For those interested in my work, here are some current ways you can plug in or access more:
My new essay, “Talking to the Gods: Power, Money, Ethics, and Spirituality and Wellness Professions” is now up at Gods & Radicals. It offers some reflections on the messy issues of power and money in helping and spiritual work broadly, and offers some questions and areas of reflection for those who want to assess risk and danger in working with unlicensed or unregulated teachers, coaches, and healers.
The most egregious mystic healers become so enamored of their own feelings of certainty and disciple worship that they feel free and empowered to determine what is true for others. Such power is exerted through giving nonconsensual and invasive “readings” of the people around them, while simultaneously rejecting anyone else’s capacity to read them. In truth, there are also unethical mental-health establishment folks who enact the same kind of power onto their clients through interpretations and aggressive reframing of the client’s problems, who approach therapy from a paternalistic posture that disempowers and infantilizes their clients and may stir up more problems than we settle.
While you’re there, you can check out their End of Year sale and pick up my new book In the Midnight Hour: Finding Power in Difficult Emotions. I’d also highly recommend checking out Emma Kathryn’s course Becoming Wild: The Tools of Resistance that begins in January.
The course I find offers so many practical and accessible skills for times of instability, including foraging, making one’s own food and home remedies, and self-defense skills.
As my private practice remains at my capacity, I have turned my attention toward writing and making courses as a way of disseminating what I offer to be more accessible to folks who do not have the access to work with me one on one. These courses are not a substitute for one’s own therapy, but may be a useful compliment to them:
Crossing the Distance: Embodied Connection and Deep Listening in Telehealth Practice is a workshop that I have offered multiple times since this summer for therapists and other healers who are struggling to feel fully present and connected to their clients while working through telehealth. As the COVID19 pandemic continues, this course has been a rich opportunity to help us find ease, joy, and clinical efficacy in our work even in a medium that may not be our preference.
The Ram & The Scales: The Dance of Interdependence is an online workshop series I am developing that will begin in February 2021. This work emerges from a book in progress that draws upon psychotherapy and the Western esoteric tradition, using the seven classical planets of astrology to organize and deepen the skills of being fully ourselves and connected in authentic relationships with others. The workshops will include a copy of the text, audio meditations, video chats, and a forum for discussion.
It is a blessing to feel inspired to do this work. This year has been hard for me, as it has been for all of us, but something that is a source of resilience and hope for me is to continue to be mindful of what is problematic and painful while also returning my focus to what is generative. There is no single solution to all that ails us, ever, but I also find that simply the act of moving toward desire is itself a transformation of life.
I wish you strength, support, solace, and ease this winter.
