vulnerability. If you want to share your experience, talk about your own sensation, feelings, thoughts, behaviors rather than that of other members. If you want to share something about another person, make sure you get consent.
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We are looking to engage in clean pain. This means that we deal with our feelings without blaming, accusing, attacking, or silencing others. We also commit to not harming ourselves through silencing or swallowing that which needs to be shared. Instead we share the bodily experience of what is happening for us. We create space to support, not change, that experience.
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We are agreeing to be uncomfortable and to not conflate discomfort with danger. We are looking to develop and expand our ability to stay in our body and present with each other even when it is uncomfortable. That is stamina.
Growing Racial Stamina
Offering white and white passing community a place to lean into our role in racism
Group Outline
The work that we go through together uses Resmaa Menakem’s material from the book My Grandmother’s Hands, with additional pod casts, and video clips. You will be invited to read chapters from the book each week, listen to a pod cast or watch a video, read an article, check in with a buddy, and experiment with somatic practices. These are invitations to open your awareness and deepen your relationship with somatic work. They are not requirements or assignments.
We work at digesting the material together and allow it to personally touch and move us into an awareness of;
1. The nature of trauma,
2. How racialized trauma affects the black body,
3. Our own racialized trauma as white and white passing bodies,
4. How racialize trauma effects police bodies
5. How to make this work move from the personal level to the communal level.
We meet as a whole group to open and close each session. During this time we participate in somatic practices.
During the digesting portion of the group, we meet in dyads and the whole group. The members of the dyad change at each session. We engage in clean pain and support the somatic experience.