Spirituality & Inner Life

There is a dimension to our existence that often resists easy description. It shows up in moments of stillness, in acute grief, in awe of the natural world, and in many other ways.

For some, experiences like these begin a journey toward spiritual pursuit, and sometimes formal religious practice. For others it's through art, science, nature, meditation, or through psychedelic experiences that crack us open to the same encounter.

This page is for all of these kinds of questions, thoughts, and experiences. It's for anyone who has noticed that some part of their experience lives beyond the frame most therapy rooms are willing to hold.

As a therapist in Eugene, Oregon working within an existential-humanistic framework, I've come to believe that the interior life — the felt, the imaginal, the spiritual, the contemplative — is not a separate domain from psychological life. It is woven through it. And how we attend to it shapes nearly everything else about who we are and what becomes possible within our lives.

A Complicated Word

Spirituality is a difficult word. It means too many things at once. It gets associated with belief systems and claims about reality that you may or may not hold. It can even be an embarrassing word for some of us, as it's so easily misunderstood. And there is also the baggage the word can carry if you are someone who has been hurt by organized religion.

The history of the word within psychology is also something worth consideration. For much of the last century, the field understood itself in opposition to spiritual life. The interior, the mythic, the contemplative — these were treated as residue from a pre-rational past, something therapy was meant to clean up rather than engage with.

I take the stance that the interior life matters because this dimension of a person's experience often holds some of the most important information they have about how we have lived and what matters within our lives.

The Interior Life

When we slow down, and turn toward what is inward, most of us find something far richer and stranger than we expect. There are images, associations, dreams, intuitions, and felt knowings that don't fit neatly into one category or another. This is the symbolic life that operates hidden from our daily awareness, yet is often directly responsible for how we make sense of our lives.

Carl Jung spent much of his life mapping this. He found that the human mind is both rational and mythic — that we make sense of our existence not just through logic but through story, symbol, and archetype, and that most of the time we don't realize we are doing it.

Part of how I practice therapy offers a space where this symbolic layer can come forward. A dream that has been circling for months is given space to be known. An image that arrives during a session turns out to be saying something the thinking mind had not yet found words for. A theme that keeps repeating across time and space reveals itself as a story one has been living inside without knowing it.

This space also opens into territory that, for many, has been shaped significantly by psychedelic experience. The overlap between psychedelic experience and spiritual life is noteworthy, and these encounters can be some of the first places people make contact with the full weight of the interior life.

Self & Other

One of the oldest questions in both spiritual and philosophical traditions concerns the relationship between self and other. Where does one end and the other begin? What is it that is looking out of these eyes? What happens at the edge where two people meet?

The existential tradition approaches this through the givens of existence — freedom, responsibility, isolation, meaning, mortality. Contemplative traditions approach it through questions of identity, emptiness, interdependence, and presence. These inquiries both circle the same themes, asking what it is to be here, connected to everything else around us.

I find that these questions show up in therapy in almost every session — in how a person holds themselves in relationship, in what they believe they deserve, in where they feel most alone, in what they sense but cannot say. The boundary between psychological work and spiritual work can thin in these places, and for some of us there may be no meaningful difference at all.

Meditation & Contemplative Practice

Part of what brought me to becoming a therapist is a long relationship with Zen Buddhism. I've spent decades within the tradition and have gone through lay ordination. Meditation in particular has shaped how I think about what therapy is, and what it means to be with my clients within the room.

Meditation and mindfulness is an interesting thing to speak to clinically. It comes out of spiritual practice, and it has also been studied extensively within the sciences. It sits on the edge between those worlds, which is part of what makes it so useful. For some people, meditation is a gateway into spiritual practice itself. For others, it is a tool for working with anxiety, attention, or reactivity.

What I find worth naming is that contemplative practice, at its heart, is a practice of staying with what is present. Not what one wishes was here, or what one fears is here, but the lived present reality of the moment. That orientation is very close to what existential-humanistic therapy asks of a person. The two traditions, for me, have come to be inseparable — and together they shape the kind of attention I bring to the work.

An Invitation

If you are considering spiritual counseling or psychotherapy that takes the inner life seriously — and arrive with a tradition, a practice, or no framework at all — you are welcome to reach out. I offer therapy for individuals and couples in Eugene, Oregon.

You may also want to explore existential questions, choice & direction, life transitions & change, or learn more about who I work with and my approach through existential-humanistic therapy.