When scheduling your first session, I’ll ask you to share a bit about the concerns or issues you’d like to address so that I can get a sense of whether I’m a good match for the kind of assistance and healing work you need right now.

At the Beginning of Our Session

I’ll guide you in connecting with a place of safety and grounding in your body. We’ll use the breath to slow down and expand our perception from the thinking mind into the feeling body. This helps us both attune to one another and prepare for our work together.

We’ll talk a bit to get current about what is happening in your life right now and about what I call your “growing edge,” e.g., where you are in the intersection between who you’ve been and who you are becoming.

With your permission, I’ll attune to your physical body and energetic field and share with you the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) patterns I perceive as we speak.

Often, the compassionate seeing and naming of these patterns allows areas of constriction to soften and release. Where there is greater emotional safety and relaxation, there is more energetic mobility for long-standing patterns to begin shifting.

By slowing down and seeing from a shamanic and non-ordinary perspective, we can begin to understand the deeper causes and consequences of long-standing energetic and relational patterns.

By relational, I’m referring both to your relationship with yourself and with others.

As we deepen into the session, we may move into one or more of the following:

• I may drum or rattle to request that my helping spirits provide us with a spiritual, shamanic, and energetic lens through which to understand our healing work together.
• In a drum journey, I may inquire: “What is the next most relevant and beneficial step in our work together today?”
• While in the journey state, I may work relationally within your energetic system to help release long-standing constricted patterns.
• My model is a relational one, which includes not only the connection between you and me, but also my approach to your unconscious and energetic material.
• We may explore external systemic influences (familial, religious, cultural, racial, or societal conditioning and projections) that have caused distress, shock, or disorganization in how you perceive yourself and your sense of belonging in the world.
• I may share relevant shamanic, somatic, and cognitive-behavioral practices, rituals, and techniques to support your connection with yourself and your ongoing inner work.
• We may create a short- and/or long-term roadmap for your healing journey.
• We may collaborate to gently re-integrate parts of yourself that fragmented or dissociated due to emotional, relational, energetic, or traumatic distress.

A Note About Soul Retrieval

Soul retrieval has become a popular, and at times over-simplified, concept within New Age spirituality in recent years. Shamanic work is not a one-size-fits-all westernized technology, and there are times when soul retrieval is not appropriate, and at times not possible.

Shamanic healing is oriented toward addressing the energetic and relational root causes of distress and dis-ease.

If you are seeking immediate, same-day “resolution” of longstanding, trauma-based symptoms, this is likely not the appropriate modality for you. This work is intended to illuminate deeper distortions in self-concept and reconnect you with your authentic self in a more rooted and integrated way.

If the original energetic and relational conditions that caused a soul-part (part of one’s essence) to detach are still strongly active, soul retrieval may be contraindicated until there is greater emotional and energetic stability.

It can be helpful to think of a soul-part as a child who has run away from home because they no longer feel safe there. It can be re-traumatizing to bring the child, or soul-part, back without first addressing some of the dissonant conditions that made the environment feel unsafe in the first place.

Relational Trauma Detective Work

I sometimes think of myself as a relational-trauma detective.

Dysfunctional family systems often cultivate stories, myths, mixed messages, and hierarchical power structures that function like encrypted code. These unconscious relational dynamics can create confusion, self-doubt, shame, and destabilization—particularly for the more sensitive or truth-speaking members of the system.

I draw upon both my own healing experiences with family-system “de-encryption” and my shamanic and clinical therapeutic skills to help illuminate these often-hidden dynamics.

This work is not about blaming one’s parents, which can ultimately become distracting and disempowering. Rather, it is intended to validate the pain and confusion that can arise within dysfunctional, toxic, or shame-based family systems.

Such systems frequently invalidate, scapegoat, or pathologize the more vulnerable and emotionally perceptive members of the family.

My Intention

My intention in my shamanic psychotherapy work is to walk with you as a guide, ally, and peer as you unveil your own deeper knowing about how you were impacted by your family, relational, and societal systems—or, in some cases, within relationships with harmful or pathological individuals.

I help clients understand and repair the cognitive dissonance, fragmentation, and trauma patterns that can result from chronic emotional invalidation.

My intention is to support people in reconnecting with a more grounded, integrated, and authentic relationship with themselves.