Background

My psychotherapy is informed by the psycho-spiritual foundation of Jungian psychology. I have 35 years of private practice as a clinical psychologist and a wide spectrum of experience in residential treatment with adolescents, substance abuse clinics, and inpatient psychiatric hospitalization. In addition, I have over 10 years of experience in supervision/training with a Jungian spiritual director, and exploring my own dreams and soulwork.

I have been closely associated with mental health issues since early childhood. My maternal grandmother was a psychiatric nurse in a state psychiatric hospital. She also opened her home (upstairs in our two-family home) to deinstitutionalized mental patients, individuals with developmental and physical disabilities, as well as pregnant unwed mothers. Her environment upstairs was my earliest university for learning non-judgemental acceptance, empathy, compassion, and deepening curiosity about the diverse patterns of how personality and soul are expressed in this life.

In the process of earning a PhD in Clinical Psychology, it was necessary for me to build a strong foundation of the scientific model to compensate for my personality typology of intuition, introversion and feeling. As a young child I was imprinted by a number of visionary experiences of merging with aspects of the living energies of nature. I had endless solitary adventures in the forest and streams of my idyllic early childhood. Blessed with these opportunities in rural surroundings in a valley full of streams and waterfalls and rolling hills, I internalized the spiritual values of the sacred as immanent, imbued with life force, and readily accessible through highly concentrated contemplation. Mother Earth was a gentle and fierce teacher in this Monastery of the natural world where I witnessed the movement of the gods and creation in the Body of Mother Nature.

For me, the soul of nature always had a feminine mothering quality. As I pursued religious studies later in life, I was always oriented toward deepening my experience of the Divine Feminine. I soon discovered that in mainstream Christianity the divine feminine was forgotten, hidden and devalued. However, this was not the case in Buddhism where Tara is elevated to the status of Mother of all Buddhas. I received the Transmission of the Primordial Mother Prajnaparamita from Lama Tsultrim Allione at Tara Mandala in Colorado.