About Therapy
My approach to therapy involves non-blaming, collaborative, curiosity-driven conversations that help to center a person as the expert of their own life. I believe we are each responsible for our own healing and wellness, and we will learn together how you want to make meaning of your experiences and respond to the challenges in your life, bringing forth your strengths, knowledges, skills, values and intentions to respond to problems in preferred ways. When relevant, I also weave in ways to increase your body awareness, attending to the mind-body-spirit relationship, as we are embodied, energetic, spiritual beings too. Some people find spirituality provides guidance and resiliency through difficult times, and overall enriches their life experience. Spending time in a beautiful landscape with trees, plants, animals, and other elements can help to access a deeper feeling of connection, presence, and peacefulness. Some sessions you may be near or touching the animals, other times you may be sitting, standing, or walking around. We may engage with the horses or be observing them as a herd. However a session may look, my hope is to support you to feel a greater sense of choice and agency, to have more influence over problems and live your preferred life more fully.
Through prioritizing the relationship and a safe enough space to explore inner worlds, I have been privileged to meet people who have shared their imaginations, spiritual beliefs and practices, and experiences with intuition, spirits, beings, energies, other forms of consciousness. For some, such experiences have brought comfort, curiosity, and opened up possibilities for healing, while for others, they were taught to be fearful, distrusting, and dismissive of such things. In the therapy space, people have expressed fear of being called "crazy" or "losing their mind", or taught to believe ideas that this stuff is "bad" or "not real", and shouldn't be talked about. This may be because it doesn't fit with their cultural or personal belief systems, or doesn't seem to make sense to the logical, rational mind.
I believe it is important to attend to the social, cultural, political, and relational contexts that influence our lives and the problems that we experience. Within the context of our mental health system, the wide spectrum of human experience is often reduced to diagnoses and pathologies that locate problems in people. Therapists and other providers are positioned as experts, with power to define what is "normal" and what is not, and to determine what happens to those people whose experiences do not fit with the current idea of "normal". There is a long history of harmful consequences, and this may contribute to fear talking about such things in the therapy room too, among other contributing histories and reasons.
I have found that when people begin to unpack the internalized messages and get curious about the possibilities from exploring their experiences and relationships with the beyond human world, they may feel a deeper sense of connection with aspects of themselves and the world around them, feel empowered through developing a relationship with their sources of wisdom and guidance (rather than a need to seek external sources of authority), and learn to discern and trust the information they receive through grounding and embodiment practices. Rather than a linear process, I have learned that healing tends to be a non-linear, spiral shaped, ongoing path, with opportunities along the way at different points in time to revisit wounds for deeper layers of healing.
I do not wish to be an expert or advice giver on these ideas or topics, as I am always learning myself in what feels like an ever changing landscape, nor do I wish to impose my beliefs, views, and practices onto others in the therapy space. My hope is to create an intention and experience together that is helpful and meaningful for you in some way, allowing room to talk about things that may not always feel welcomed or understood in traditional therapy spaces!
I believe there are many avenues for healing and exploring these other realms, and many brilliant people with offerings beyond my scope and training. Here are some people I have appreciated learning from so far while exploring these intuitive and energy realms:
Amanda Woodward, Fauna Speak, Haylee LaCroix, Circle of Peace, Following Hawks, Asha Frost, Empowered Curiosity, Holistic Life Navigation, Earth Speak, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Asia Suler
Through prioritizing the relationship and a safe enough space to explore inner worlds, I have been privileged to meet people who have shared their imaginations, spiritual beliefs and practices, and experiences with intuition, spirits, beings, energies, other forms of consciousness. For some, such experiences have brought comfort, curiosity, and opened up possibilities for healing, while for others, they were taught to be fearful, distrusting, and dismissive of such things. In the therapy space, people have expressed fear of being called "crazy" or "losing their mind", or taught to believe ideas that this stuff is "bad" or "not real", and shouldn't be talked about. This may be because it doesn't fit with their cultural or personal belief systems, or doesn't seem to make sense to the logical, rational mind.
I believe it is important to attend to the social, cultural, political, and relational contexts that influence our lives and the problems that we experience. Within the context of our mental health system, the wide spectrum of human experience is often reduced to diagnoses and pathologies that locate problems in people. Therapists and other providers are positioned as experts, with power to define what is "normal" and what is not, and to determine what happens to those people whose experiences do not fit with the current idea of "normal". There is a long history of harmful consequences, and this may contribute to fear talking about such things in the therapy room too, among other contributing histories and reasons.
I have found that when people begin to unpack the internalized messages and get curious about the possibilities from exploring their experiences and relationships with the beyond human world, they may feel a deeper sense of connection with aspects of themselves and the world around them, feel empowered through developing a relationship with their sources of wisdom and guidance (rather than a need to seek external sources of authority), and learn to discern and trust the information they receive through grounding and embodiment practices. Rather than a linear process, I have learned that healing tends to be a non-linear, spiral shaped, ongoing path, with opportunities along the way at different points in time to revisit wounds for deeper layers of healing.
I do not wish to be an expert or advice giver on these ideas or topics, as I am always learning myself in what feels like an ever changing landscape, nor do I wish to impose my beliefs, views, and practices onto others in the therapy space. My hope is to create an intention and experience together that is helpful and meaningful for you in some way, allowing room to talk about things that may not always feel welcomed or understood in traditional therapy spaces!
I believe there are many avenues for healing and exploring these other realms, and many brilliant people with offerings beyond my scope and training. Here are some people I have appreciated learning from so far while exploring these intuitive and energy realms:
Amanda Woodward, Fauna Speak, Haylee LaCroix, Circle of Peace, Following Hawks, Asha Frost, Empowered Curiosity, Holistic Life Navigation, Earth Speak, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Asia Suler
The Herd: Major, Dream, Tilly, and Dublin (plus Waylon and Whiskey the donkeys!)
