WRITING
At the blog
I posted a new open essay at my website on the shifting, evolving, beneficial and harmful aspects of our aspirational selves, and the particular ideal selves that have both shaped and haunted me.
I also have at least two more essays outlined that I’ll be offering at the free blog my website in the next month or two.
Seminar and Lectio Essays
There is also a new, closely related essay on the persistent and recurring archetypal notion of The Dual Self as it emerges in psychological and spiritual literature for those who subscribe
The Good Thief Dilemma:
a memoir, a meditation, and investigation into the mysteries of spiritual abuse
This writing is a work of memory and imagination, of investigation and amateur detective work, of theological and psychological theory, of dreams, synchronicity, and bald conjecture, of encounters with death, grief, and illness, of coming to terms with the unknowable, the incomprehensible and the unforgivable. New chapters posted each month, accessible with a one-time fee.
SUMMER WORKSHOPS & SERVICES
As always, my groups and services are offered by pay-what-you-can donation
Circling the Drain: Living Intentionally with Mortality
Many people, including helping professionals, feel fearful, overwhelmed, and unsure of how to best respond when they are in proximity to death, dying and bereavement processes. As death in the United States, has become an increasingly invisible and medicalized process our collective willingness, and ability to talk and listen about death and dying has atrophied, and is often left to specialists. Climate injustice, political and economic instability, and the pandemic, with so many unacknowledged losses, has only intensified this dissociation. It is everyone’s work to be able to talk about death and dying:
I’m also developing a 5 session workshop as an expansion of some new (to me) ideas about the function and purpose of our emotional responses and blocks - based on a recent recorded community discussion
Riding the Roller Coaster:
Emotion & Contemplation Workshop
What are the psychological, relational, environmental, embodied, spiritual, and collective functions of our emotions and blocks? How do they serve as guides? How might we be overtaken, possessed by them? How do we tend to their call with discernment and respect for their embodied demands?
This discussion group will focus on examining some of the healthy compensations and guidance that our emotional responses have to offer beyond the usual culturally reinforced stories, and will draw from various contemplative, meditative, and spiritual models for establishing “right relationship” - neither over- or under-valuing our emotional lives.
I haven’t finalized dates to start yet, but it isn’t far off from completion - and if you’d like to hop on the information/wait list please feel free:
Vocation and Discernment for Helping Professionals
Why do we do what we do? What are the hazards to ourselves and others? How do we integrate the “shadow” aspects of the helping professions? How do we promote justice in our practices and our professions? How should global crises – the pandemic, the rise of the extreme right, racial oppression and colonialism, and climate breakdown come into our work or transform our professional identities?
An ongoing, twice monthly group meeting on alternate Thursday evenings. Room for up to three new members.
The Group-Group
This is a discussion group gathered to support the participants in building community groups of various kinds: peer support groups, study groups, social and recreational groups, discussion groups and circle groups. I firmly believe that our current individual support structures are insufficient for negotiating an era of complex and compounding crises, and that well- designed, resourced and curated community and peer support groups are profoundly necessary at this time.
Note: This group is designed to support lay people, community members and clinicians in building healthy, boundaried, well-designed non-clinicial community groups.
Many people who have attended this workshop have found it useful, even if they didn’t have a consolidated idea about what kind of group they want to start, or even that they want to convene one at all. This workshop focuses on defining the kinds of community groups that feel welcoming, balanced, and right for you, as a facilitator, convener, or simply as a group member.
This is the first time I am offering this in the evenings - Tuesday evenings, starting at the end of July.
Dream Workshop
Exploring dreams as a creative, contemplative, and community practice.
"The map to a new world is in the imagination, in what we see in our third eyes, rather than in the desolation that surrounds us.” ~ Robin D. G. Kelley
I am adding a third session this summer if there is sufficient interest. This is the work that sits most closely on my heart - and I love to watch members learn to hold and contemplate their dreams tenderly and respectfully. Starting in August on Monday evenings.
Aging as a Spiritual Practice at Pacifica
I’m also honored to be teaching one of the modules in this Pacifica Graduate Institute extension course alongside teachers such as PhD Connie Zweig, Rick Moody, Vince Cullen, Mirabai Bush and others : Aging as Spiritual Practice: A Rite of Passage for Stepping into the Elder Archetype - Certificate Program in Conscious Aging.
Individual Consultations
I offer brief or intermittent online individual support, assessment, coaching, vocational mentoring, or spiritual direction:
for people negotiating transitions in career, or life-stage, and can help clarify changing priorities in the face of collective stresses
for therapists, clergy, professed religious, and other helping professionals
for artists and creatives to support their projects and negotiate blocks
for those facing life-threatening diagnoses
for those who are seeking integration support after psychedelic therapies
I have had many specialties and sub-specialties over the course of a 30 year career and I am usually able to quickly determine if I think I can be of use
You can learn more about me and my work at my primary website. I’ve moved and will be keeping as much of my work “in house” as possible, so please visit Whatashrinkthinks.com and register for my email list to stay up to date.
As you can see I am busy enough and have my work cut out for me this summer. I’m up to my ears in delicious research - readings and writings for the study groups and subscriptions that I host, and wading through psycho-spiritual texts on aging, and emotion for new classes and workshops.
I’m also working on several different collaborations with wonderful colleagues - exploring collective liberation arts, as well as reconvening with the Treehouse Collaborative and percolating new online events together.
I am even starting to imagine creating (well ventilated) in person retreats, in Santa Fe and/or New York City. It may be a pipe dream, but for now, it is a pleasant one, and I’ve learned from my life that everything that ever comes to fruition begins by imagining it first.