Some people find their way here because life has cracked open. A marriage ends, a loved one dies, the last child leaves home, elderhood comes knocking, or a faith that once held your weight gives way beneath you. Passages like these cannot be thought through. They ask for the whole of you, body and soul, and the crossing goes easier with someone beside you who has made it before.
Others come carrying something much older. A pain that has kept you company for as long as you can remember. Loneliness that drops you into a bottomless well. The way you leave yourself the moment someone else needs something from you. The same hurtful dance playing out with partner after partner, friend after friend, until it feels like the only song you know.
And some come from the spiritual path itself. You have sat at the feet of teachers. You keep a meditation practice, you honor the rituals, you have tasted real grace. And yet the old patterns hold on, the reactivity and the self-doubt and the ache that no amount of practice seems to reach. Spiritual teaching can light the way…and it often walks right past the wounded parts of us that most need to be met.
Walking With a Spiritual Doula
IFS therapy was my root practice for more than twenty years. I trained as a somatic psychotherapist, and in time I became a therapist to other therapists. Over those years the therapy room grew too small for what people are carrying in this era. The clinical lens is trained to look for what is wrong, and it names our suffering as pathology. It leaves little room for the sacred, for the land, or for the ancestors whose stories run through our blood. I honor what that training gave me, and I have since expanded the work into Neoshamanic IFS, which reaches well beyond it. Inner Work Journeys is an alternative to therapy, made for the parts of a life the clinic was never built to hold.
A birth doula sits beside a woman in labor. A death doula sits beside the dying and the people who love them. Neither one does the birthing or the dying; instead they offer guidance and support. They keep the room steady, attend to body and spirit in distress, and remind you that this passage has been made before. A spiritual doula does the same for the births and deaths that happen when an old self is loosening its grip and a new one is taking shape in the dark. I have walked a spiritual path for more than forty years, and I know the ground between the ending and the beginning, where most of us were never taught how to stand.
How This Differs From Talk Therapy
In most traditional therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), you talk about what troubles you. Here we learn to be in relationship with it. Talking about our issues may help us understand them with the mind, but talk alone cannot heal them. The anxiety that wakes you at three in the morning, the grief you have kept under wraps, the insecurity that second-guesses every choice, the part of you that keeps people at a distance so no one gets close enough to hurt you: each one is a part of you with its own history, and each one has been trying, in its way, to help. We turn toward them with curiosity and care rather than trying to fix them or make them leave. The work here is attendance, understanding and compassion, and in time, healing: for the parts that carry the wound, and for the patterns that have worked so desperately to keep that wound at bay.
Over time you learn to love and trust yourself, including the parts of you that were sent away long ago. One by one they are welcomed back into the weave of who you are, and as they return they set down the beliefs and wounds they have carried on your behalf for years. That healing ultimately reaches past your own skin. As your relationship with yourself grows healthier, so do your bonds with family and community, and with the living world around you.
Sometimes the work calls us into a space beyond the everyday world. We may tend your ancestral line and heal what was handed down. We may call in helpers from other planes: your well ancestors, guides, angels, animal allies and mystical beings of many kinds. Now and then we meet a darker energy that attached itself along the way and never belonged to you. We meet it without fear, unhook it from your system, and send it on to where it belongs. Beneath all of it, the real work is relationship: with yourself and every part of you, and with the larger world that holds you.
Most sessions turn inward. Some days call for practical solutions as well, and those have their place in the mix.
What We Draw On
Integrative means that no single method gets to be the whole answer. The work draws from several wells at once. There is the inner world: your parts, your Self, and what your body already knows. There is the world around you: the land, the creatures and the people who hold you up. And there is the world beyond sight, where ancestors and guides keep their own counsel and sometimes share it. Ritual and ceremony give the passage a shape you can step through, and breathwork, meditation, movement and medicine open doors that talking alone cannot reach.
I know this territory from the inside out. I have navigated my own complex trauma, and the path I offer is one I cleared with my own hands, with the assistance of my own helping beings. So alongside our sessions, I give you practices for the days in between: techniques that hold up in real life and keep the work of transformation moving between our meetings.
How It Works
Most sessions are online, so you can do this work from wherever you live. I also see people in person at Soul Medicine Sanctuary, my home retreat center in Longmont, Colorado: some who live nearby, some who are in town for a visit, and some who come for extended medicine sessions. For a deeper immersion, personal retreats are available at the Sanctuary.
This is deep, unhurried work, and it is priced to match. If my rates or my availability do not fit your life right now, my Trusted Colleagues all work from a similar Neoshamanic IFS framework and can support you in your own transformation. Each of them has trained or consulted under my guidance, so you will be in hands I know well.
When the old map no longer matches the ground under your feet, reach out. We can find the next stretch of trail together.