My Approach

I am a Licensed Professional Counselor and a Licensed Addictions Counselor in the state of Colorado. I am a mindfulness -based transpersonal psychotherapist.  I am a MAPS trained MDMA assisted psychotherapist as well as a Ketamine assisted psychotherapist. I work with people suffering with trauma, PTSD, depression, anxiety, stress, grief, relationship issues, personal and spiritual growth, life transitions,  and LGBTQ issues. I see adolescents and adults. I use a holistic approach to therapy that takes the mind, body, and spirit into consideration.  I provide clients with different resources in order to gain understanding and empowerment with each step in the therapeutic process.   

 What is mindfulness-based psychotherapy?

Mindfulness is just another way of becoming aware. I believe that any growth starts with awareness.  We go through life in a hurry, barely stopping to catch our breath.  We are reactive.  Someone angers us and we lash out.  We are rejected and we withdraw. We have pain and we avoid feeling it at all cost. When we are in pain, all the emotions that accompany it make our pain much greater.  We do what we have always done.  Becoming aware of what we do and why we do it is the first step.  If we can pause, and take a moment to sit with whatever is happening, we have the ability to make better, more productive choices for ourselves.  

Pain is a reality for everyone.  In Buddhist teachings it is said that suffering is equal to pain times resistance.  In other words, the more that you resist the pain, the worse that your suffering will be.  If we can learn to experience and sit with our pain, instead of avoiding it, our suffering is reduced. 

In addition to avoidance, our thoughts play a large role in our suffering.  Becoming aware of our thoughts, and choosing to focus on thoughts that serve us better is more beneficial to us.  Awareness helps to shape connections in the brain.  By cultivating new thoughts, we actually change the wiring in our brain. With healthier thoughts and behaviors, new neural pathways are formed .  As these new pathways are strengthened, older neural pathways that we don't use any longer (bad behaviors) wither away.  We CAN actually rewire our brain for the better.

What is tranpersonal psychotherapy?  The term transpersonal comes from trans - beyond, and personal - persona, so meaning beyond person.  Transcending beyond the person through altered states of consciousness and spirituality.  This is an approach geared towards those that are in search of higher meaning for their lives. I honor and do not pathologize transpersonal experiences and help people gain understanding and meaning to go along with these experiences.

Each person is unique, with their own challenges and life experiences. Aside from cultivating awareness, I do not believe in a one size fits all approach to therapy. I draw from a variety of modalities in order to facilitate change and growth for each client's individual needs including:

• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

• Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)

• Brainspotting

• EMDR - Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy

• Client Centered Therapy

• Existential

• Psychodynamic

• Psychoeducation

• Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)

• Internal Family Systems

• Gestalt

• Motivational Interviewing

• Body-Mind/Somatic Therapies including Somatic Experiencing and Hakomi

• Guided Visualization and Imagery

• Art Therapy and Creative Expression

• The Enneagram