A good therapy session has the quality of a conversation with a stranger on a train or bus.  You don’t know each other, but partly because of that you can be completely honest.  Your talk is deep, maybe an hour or two long.  You talk to the stranger the way you might talk to a bartender, someone you meet in an airport conversing about partners or childbirth, or like you would talk to God.  You couldn’t have this conversation if the person were “in” your life.  The talk is protected by the convention of confidentiality and professional bylaws.  And yet you meet weekly.  The relationship becomes very deep; deep differently than any other deep relationship in your life, but deep all the same.  You ask the best questions together, fellows on the journey of life.  Who are we, Where are we going, What will we do when we get there?  Is this what we wanted?  Did we do the right thing.

Technically, of course, all the questions are your client’s questions.  But you know they aren’t, really.  They are all of our questions.  And we ask them through our dialogue.  The client becomes the other and together we are interlocutors of spirit, fear, history, and anticipation. ​
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I am offering a group for therapists and those in related fields who would like to explore the questions that arise for them in the context of this work of psychotherapy.  This is not a supervision group, although it will have great value in clarifying your relation to your clients or patients.  Our inquiry will center on our own reactions, counter transferences in the language of Freud, projections, and the areas of our lives of which we are less aware.  We will also look at an unarticulated agendas that may have crept into our work, and upon examination decide whether or not to affirm or alter that agenda.  It can be helpful to see what has grown up uninvited within us, and to seek rejuvenation by reconnecting to our original inspiration.  This inspiration may have changed, died, or need rebirth in a new form.

My technique is to offer a safe space and gentle guidance, recognizing that each person has extensive experience him or herself in this multi-faceted profession.  I work to help the individual discover the true voice of his or her own inner teacher, and distinguish that voice from the multiple other voices that we all carry or absorb.  By being more deeply conscious of the source of our reactions, we can attain the freedom to act by choice and not out of unknown attitudes.

Tentatively, the group will meet every other week beginning on Tuesday, November 5th (after you vote!) at 7:00.  The fee is $30/ session and I am asking for a 7 week commitment.  If you pay for the seven at the time of the first session, your fee will be $180 instead of $210.  If the group works out well, and we all "gel" we will have the option to continue the group beyond the initial 7 sessions.

I invite you to call with questions or email me as you prefer.  

Inspired by the book, Eight Dates, (Gottman & Gottman) and by a discussion in my Insight and Practice group, I've collected seven topics to help couples explore and deepen their relationships.  Use these themes to inspire your own investigation.  Cultivate curiosity, and leave fault finding behind on your journey.  You probably don't want to discuss all of these themes at one sitting, but rather spread them out over several occasions.  Borrowing from the notion of Eight Dates, consider these to be Seven Dialogues of Discovery.  Take seven walks together, go for coffee on seven different mornings, or take any other opportunity to explore these topics each in turn.

1.  How do you define health?  Consider all aspects of health.

2.  How can your physical environment support your health.  That is; what should your physical space look like?  Along with this exploration, consider how you feel about your possessions, and you feel about your partner's possessions.

3.  What are your aspirations?  Can you also describe your partner's aspirations?  What might be in the way of these goals, for either of you?

4.  All relationships involve projection.  Projection is the psychological device by which individuals map onto another person features that are really part of their own psyche.  What have you projected onto your partner?  How does that projection influence your relationship?  Likewise, can you describe what your partner maps onto you?  What affect does your partner’s projection onto you have on your relationship and vice versa?

5.  What does listening to another person mean?  How would you like to be listened to?  What interferes, for each of you, in listening to your partner.
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6.  Compassion.  What is healthy compassion?  Are there ways in which being compassionate can hurt the one who feels the compassion?  can it hurt the one for whom the compassion is felt?

7.  What resistance do you have to being fully healthy; physically and mentally?   Can your partner be helpful to in your ascent to radiant health?  Can you be helpful to your partner?

On Sunday, February 3rd I shared a few quotes in the meditative self-inquiry group.  I'll post some of  the quotes here for those who were unable to join us for the meeting.  

Less than 200 years after Christ, Marcus Aurelius wrote: 

​I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.

If any man despises me, that is his problem.  My only concern is not doing or saying anything deserving of my contempt.
Never esteem anything as an advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose you self-respect.

​Around 1300, Meister Eckhart wrote:

People say Alas sir, but I would prefer to stand well with God, to have the devotion and divine calm of some people, or I wish I could be like this or as poor as that, Or they say, It will never do if I cannot be here or there and do thus an so.  I must get away-or go into a cloister or cell.

The truth is that you yourself are at fault in all of this and no one else.  It is pure self-will.  Whether you realize it or not, there can be no restlessness unless it comes from self-will, although not every person understands this.  This is what I mean: people fly from this to seek that-these places, these people, these manners, those purposes, that activity-but they should not blame ways or things for thwarting them.  When you are thwarted, it is your own attitude that is out of order.

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I'm going to be offering a 1/2 day workshop which will be open to children as well as adults.  The theme is printing on clay.  This technique, beautifully demonstrated in the video below was pioneered by Mitch Lyons.  

www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0r5EMuMCsY

The purpose of this workshop is to enjoy art making and pushing back the winter blues.  The workshop will begin in the morning with the demonstration at 10 am on Saturday __TBA__ but if you bring your lunch, you are welcome to continue work into the afternoon.

You will learn to make a monotype prints using clay, clay slips, tempura paints, stencils, texture and your imagination.  You will be able to complete and take home a frame ready print, or several.  You will work with color and explore the ways color can be intensified or minimized depending on proximity to other colors. 

The group will meet on Saturday, 3/16/19.  If you are interested in this workshop, please send me an email using the contact page on this website.  Let me know your date preference and if you are planning to bring a child, the age of your child.  

cost per adult: $85
add $50 if you are bringing a child with you.
fee includes all materials
I welcome feedback on this suggestion.  

Well here you are.  In your life.  It is not happening tomorrow or yesterday.  It is happening now.  Mystics might say that all is happening simultaneously: past, present, future.  Yet you have only a grasp of your past, to some greater or lesser extent, and an anticipation of your unforeseen future.  Is your fate already present in some way, opaque to you but easily read by some all seeing one?  Is your fate inscribed in your will, your ambition, your blindnesses?  Whatever it may be, it remains unknown to you.

As if arriving at a party that has been going on for thousands of years, you attempt to take stock of the lay of the land.  Decision after decision has been made without your input.  In addition, your own talents and attributes are only partially in your power.  You did not choose your parents (unless in some mysterious way before your birth) nor your height, eye and hair color.  You have no control over what diseases may have come with your genetics, although you can influence your health in many ways.  Like one of a handful of seeds cast into the wind you land, whether on rock or loamy soil, and consider.

What is in store for you?  Are you angry or grateful?  Do you rail against it all, appealing to fairness-shouting out to the vast, tangled beyond?  Will you, like someone once told me, “Punch out God’s eyes” when you finally see him in fury at all that has befallen you?  Punch His lights out to render your opinion of His gift of life?  No.  You pause, take a deep breath, and ask your first questions.  How shall I live my life?  What is my purpose? How do I design a life that reflects this purpose?

You have a feeling of urgency.  Like some race horse before the bell, your eyes, partly blinded by dark leather, see only the path in front of you. You paw the earth and inhale the sweat of the trembling bodies around you.  Then you burst forth, with no sense of direction other than that which is offered by your sliver of vision.  Pounding soil, breathing dust, gathered into a ball of tight, insistent energy you rush until you have grown weary with the years.  Finally you ask, Where have I arrived? Where am I headed?    Sourceless, yet bound by the restless energies of life and passion to move ever forward- the grace of wonder opens up a question, albeit dark and terrible: Am I moving toward a destination or mere end?  ​

If you have the wherewithal, you work to determine your life’s design with reference to a focus.  And yet, merely to ask the question, what is my focus, you will have already used many breaths.  No matter.  Where do you want to go?  You decided on the most insistent of the questions that knocks on your soul.  Why am I here?  A dialogue begins wherein you are both interlocutor and subject.

    I am here to find out why I am here.

    With what capacity can you even attempt to find out?  Aren’t you profoundly     limited in your     abilities?

    I am, but there remains no choice for me.  I must ask.  The urgency I feel will     not allow me to rest my head if I cannot     come to understand this mystery of     my life.

    Ah, so you recognize it as a mystery, then?

    Yes-a mystery that I am and see.  It can be described with no less a word than     mystery.

    A mystery of terror and wonder.

    Yes, of terror and wonder.


Surprised, you notice that you are fully capable of two entirely different voices.  You can question and answer easily.  Like a sharp scalpel that you never knew you had, you twist the blade this way and that, conducting a surgery on the fathomlessness of your own existence.  A new wonder arises.  How is it possible that you can both ask and answer?

The blistering sun is reflected on a thousand peaks of water in the vast ocean of nothingness that stretches before you.  Tempted to shield your eyes, you nevertheless open them and gaze steadily forward.  Blinders removed, a new question rises up within in you.  Am I Self? you ask.  You are Self, you answer.