Welcome

Psychotherapy and mindfulness have in common the ability to put us in touch with and nurture a natural tendency towards healing and wholeness that lives within us all. As a Doctor of Psychology and post-doc intern (PSB 30265, Supervisor: Brian Lukas, PhD, license: PSY 9835) working in San Rafael and Petaluma, I guide my clients in a process that involves these two powerful approaches to deeper self-understanding.

Over my nearly 40 years of mindfulness practice and recent therapy training, I have come to understand human experience as a single continuum including physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. My approach to psychotherapy is to meet my clients, in any give session, wherever they are along this spectrum. From this starting point my work is to assist them to deepen their exploration and insight. For you, as a potential client, this means the chance to see with increasing clarity into the processes of mind and body and their interaction with the world. As you open to these underlying processes with both acceptance and curiosity, they naturally begin to move in the direction of healing and wholeness.

I am currently in my eighth year at The Child Therapy Institute (CTI). Although our focus at CTI is on children, I work with an equal number of adults and a few adolescents in my practice. My work with all three age groups utilizes our human ability to express ourselves through imagery in art, imagination, dreams, and play in ways that catalyze healing and inner transformation.

My professional school, Meridian University (formerly the Institute for Imaginal Studies), has an archetypal, neo-Jungian flavor, sometimes referred to as Imaginal Psychology, that informs my approach with clients. My internship training emphasizes sandplay therapy, play therapy, and art therapy.

I also integrate the practice of mindfulness into my therapy sessions, both as a way to deepen this work with imagery and as a profoundly effective therapeutic approach in its own right. In addition to my many years of personally using mindfulness as a practice for spiritual exploration and liberation, I am also trained in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy  (MBCT), both of which are powerful secular applications of mindfulness practice. I have also studied with Richard Miller, PhD, the developer of Integrative Restoration (iRest/Yoga Nidra) and can also teach iRest as a part of a psychotherapeutic process. In my work with Mindful Schools I teach mindfulness to elementary school classes. In my individual psychotherapeutic work with children, I often mix in exercises form the Mindful Schools curriculum.

I am also an accredited provider of the Positive Parenting Program (Triple P), an evidence-based approach to the challenges of parenting.