I work with people rebuilding a self.

 

Sometimes the self came apart through addiction. Sometimes through a closet, a marriage that ended, a faith that stopped holding, a role that defined someone until it didn't. The cause varies. The task doesn't. At some point you see who you actually are, and then you have to go build a life that can hold that person.

 

That gap, between the seeing and the living, is where most people lose what they found. It is where I work.

 

For nearly fifteen years I have been in rooms where people come apart and put themselves back together. Recovery spaces. Yoga and meditation. Ceremony. Retreat. My training has come through the Southwest Institute of Healing Arts, through years of teaching yoga and working with energy and breath, and through apprenticeship with Shipibo maestros in the Peruvian Amazon, where I learned that the real medicine is what you do on Tuesday, not what you saw on Saturday night.

 

I am not a clinician, and I do not pretend to be one. What I offer is different and, for the right person, more useful: a steady presence, a trained eye for what the body is saying before the mouth catches up, and a refusal to let a beautiful experience substitute for a changed life.

 

The question I keep returning to with clients is the plainest one there is. You saw something true. Now what are you going to do about it?