My passion is to create the context where others can discover and articulate their own life’s wisdom as they have lived through and with the paradoxes that life has handed us. I am an educator, artist, and counselor in life’s depth dimensions where I serve as companion, witness, resource, guide, and mentor.

I offer individual sessions in person or online. I help you to explore your own depth dimensions, open to mystery, and deepen the freedom with which you live your daily life. If we listen, we long to come home to our own way, to our own patterns, to our own psyche, our own soul, to our own deep desires and callings. Sometimes it’s really helpful to be accompanied in this work of a lifetime, to have a witness, to access some guidance and support, to get some mentoring. We can move from where we are to where our souls want to be. Many of us don’t have wise elders in our lives, or don’t get personal witnessing or guidance in our usual spiritual traditions. We do not need to do this exploration all alone.

In our sessions, you are in the driver’s seat while I offer suggested navigation, and serve as companion and resource. We can explore all sorts of questions of discernment, dream analysis and appreciation, accessing life’s Depth Dimensions, or exploring creative spiritual practice.

No previous art experience is necessary or expected.

How We Work Together

I offer a no-charge introductory 20 minute phone or video call to see if I’m a good fit for what you are looking for.

I am an educator trained and experienced in counseling, spirituality and theology including faith crises and transitions, and in creativity coaching. I have experience in trauma recovery, and worked for many years with women who have experienced sexual violence or abuse. I am an ongoing student of the Wisdom Traditions of the world, and I have lived creatively with chronic pain and illness for more than 40 years.

I do not offer therapy but a form of spiritual companionship. I do know my own limits, and will refer you to a wise person in your own community if I feel that would be more helpful to you.

As I am not a licensed therapist, I do not take insurance.

While one session can be helpful, I find the best results come from a short series of inquiry and discussion. Often three sessions are most useful, where the first session is discussion, exploration, and a simple art process, the second is a planned personal ritual or a ceremonial statement of an intention, and the third is a debrief and plans for the future.

I know that access to personalized consultation is not available to all due to economic differences and often unjust wages and opportunities. That’s why I try to be flexible in our energy exchange, respecting your resources along with my own needs. If working individually is not available to you at this time, please take a look at my book Wildflower Seeds: The Beauties of a Reflective Life. There are many resources in book and online formats that can be very helpful. Follow your intuition, but also keep your inner bullshit detector on to discern wise and appropriate assistance! If you are in immediate crisis, please contact your doctor, a crisis help line, or go to the emergency room for help.

For questions or registration, use my contact form below:

Over the years, I have served others with

• exploring new spiritual practices
• honoring and memorializing our life experiences
• learning how to access our own inner wisdom
• identifying self-defeating thoughts and creating new possibilities for beliefs
• strategizing through difficult family, cultural, or religious challenges
• developing dream recall and regularly recording our dreams
• analyzing our night dreams for their wisdom and guidance
• expanding the wisdom and wonder of dreams into our daily lives
• understanding the messages in nightmares and incomplete dreams
• neutralizing intrusive thoughts and inner critics
• finding a path through doubt and despair, fear and frustration
• building a gratitude practice
• navigating the highs and lows of our creative cycles and emotions
• identifying and honoring our spiritual journeys
• loving our bodies as they are now, with all we’ve been through
• listening into those things which are unspeakable
• discovering and dancing with our shadow
• releasing blocks in using color and shape for self expression and discovery
• accessing and responding to our inner Muse or Inspiration
• questioning societal expectations, gender roles, sexuality
• communicating with others with patience, clarity, and justice
• illuminating a path to a meaningful, fulfilling, expansive life
• moving into conscious life choices and life design
• discovering original voice and aligning our lives in integrity
• outlining visionary goals, structures, and strategies
• designing independent self-education projects
• living creatively and well with illness or disability, with disappointment or grief
• regaining and focusing energy
• reframing problems and limitations into handle-able challenges
• developing expanded consciousness and honoring paradigm shifts
• transforming old wounds, personal myths and archetypal patterns
• clarifying multiple options and pathways
• becoming a change agent within our families, our churches, our communities
• creating the life that you would love through living and expressing true self.

USING INTENTIONAL CREATIVE METHODOLOGY

Are you at a crossroads or transition point in life? Do you want to explore and deepen your spirituality, or are you in the midst of questionings and doubts? Do you have a project you’re working on, but need some support in planning, organization, or keep it going?

Intentional Creativity is a process of inquiry, transformation, and manifestation in which we use pen and paper, brushes and paint, and other simple writing and art processes to undertake a journey into our inner selves, expressing our own stories and symbols of our inner lives into a material reality onto paper or canvas.

SOME EXAMPLES OF SESSIONS

How Did It Get So Confusing? Navigating a Faith Crisis: Inquiry and exploration for those whose relationship with their faith is causing pain or confusion. My own experiences of crisis and inquiry have helped me to guide others to their own deepest questions and next steps. We will explore adult doubts, pain, anger, and sorrow with a view towards (eventually) finding a faith of our own to live into. We will write or art in response to prompts.

Letter from your Muse: After creating a colorful portal on watercolor paper, I lead you on a visualization to meet your inner muse. You draw her outline onto your portal, then “give her the pen” to write yourself a letter from her, that is, from your source of creativity within.

Soulful Story Cards — Transforming the Critic’s Voice through Color and Language: Create personalized cards from watercolor paper that carry positive intentions based on your personal stories, challenges, and recurring thoughts. Includes visualizations, writing prompts, and some color theory.

Gathering the Shards, Restoring the Light into the Shattered Spaces: Where has your life been broken into pieces? Illness, loss, despair — how can we gather whatever light there is, and remake a Holy wholeness? Create a simple art piece based on the Kabbalistic story of the Divine Light being shattered into shards that now permeate our world, with our task to gather these shards to make the Holy visible. Includes teaching, pondering, writing, and painting.

Walking in the Dark — Finding, Questioning, Claiming, and Following Our Intuition, based on the Vasalisa Story: We will explore Vasalisa and Baba Yaga as told by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her book Women Who Run with the Wolves, creating simple artwork on watercolor paper out of our discussion. Includes teaching, pondering, writing, and painting.

The Life I Long to Lead: Create personalized cards from watercolor paper that mirror and affirm the way you want to live and the things you want to accomplish. Includes visualization, writing prompts, and some project planning.

Creating with the Tree of Life: Based on Tree of Life teachings on the Four Worlds of Creation, this is a way of understanding and planning a project from conception to completion. Create your personal diagram/painting on watercolor paper. Includes teaching, pondering, writing, and painting.

Home of the Heart: Working with writing prompts and arting around the idea of home, belonging, and where we find rest, nourishment, and nurturing. Where is your ideal home? Are you living here now? What can you do to feel more at home right now, in this life, in these circumstances, in this community, with these perfectly imperfect particular people? Includes teaching, pondering, writing, and painting.

What’s in Your Medicine Basket? Claiming our particular gifts and talents for service and abundantly creative living, right here in now in our lives as is. Includes teaching, pondering, writing, and painting.

Sophia — Wisdom Within: Explore the idea of the Divine Feminine within yourself. What might she say to you, here, now? Includes teaching, visualization, pondering, writing, and painting.

Bluebeard — the Predators around us and within us: Where there is beauty, there the predator arrives. Explore the forces around and within us that drain our energy, beauty, and creativity through the story of Bluebeard as told by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her book Women Who Run with the Wolves. We will represent and then transform these energies using prompts and simple art processes, including forming practical strategies to bring these ideas into daily life.

Harvesting Our Lives: Through writing prompts, guided journeying, simple painting, and discussion, claim the abundance of this stage of our lives, acknowledging the gifts and the learnings, the surprises and the depths. We will also preserve this harvest for the future in paper, image, and poetry.

Who Lives in Here? Holding Space for Ourselves: Are you at home in your body, your psyche, your life? Do all of the different voices within you have a say in how you live out your precious life? Can you listen to the voices who aren’t saying what you want to hear? Through word, image, and collage create a few Soul Cards of our voices and paint an internal home in which these voices can be held and welcomed within.

A Gift Unlike Any Other: You will have the opportunity to create three different kinds of personalized TRIBUTE GIFTS, hand-made gifts of paper, cardboard, word, and image created specifically with a loved one in mind, to honor and encourage them: an Intention Box, Appreciation Booklets, and/or Soul Cards.

Tree of Life, Spheres of Light — an introduction to an ancient mysticism: Through teaching, pondering, writing and arting prompts, create your Tree image on watercolor paper, based on Kabbalistic lore on the Divine pouring Godself into this world, held in the mystery of a Tree of Life.