About

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The basic offering here involves meeting whatever is coming up for you from a heart-space of patience, openness, compassion...just really hanging out with whatever you're feeling and giving it a space to felt and expressed on its own terms.

And that's a lot in itself: just spending time feeling accompanied in an open space without hurry, pressure or expectations to show up any particular way.

Beyond that, we work from the idea that your experience of life is a reflection and expression of what is happening in your inner world. Working with this principle involves becoming more and more aware of what's happening within - in your present moment emotions, body sensations, energy, and alignment to what is most important to you. It involves making room for what's hidden and disruptive inside you to become conscious.

Sessions are all different depending on client's individual needs. We may open a space to discover hidden core beliefs, distorted images of what's real, instinctual reactions locked in the nervous system. We may work to identify anything that might split you from a simple follow-through in shaping the life that you'd like. Or we may explore what ways ways of being are most important to you - how you want to show up in the world embodying what you love - so that your life can more and more reflect these values and devotions. And we hold open a space to support you in revealing more deeply who you are, to discover how you uniquely want to live... a vision of life that may be extremely different from anyone's expectations of how you should live.

We may work to identify the images you have of how you'd like things to be - a passionate relationship, a thriving career - and then slow down and withdraw from those images for a time to notice how things actually are. What is the present moment feeling in your body when with your partner? Is there ease? Tightening? Does your heart feel full in the present moment of showing up to work? What's the reality of things, and what fine-tuning or big changes rise naturally out of acknowledging that reality?

We may drop into the somatic realm to notice the reality your body holds: the fears that might not knock you off your path, and the deep feelings of alignment and rightness that help centre you on your way. We meet the images of self you hold: the negative ones you may have formed very early in life, and the positive ones that match the qualities that are ready to manifest. And we support more and more deeply discovering a stability and richness within from which you can author a life that’s rooted in who you are.

And finally, the support here is for helping you to drop into a stillness and wholeness within that reveals truths of who you really are. One of the great possibilities of this approach is that old, deeply entrenched patterns can suddenly start to change: a space is held open for them to transform in radical ways that jump the tracks entirely from what has gone before.

About Shawn

My ability to hold space for people is rooted in thousands of hours of meditation...learning gradually how to stay still and relaxed with what shows up. I've been awarded credentials in spirituality and therapeutic techniques. But I like to think what really accredits me to sit with others in their difficulties is the depth I've found through sitting with my own. It means If you drop into profound stillness or intolerable grief, if you're visited by angels or demons, if your hair catches fire now and then in a session...we can meet that together.

My training and background has included in-depth training in Vajrayana Buddhism, Esoteric Daoism. Zen Buddhism, and Advaita Vedanta. I'm also involved in ongoing training in the fields of counseling, trauma, and somatic technique. Really though, so much of my "training" has involved watching how my teachers love...and gradually discovering the place within themselves from which great love is possible. I'm speaking here of love without prejudice; with a warmth that encompasses stars and squirrels and strangers and demons. Somehow it seems, a certain kind of devotion can bring up the surface of a person some pretty great qualities: compassion, caring, real warmth...real love. My aim in this work is to do my best to bring these kinds of qualities to sessions in a way that benefits you.

 
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