A place to notice
what has come forward.

How I think about this work.

People often arrive because something has become difficult to carry alone. The problem may be clear. Often it is not.

My work begins with attention: to what is happening now, to what has become repetitive, and to what may be asking for a different kind of hearing. We do not need to force a conclusion before the experience has had room to come into view.

Learning to wait.

Before becoming a therapist, I spent two decades working with artists and engineers in complex, demanding environments. I saw how much can be carried beneath a capable surface, and how easily a person can lose contact with what they need.

I trained at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where I earned an M.A. in Integral Counseling Psychology. My clinical placement was at the Church Street Integral Counseling Center, one of the CIIS training clinics, seeing clients from across the city under close supervision. Residential mindfulness practice at Plum Village and Deer Park Monastery deepened the same commitment from a different direction: careful attention, relational presence, and the practical conditions that allow a person to speak honestly.

The gestalt training came afterwards, through the residential programme at the Pacific Gestalt Institute — the Los Angeles institute co-founded by Gary Yontef, whose work with Lynne Jacobs shaped the relational turn in gestalt therapy. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. The older popular image of gestalt is confrontational and technique-driven: the empty chair, the therapist pushing for a breakthrough. Relational gestalt moved the emphasis to what happens between two people over time — how contact is made and avoided, what each person does to the other without meaning to, and what becomes possible when that is noticed rather than interpreted.

That is the lineage this practice comes out of, and it is why the work here is open-ended and why so much attention goes to the relationship itself rather than to a set of exercises.

I do not take that as expertise over another person's life. It is a practice of listening: making room for what is difficult, what is unfinished, and what may be ready to be brought into relationship.