I have degrees in clinical psychology and comparative (east/west) philosophy, and taught and practiced as a psychotherapist for over twenty-five years. For many years I’ve also studied and practiced in a number of meditative and somatic disciplines, including hatha yoga, tai-chi, qi gong and Continuum, as well as with various approaches to breath work.
As a psychotherapist, I first worked within a family systems framework, having had the opportunity to train with several of the pioneers in that field. Over time my orientation shifted toward a psychoanalytic object relations and a Jungian-inspired approach. Eventually I came to feel that these psychotherapeutic disciplines, for all their virtues, are quite limited as vehicles of real transformation. Among the many factors that may contribute to these limitations, there are two in particular that have been especially important in my own study and development.
The first is their emphasis on the narrative content of experience, to the relative neglect of a wider intelligence and center of being. With a shift towards the latter, our lives begin to appear in a wholly new light. As the ego is de-centered, the world comes increasingly alive and we actually experience the guidance of this vast intelligence within and around us.
The second factor reflects a pervasive condition in the modern world: most of us are profoundly disembodied. This fact is perpetuated in most psychotherapy with its almost exclusive reliance on verbal exploration and analysis. This is particularly unfortunate, for it is in the dynamic, living body that we find immediate expression of, and gain direct access to, this wider intelligence.
I retired from psychotherapy in 1999 and now describe my work as visionary guidance. I know this sounds rather esoteric, but in truth I mean something quite simple. By visionary I refer to all those ways of experiencing and knowing that attune us to this wider intelligence. By way of vision, we are once again able to directly feel, hear and see the movement of this intelligence in our own lives and the lives of others, even in discomfort, affliction and illness. The guidance of this intelligence is close-at-hand. But it is not primarily mental. In order to recognize and engage with it, we need to soften our habitual and conventional ways of knowing.
As a guide, I am a pointer to that guidance that is calling you to a deeper, more meaningful and unique life. It moves in its own way, and we only discover it by entering into respectful relationship with it.
When we do, we find that this wider intelligence is none other than who we truly are.
