It was not until I travelled to Epidaurus, Greece and made connection with therapists carrying on the tradition from the ancient Temple of Asclepius that I discovered, in my own psyche, the archetypal roots for healing. Healing is holistic and organic. We are both natural and spiritual. Growth requires transformation, dying to the old and becoming reborn to the new.

I studied history and literature in college, then depth psychology for graduate school. Like many others in these contemporary times, I did not care for rational materialism, nor did I feel at home in religious systems whose symbols have lost their power. I traveled East internally. I studied Chinese medicine, Qi Gong and Vipassana meditation. Living and working in both rural Hawaii and the Navajo Nation in Arizona, I then permanently transitioned to Thailand in 2009 and over a period of seven years intermittently ordained as a Buddhist monk at Kyiatisaung monastery in Burma where they had cultivated such a pristine level of energy that it was nearly impossible for the spiritual scales to not fall from my eyes. Kyiatisaung is an old growth forest protecting a valiance of spiritual energy that must have been the rule rather than the exception in the deep past.

My background in Jungian psychology helped me navigate the tensions between my Western identity and inner access to the spiritual ecosystem of Burmese, Buddhist mysticism. Back in the ordinary world of earning a living and raising a family, serving eight years as a therapist overseas for the US military, I found my way to Kundalini yoga deeply impressed not only with the practice itself but the underlying Vedic philosophy. The relevancy of Kundalini is that it addresses the psychological and spiritual problems we are experiencing during this current epoch of a collective impoverishment of the soul. We are transitioning from the corruption of the industrial Piscean Age to an Aquarian Age wherein we need to become grounded and rooted in our individual bodies and minds. The kingdom of God lies within, and by journeying inwards we form a relationship with Truth.

Yet ... I grew up in a Western, Christian background. Jungian psychology is a Western attempt to heal the schism between the material and spiritual worlds. While studying depth psychology at Pacifica in California, the author and Jungian analyst, Robert Johnson, was gracious and compassionate enough to offer to do analysis with him. I was his last analysand. With over two million books sold, Robert was highly effective in communicating Jungian psychology. I engaged in analysis with a few other Jungian analysts, most notably the Catholic priest and Trappist monk, Father Gregory Santos.

Father Santos was a scholar in Aquinas theology, and in his estimation, the deeper message from St. Thomas Aquinas is that the world is good and all is in process towards union with God. This approach neutralizes interfaith conflict. We do not have the circumspect to judge how others experience God. Instead, we should join in communion with others from different faiths celebrating the manner in which God expresses himself throughout world history.

Ancient Greece seeds Western civilization including the development of Christian theology, yet its cultural flowering happens during a time when there did not yet exist a split between mind, spirit, soul, and body. It is within this unitary experience of the world that the institution of Aslcepius develops and sustains a holistic, transformative therapy for a duration of over one thousand years.

We are in the midst of a collective transition, the loss of faith in political and religious institutions has been obvious. It is no accident that interest in shamanism, meditation, plant medicine, herbal detoxification regimes, and a rediscovered respect for indigenous spirituality is on the rise, not as unfortunate symptoms, but as the mechanism for creating a new visionary framework to sustain future generations.

If you choose to work with me, I am uniquely positioned to offer connection to well established lineages in terms of Jungian psychology, Buddhist and Christian mysticism, Vedic yoga and its plenitude of mind/body practices, and the archetypal well spring of Asclepian healing and therapy. All of these traditions value the dignity and higher meaning of individual consciousness. We are not here to be perfect, but to become whole. We are a composition of light and dark, matter and spirit, and it is consciousness, the ultimate substrate of Reality that embodies the power to integrate and heal.