Work with me

Working with me entails taking common divides that keep us in states of suffering, contraction, and rigidity and practicing turning them into dialectical wholes that free us to become, create, and relate in new ways. Some of these divides include: subjective experience/objective reality, inner world/outer world, self/other, oppressor/oppressed, problem/solution, and cognition/emotion. 

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I am invested in human development and growth, community and relationship building, and the activity of being human. My work is radically oriented toward possibility, curiosity, agency, flexibility, creativity, imagination, and the space of shared emotionality. I relate to my clients as more than social beings who exist in fixed identities, shaped by the world around them. I also relate to my clients as historical beings who exist in this particular time, as revolutionaries able to shape the world around them. 

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I believe frameworks based in self-inventory and self-expression (including “authenticity”) can place us on roads that lead to rumination, isolation, stuckness, and frustration. I am interested in co-creating environments that support development, that celebrate and appreciate non-knowing growing: doing something before we know how to do it (Holzman). We do not need more opportunities to figure out who we are and express that in the world. We need more opportunities to create new performances of self and to meet one another in a space of completion rather than competition and creation rather than presentation. 

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Okay, so how do we do all of that in these sessions? So many ways that I know and so many ways that I don’t yet know - ways that we will create together! Some of the ways I know include: curious conversation, energy work, applied theatre and improvisation, creative and artistic practices, somatics, neurodevelopmental work, relational practices, and applied clown and fooling. It’s deep work that holds hands with joy. 

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We go where the work leads us. You can think of these sessions as containers of becoming, insight, and rehearsal - or, as one client put it, "Your practices encapsulate complex dynamics into condensed actions." These distilled practices are a laboratory of creation that yields applicable reflections back to the rest of life, rewiring neural pathways of habitual patterns of relating and offering a framework of metaphor that continues its work underground.

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Oh, and I do assign homework! You gotta take it out of the container into the world, bit by bit.

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You do not need to be experiencing a specific problem in order to want to work in this way. In fact, this work invites us to move away from solution-seeking altogether. Besides, we don’t work on the problem. We work on the development that renders the problem contextualized, included, immaterial, or simply uninteresting. We focus on creating and growing ourselves into new situations, new needs, new wants, and new capacities. We do it together, even in a community of two.

 

My work is heavily influenced by the work of Lois Holzman, Fred Newman, and the East Side Institute and inspired by Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, Arawana Hayashi, The Keeneys, Sue Buckmaster, Cecil Collins, Fluxus, Gaston Bachelard, Phil Smith, Matthew Fox, and many, many others.

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“The discovery of who we are is the discovery of what it is that we are continuously becoming. The notion that we discover who we are from getting a deeper look at the component parts that make us up is, in my opinion, a pernicious myth. We aren’t who we are. We are what it is that we are continuously becoming.” -Fred Newman

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“Metaphor carries us on wings larger than despair.” -Matthew Fox

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“At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer. A wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity." -Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen