Because you are alive, everything is possible.-Thich Nhat Hanh
My practice focuses on 3 areas of offerings: spiritual mentoring, mindfulness coaching and grief tending.
You can learn more about each of these below!
Spiritual Mentoring
One of the deepest longings of the human soul is to be seen. -John O’Donohue
What does your relationship to the deepest and truest parts of you look like these days? What gives your life meaning?
Attending to our spiritual needs is an important dimension to living an authentic life. Spiritual mentoring is about supporting you in staying connected to your essence, in maintaining internal alignment, self-understanding, compassion, intimacy, joy and inner peace.
Many spiritual teachers have taught that we each have a responsibility to discover in life what is true for us. In a world with so much messaging and influence coming from all angles, this is no easy or simple task.
Spiritual mentoring invites you to stay connected with your own innate soulfulness, intuition, wisdom and power. It is to offer guidance in listening to your heart, your soul’s longings, deepest desires and discerning how to live in alignment with your authenticity and values and to cultivate a strong sense of meaning and purpose in your life.
It is also about exploring the many, many things that get in the way of all of this.
Life can be hard. We’re hustling to make it work and are doing our best.
But life is also short. We are not meant to live shallow, hurried and frenzied lives. Spiritual mentoring invites us into a deeper and more intimate way of ultimately engaging our lives, ourselves and one another. It gives us what we need to softly land into a life of abundance, connection and growth.
It is building off of what is meaningful and purposeful for you spiritually in your life and giving you the tools and agency to integrate that into your days so that you can close every day feeling connected to the truest and deepest parts of you.
Spiritual mentoring can support you with :
-Personal growth and self-awareness
-Wanting to cultivate a stronger sense of meaning and purpose in your life
-Connecting with your intuition, inner wisdom and source of spiritual meaning: the Universe, God, loving Divine, the earth, the present moment, etc.
-Wanting to improve your relationship to yourself and others
-Discerning the need to make a big decision (job change, ending a relationship, moving, letting go of something important, etc.)
-Addiction, recovery needs either for yourself or a loved one
-Support in recovering from religious trauma or wounding and wanting to claim a spirituality for yourself
-Navigating patterns that keep you stuck or prevent you from experiencing your joy, vitality and soulfulness (for example, can’t stop working, can’t stop helping, can’t stop scrolling, etc.)
-Support and guidance in connecting with prayer, meditation or other spiritual practices that are important to you
**My training as a spiritual practitioner is interfaith in nature. This means I am experienced and trained to work with individuals from all different faith backgrounds and especially who do not identify with any organized religion or spirituality. I intentionally use open language on my site to convey this and acknowledge the vastness of how we can define and experience spirituality.
Mindfulness Coaching
If peace comes from seeing the whole, then misery stems from a loss of perspective. -Mark Nepo
Do you feel like you are really able to experience the fullness of your life and live in the present moment?
Do you find yourself wanting to slow down and enjoy more of your day but are not sure where to begin or once you try to, find it doesn’t last long? Do you often feel stressed, anxious and exhausted? Do you ever get through a day or a week and it just feels like a blur you barely remember?
I hear you. I really do. And you are certainly not alone. Our culture is fast paced and most of us whether we want to or not are physically and mentally moving non-stop. We are overloaded with stimulus, stressors, to-dos and an oh-so-endless list of distractions. Many of us are also very, very tired. If we are paying attention though, we are likely aware on some level this lifestyle is coming at a cost to us, our relationships and our health. Staying on the move can be an unconscious pattern and it can be a mechanism we use to avoid addressing the deeper stirrings, yearnings and angst in our hearts, minds and bodies. Awareness is a powerful and courageous first step. But where do you go from there?
Engaging with mindfulness and presence work is a powerful move to make these days and it can radically change your life. It allows you to cultivate a quiet mind, de-clutter internally and create an experience of internal peace and freedom. It gives you more energy and frees you up to really focus on what matters most. It allows you to move into a deeply alert stillness and ease where you can let go of the constant thought patterns of your mind. You deepen into your body and heart space. You’re connected to the flow of life. It allows you to truly be in the present moment- “the now,” which as Eckhart Tolle reminds us, is sincerely all we ever have. It doesn’t get any better than this.
It’s not necessarily easy. And it doesn’t change the external forces that may be causing us stress. But what it does do is give you agency to live the life you really desire with a sense of joy, ease and calm each day. It gives you some strong internal boundaries about what to let in and what not to. But it’s difficult work to do alone and most of us need the support of a trusted guide to give us the tools, resources and support to know we can do it. In fact, you deserve to do this and to gift yourself with presence and the ability to experience life and this present moment at it’s very fullest.
We’re all here for such a short time. And we each deserve to truly be here for all of it.
Mindfulness Coaching can help with:
-Stress reduction
-Supporting you if you’re experiencing anxiety, angst, restlessness
-Improved emotional regulation
-Enhanced focus, productivity, energy and engagement
-Improving physical health by reducing the impacts of stress on the body
-Increased self-awareness
-Improved relationships
Grief Tending
I’m not sure how or when I began my apprenticeship with sorrow. I do know that it was my gateway back into the breathing and animate world. It was through the dark waters of grief that I came to touch my unlived life. . . . There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. Through this, I have come to have a lasting faith in grief. -Francis Weller
Grief is paradoxically both a universal human experience and incredibly unique to each individual. It is indeed for all of us, a part of this life. Not a single one of us will escape it.
We have a strong cultural preference to move away from and avoid grief. But here is what we know:
“We cannot selectively numb our emotions.” -Brene Brown
This means when we numb, stifle, repress or push away our grief, we also numb and repress our capacity for joy, love, intimacy and connection.
Maybe you know this from your own experience that leaning into your grief strangely opened you up to living in a new way.
Maybe you feel on some level you’ve been walking around with pounds and years of undigested grief and you know it’s being stored in your body and heart, impacting your joy and vitality.
You are not alone in this.
It is hard. We worry as Francis Weller says that this grief will become “our final resting place.” We fear it will swallow us whole and sting us with pain for the rest of our days. But it will not. We can have faith Weller assures that “grief knows where to take us.” Resisting our pain will always be more painful than the grief itself.
Weller talks about grief as being an underground journey and this is a beautiful imagery for us. Grief tending invites us into such a deep, tender place in ourselves where things move slow, we are now on grief’s time and we can be certain of one thing: grief will indeed remain faithful to us. She will ask us to be with her. She will ask much of us. She will give it all back and more.
There are many paths toward grief support. Spiritual and soul work offers a unique way of being with your grief. For many generations people have turned to their spiritual leaders for support in grieving a loss and finding meaning in life experiences that are without words. Grief is not meant to be fixed or healed. It is meant to be tended.
The hopeful thing is we are working within our biology to process grief. Even if it feels like we are floundering our way upstream. Our brains are actually hardwired for grief. As Jaak Panksepp’s work shows us, we have a neurological need to be able to experience all of our emotions. We are born with this need. Our disconnected culture and conditioning has cut us off from this innate wisdom but the desire to be with our grief and tend to it lives in us on a cellular level. There is much hope in this.
Unexpressed and unacknowledged grief can harden us. It is tremendously coureageous to sit with our own tenderness and trust the movement and flow of this potent life experience. It requires a witness and community. It requires our trust and knowing that we will be able to navigate what comes when we open up to it. And that living a good, joyful life is very possible to do even alongisde being present and tending to our sufferings.
Some Things You May be Grieving:
-Loss of a loved one or pet through death
-Relational loss (ending of a relationship, divorce, estrangement or changing dynamics of a relationship)
-Illness of a loved one or your own health struggles
-Addiction of a loved one or yourself
-Ecological, Political or Global Grief from injustices and events in the world (So under talked about and so significant for many of us)
-Transition in your own life
-Grief that arises from more awareness of your life’s sufferings
-Pregnancy loss or infertility
-Ambiguous loss (you are grieving something that is difficult to name or explain or for others to see and understand)
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Mary Oliver