Path of Essence Course
The Path of Essence Course - Year 1 will begin in January 2025 for new students. The Path of Essence teaches us how to catalyze our essential development, the cultivation of our integrated nature in body, speech and mind.
Essential development integrates what I call the 3 aspects of our wholeness:
our embodiment on the relative human level with healthy ego structure intact
our radiant essence (our light or soul nature)
our open vast nature (oneness or divine nature)
The Path of Essence teachings convey a unique inquiry and active contemplative approach to reveal, understand, and transform the psychological patterns that block our spontaneous attunement with our innate wholeness.
One-on-One Counsel
“The curious paradox of life is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
“A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years… Thoughts just appear. They come out of nothing and go back to nothing, like clouds moving across the empty sky. They come to pass, not to stay. There is no harm in them until we attach to them as if they were true.”
Are you unable to make wanted changes?
Do you want to understand why you feel the way you do?
Do you feel distress, depressed, or overwhelmed?
Do you suffer from the effects of trauma (PTSD)?
Are you experiencing grief, loss or going through a big life transition?
Are you looking for a deeper meaning and purpose in your life?
Are you ready for a transformative experience to reveal your wholeness?
We all need loving, spacious support and wise guidance at times in order to find our way through our suffering and toward an authentic truer way of being. Deep inner work can be difficult. It can be uncomfortable to look directly at our beliefs and judgments, especially those about ourselves, which keep us living a limited life. Without the loving presence of another, it can be challenging to touch the painful feelings and body sensations that are connected to the faulty belief and judgment systems that were formed at a very early age in our family of origin. Until a solid base of inner stability is established, transformative changes happen best with a connected, attuned ally. It’s easier to do this kind of inner work embraced by loving support. I energetically provide the loving embrace where you are safe to unwind what no longer serves. This loving support is rooted in the certainty that you have all the wisdom, inner support and guidance within you. My work is to help you reconnect with the source of your well-being and authenticity..
Relationship Counsel
“We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.”
“To choose to love another just a touch more than we love ourselves is a great method for cutting some of our self-centeredness. Of course, it is imperative that we love and care for ourselves as well.”
Whether we are in a marriage, life-partnership, family, friendship or community relationship, we have a great opportunity. This is where we have opportunity to check on and challenge ourselves to grow in our humanity.
One of my wisest teachers once told me, “You can only expect about 70% ease in any relationship. The remaining 30% gives you a chance to practice loving-kindness, generosity and patience.” How delightful!
We are wired to securely attach to a significant other. We all want to feel safe in emotional bonding and to enjoy loving relationships. It is vital to our well-being to have positive supportive human interaction. Our work together is to help you create health in your partnership and other important relationships by identifying the negative patterns that perpetuate lack of ease and suffering by becoming aware of your protective defenses and by opening to vulnerable feelings through responsible empathic communication.
When I work with you individually or with a loved one, I help you understand how your attachment and communication styles inhibit mutual understanding, love, empathy, and affection. I help you find safety in emotional transparency with one another and in taking full responsibility for your experiences. I support you in learning healthy communication of feelings and needs. You will learn how to come out of negative cycles, emotionally re-attune, and restore intimacy. Based on your individual needs, we can address issues that arise in the areas of commitment, intimacy, sexuality, appreciation, autonomy, creativity and other important aspects of loving connection.
To avoid taking the courageous, creative step into an unknown that they fear, couples often argue and use up precious energy. Arguing brings partners into a zone of familiarity into which they can each retreat to avoid discovering the truth of who they are, which in actuality is love, abundance and joy. Instead, they each fall into the patterns they learned from the dysfunctional family system of their birth family, where there was often a lack of healthy attachment and support. At this point, feeling unsupported and unloved, they then conclude that their partner must be the source of the relationship problems and the reason for the lack of connection. Sound familiar?
The core beliefs about ourselves that we formed in early life created the lens through which we saw our world as a child. These beliefs often continue to run our life in the present. Our present circumstances with our partners can trigger our childhood core beliefs, and these in turn trigger the unresolved feelings and body sensations connected with painful past experiences. It is important to remember that we are never upset for the reason we think. The good news is that we created these beliefs and we can correct them by embracing the truth about ourselves, that we are innately worthy, pure, whole and changeless.
I help you remember that when you are emotionally triggered, the root cause is not another person or external situation. Blaming others or blaming yourself actually strengthens your negative beliefs about yourself. This is challenging as we are used to seeing the cause of our upsets as outside ourselves. If we want to be happy and have peace of mind, we can accept this and take full ownership of our experience. Difficult life situations arise, but we choose how we will experience them. By discovering and defusing your inner triggers, you can meet problematic circumstances with confidence, calm, and compassion.
I work with you and your partner to shift your perceptions of your childhood experiences and what you concluded that these experiences meant about you. I guide you to embrace your inner children with a loving presence. Through this process, the negative beliefs you hold about yourselves and your world begin to dissolve along with your identity as limited, worthless and unlovable. An amazing thing happens when you take the heat off your partner and start to unwind your core patterning. It almost always opens the heart of your loved one. Then the next opportunity opens: Adjusting to a life free of conflict can summon up a great resistance from our small self, who through living with years of inner distress has become adapted to it. At this point, your inner work is to patiently stay in awareness as you gently turn to the truth of your nature, which is innocent, radiant, powerful, infinite and love.