I’m a born emotional adventurer. I love to talk with people about life, family, pain, heartache, love, confusion, loss, and all the things people carry inside – including purpose and meaning and pretty much all the big and little things they think about.
I have known since I was a young girl that my happiness was interdependent upon having a true Spiritual practice, as I have been hungry for greater connection for as long as I can remember.
As a younger woman, I dreamed of being a Buddhist nun, homeopath, and a therapist. This longing led me to become a licensed psychotherapist integrating my passion for understanding the interconnection of Spirit, Body, and Mind.
In the mid 90’s, I graduated from Pacifica Graduate Institute, and ever since I have offered myself as a guide, and a healer with a medicine bag; which means I pull from Source the wisdom that is being called forth in the moment.
As a younger woman, I dreamed of being a Buddhist nun, homeopath, and a therapist. This longing led me to become a licensed psychotherapist integrating my passion for understanding the interconnection of Spirit, Body, and Mind.
In the mid 90’s, I graduated from Pacifica Graduate Institute, and ever since I have offered myself as a guide, and a healer with a medicine bag; which means I pull from Source the wisdom that is being called forth in the moment.
At the time I was completing my graduate degree, I had a break-up that brought me deep into what I call dark night of the soul. This was a profoundly difficult yet healing time that brought me into the underworld of anxiety and despair. I learned to navigate my way through the terrifying realm that anxiety calls forth. I dove into this world determined to understand the nature of anxiety so I could be free from it and help others to do the same. This period in my life offered me so many gifts of insight that informs me to this day when I’m working with others in their journey.
The foundation of my daily practice is meditation and cultivating the discipline of seeking beauty. Meditation influences and strengthens every facet of my
being. It truly carries me through the storms and heightens my joy. This practice offers me blessings of clarity and open heartedness that inform and strengthen all of my relationships.
I am a wife, married to an extraordinary human, a beyond grateful mother, a sister and daughter, an auntie, and a soulmate to my soul-sister friends. I am also so fortunate to be able to experience such a close intimacy with my clients with whom I care so very much about. All of these relationships sustain me deeply, and because of them I am very blessed to be able to live my life’s purpose, which is to grow my heart and consciousness infinitely bigger one moment at a time.
He Said, She Said
It seems that profound suffering and disconnection are everywhere, making us more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and dis-ease. This collective sorrow is asking us to bring a greater level of attention and compassion to our heartache. What if the suffering itself is our wake-up call? What if it is the messenger, revealing the opening to the deeper questions needing to be asked? Perhaps we are being called to no longer feel ashamed by our difficulties, but to grow something beautiful from them.
He Said, She Said was a radio show that my husband and I did together. It is an intimate look at how I address many subjects. Our intention was to offer insight and healing by providing a forum where our listeners could call in to share their stories, reveal their struggles, and consider alternate perspectives on many subjects ranging from relationships and parenting to sex and addiction.
We share over 45 years of accumulated clinical experience as successful psychotherapists, unwilling to hide behind the persona of the all-knowing healers. I do not offer a one-size-fits-all formula for happiness, but rather razor sharp intuitive counsel. It is an opportunity to listen to how I openly and honestly draw from my life as a married couple, my challenge as a mother, my clinical experience, and the difficulties of being human.
Take a listen…
The Secret
Strong and gifted? Yes! Vulnerable and insecure? Yes! Just like you? Yes! The secret is out. We are all in this together; a laughable admission that we each struggle with the confusing, insecure and lonely parts of ourselves that shape our relationships, our work, and our identity. When we hide this secret underbelly from each other, then everyone wonders, “How come she has it all worked out. What’s wrong with me?” Once we finally reveal our vulnerabilities, then the conversation that follows is the antidote for the isolation and shame that so many of us experience. Let’s have that conversation.
The Anger Games
When a farmer uses a kind of fertilizer that does not have any effect, he has to change the soil. The same is true for us.
We have to change the way we tend to the rich soil that is our Anger. At the moment we become angry, our anger plays its own games. It makes us believe that another person is the cause of our pain. And, most of us tend to blame that person for our suffering.
However, your anger is like a frightened baby – distressed and crying. This baby needs a courageous mother to attune to him. You are that mother for your baby, for your anger. And if you begin to get curious about your own fury, you can begin to see that it is often driven by fear.
We are very rarely told to move closer to the anger, to the fear – to just be there, to become familiar with it. The advice we usually get is to smooth it over, to take a pill, to distract ourselves, or that we’re entitled to it; but by all means make it go away.
The next time you encounter anger and fear, consider yourself lucky. This is where the seeds of courage comes in, the courage to move beyond blame and toward curiosity.
What games does your Anger play?
Parent Trap
It may be that the feeling of needing another kind of child to love visits all of us as parents from time to time, when things feel particularly challenging. But if we go deeper we may find that, after all, we can know and love well the children who are ours to love. Parenting is clearly a life’s work, and it is for life that we undertake it. As we all know down to our bones, there is no question about doing a perfect job, or always “getting it right.” It seems more a quest than a question of anything. What is important is that we be authentic, and that we honor our children and ourselves as best we can, and that our intention be to, at the very least, do no harm.
What are your Parenting Traps?
Fifty Shades of Marriage
What is a Marriage?
Does it exist only between a husband and wife?
Does gay marriage count? What do you do after the thrill is gone?
It seems that marriage can be a lasting covenant between two people – a vehicle for the nurture and protection of each other, the one reliable shelter in an uncaring world; or it can be a devastating infliction of suffering not only on oneself
but on the people you supposedly love above all others, most of all your children.
Which shades best describe your marriage?
Show Me The Money
Money doesn’t grow on __.
The love of money is the root of __.
The rich get __.
Save for a rainy __.
It takes money to __.
It’s just as easy to marry __.
Money can’t buy __.
What did you hear and see about it when you were growing up?
What did your parents say to you when you asked for some?
How many of you were educated about making and managing it?
Does Law of Attraction really work?
Where do affirmations and positive thinking fit in?
Is it taboo to talk about it?
Without knowledge or training we are left to formulate our own ideas based on what we heard, read, or saw others do. These thoughts become our mantras and they resound in our mind whether or not we’re aware of them. And they create our financial reality! We then may partner with someone who has heard, read, and seen a completely different set of stories. Money acts as a lubricant for all kinds of emotional and material interchanges in our lives. It’s like karma. Regardless of how much or little we have, many of us have an unresolved problem with it, just as we have an unresolved problem with life.
A Wrinkle In Time
What does it mean to age gracefully?
At what length will you go to try and look younger?
Does botox mask and cut us off from our emotions?
What is the cost of our youth-obsessed culture?
Is your body your sacred temple?
Does getting older have to mean ill health?
How prominent is Ageism in our culture?
Does meaning and purpose change your perception of aging?
What impact does a spiritual practice have on getting older?
Do you have any positive role models for aging?
What does it mean to become a wise elder?
At what point does surrender and acceptance enter in?
The wrinkles don’t lie. Aging changes everyone!
Love & Other Difficulties
Love is that which calls up all that is not love in order to be healed.
Relationships break us open! We connect and we disconnect; we have intimacy and we have isolation. We get injured and we heal in relationship. One of the greatest vehicles for self-awareness is connecting with another human being – whether it’s our intimate partner, our parents and children, our siblings, our colleagues, or our friends and neighbors. It is the vital frontier for self- discovery, for community, for support, and for growth.
What relationship is breaking you open?
Let’s have that conversation.
Fear Factor
Some of us call it anxiety; others call it worry; and then there are those who won’t call it anything at all. And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we live out our lives on an ocean of fear. Whether this angst comes to us as fear of death, abandonment, illness, insomnia, or losing our livelihood, it is a universal experience. Or, perhaps we may have fears of failure or success, fears of letting other people down or about the fate of the earth. Regardless, once under the spell, navigating this realm can feel like being in a small boat alone on the stormy sea. What we often fail to see is that each difficult and turbulent wave comes as an offering to help open our eyes and our hearts.
How is fear a factor for you?
Parent Teen
“Little children, headache; Big children, heartache.”
Continuing the rich and juicy conversation of Parenting from last week, we will move into the interesting and provocative stages of adolescence and teens. As much as we watch to see what our children will do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we’ll do with ours. We can’t tell our child to reach for the sun unless we are willing to reach for it ourselves.
Let's Talk About Sex
What role does it play in your marriage?
Can you take it or leave it?
Are you the one who wants it more or the one wants it less?
Is it what you imagined it to be?
Would you rather be playing solitaire?
Did you know that typically the person in the relationship with low or no desire feels flawed and withholding and that the high desire partner takes it personally? The low-desire partner always controls sex, whether they know it, like it or not. It shows how “high desire” and “low desire” are positions in a relationship, and there is a low desire partner in every marriage!
Let’s Talk About Sex…
The Hangover
“Trying to reason with an addict is like trying to blow out a lightbulb.” ~ Anne Lamott
Many magical traditions hold that you control a monster by speaking its name.
- Alcohol
- Drugs (Prescription and illicit)
- Cigarettes
- Sex
- Porn
- TV
- Gambling
- Shopping
- Sugar
- Food
- Caffeine
- Fitness
- Body Image
- Tattoos
- Adrenaline
- Control
- Drama
- Perfection
- Video games
- Internet
- Texting
Know anyone?
Addiction is a response to overwhelming emotions—such as fear, terror, pain and aloneness. People use addictive substances or behaviors to anesthetize pain, feel relaxed, calm themselves, feel alive, numb out pain, turn off a racing mind, hide from shame, or feel a sense of belonging. Addictions are used in an attempt to manage what feels out of control, missing, or very frightening. The journey of the addict is essentially a spiritual journey. It is a journey into Self to confront your greatest fears, your innermost demons. Few have the courage and perseverance to complete the journey.
Join us as we brave the beast of addiction.
The END
How do you navigate change and endings?
Do you stay in relationships longer than you should?
Do you allow yourself to have conscious goodbyes?
What is your relationship to loss?
How different might you be if you discovered you have 1 year to live?
What insights do near-death experiences provide and do they alleviate the fear?
Is the fear of death also the fear of life?
Who or what dies?
Join us as we END our stay with Voice America.