NEW APPROACHES TO THERAPYPractical and spiritual approaches to
healing and growth.
My journey into new approaches to trauma healing and spiritual growth.
Over the past decade my own growth as a therapist and healer has led me to become simultaneously more practical and more spiritually oriented.
The practical side is working with my clients to develop daily practices -at times as a coach- that help improve health, energy, and well-being, and also learning and employing more effective means to resolve the impact of traumatic experiences, through practices such as breathwork, Havening and other somatic practices such as Somatic Experiencing (SE).
The spiritual side includes preparing for and integrating transpersonal experiences thru entheogenic plant medicines, transpersonal hypnosis and channeling, and the creative use of astrology. I now think of this turn toward the spiritual as a project of dying well, approaching the end of life as a new beginning.
After a delving into somatic practices like Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and the therapeutic use of astrology in the late 1990’s my turn toward the spiritual began anew in 2015 with Dr. Joe Dispenza’s meditations and MindValley trainings, atill including some somatic programs like Wildfit: a diet lifestyle change for enhanced health, energy, and well-being.
I then trained as a Holobody Coach through MindValley, and incorporated practices such as Intermittent Fasting. At the beginning of 2023, I completed Level 1 training in SOMA Breathwork, and in 2024 explored the Grof Legacy Training (GLT) in Holotropic Breathwork, which included GLT’s 1st ever week-long workshop in the integration of Holotropic Breathwork and Archteypal Astrology. In late 2024, I discovered Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique (QHHT) and immediately began training as a practitioner. QHHT is a hypnotic technique that facilitates access to the wise, transpersonal version of us beyond ego and default personality, initially through a series of so-called past life regressions. As of Spring 2025 I am 4/5 of the way to becoming a Level2 practitioner in that approach, but in Spring 2025, found myself in violation of one of my core principles: that as a therapist and healer I have full enough experience as a client in what I facilitate for others. Since QHHT is an in-person process, with limited opportunities in the SF Bay Area, I am currently gaining that experience through QHHT’s fraternal twin, Life Between Lives, which is Michael Newton’s transpersonal system and practice of hypnosis.
If any of these newer approaches to trauma healing and growth in consciousness interests you as a means of accessing your own more spiritual resources for healing and growth, please inquire further with me.
(rev. 5-15-25)
Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy
Integration coaching
With past training in Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy in 2020-21, I am available to help orient you to the therapeutic use of psychedelics and help you integrate your micro- and/or macro-dosed journeys into your daily life, where they aquire their full capacity to transform the quality of your choices and deepen the meaning, purpose and enjoyment you experience in life..
As of 2024, California has not yet followed the lead of Oregon and Colorado in legalizing psychedelics, even though legislation has been proposed for years and Oakland was one of the first cities to deprioritize criminal enforcement of possession for personal use.
This means that, as of now, neither I nor any other California licensed mental health professional can legally prescribe or facilitate the use of these profound medicines outside treatment in a medical Ketamine clinic or a sanctioned psychedelic clinical trial. I can, however, help you navigate the integration of experiences you do have, whether in these settings or with a competent and trustworthy guide, and have done so with a number of my clients, some of whom became aware of past trauma during psychedelic journeys, and thereby gained the conscious access needed for healing.
Psychedelics and psychotherapy
When I first learned about microdosing in 2018 from a colleague using it to manage depression, I immediately sensed psychedelics would become a major force in the future of psychotherapy. Then, like many of us, I discovered the extensive literature in therapeutic psychedelics, starting with Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind. As a trauma therapist I was impressed with the results being achieved by MAPS and in other clinical trials treating PTSD, depression, and anxiety, supported by the FDA’s 2017/19 decisions to grant MDMA and psilocybin ‘Breakthrough Status.’ I sought out training as soon as I could qualify and continue to explore treatment and training opportunities.
Breathwork
SOMA and Grof Holotropic Breathwork
In recent years, breathwork has been spreading through the fields of health, wellness, and spirituality like a benign mycelial network.
SOMA Breathwork and Holotropic Breathwork represent two ends of a spectrum of practice, with SOMA offering progressive levels of training to develop daily personal breathwork practices that can be deeply healing It was developed by ex-pharmacist, Niraj Naik after he used the traditional Indian practices of pranayama (breath yoga) and Ayurvedic medicine to successfully cure his own own serious case of ulcerative colitis.
Holotropic Breathwork is an intensive multi-day experience created and facilitated by psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and psychedelic researcher Stan Grof and his wife Christina, beginning in 1975, as an alternative to what had been a legal use of psychedelics in psychotherapy until they were scheduled as illegal 1968. Grof was one of the earliest researchers in the therapeutic use of psychedelics, beginning in Czechoslovakia in the 50’s.
Astrology
Introduction to Therapeutic Astrology
My approach to astrology begins with a basic assumption: that we are both human and spiritual beings. We live grounded in the physical world—with bodies, families, and cultural expectations—but we also carry a deeper, evolving story, one that speaks to our soul’s journey and purpose.
The most familiar view of personal identity is that we are shaped by our environment. From the moment we’re born, the way we’re cared for—or not cared for—begins to shape our personality and sense of self. Our families, schools, and cultures project roles onto us, define what is expected, and often influence what we come to believe about ourselves. Some children are idealized as golden extensions of their parents. Others are burdened with the emotional shadows their caregivers can’t bear. Most of us fall somewhere in between, doing our best to adapt in order to survive. If we’re fortunate, we experience what the great psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott called “good enough” parenting.
Alongside this environmental shaping, astrology offers another way to understand identity—one rooted in timeless spiritual symbolism. For thousands of years, astrology has held that we are born with a unique pattern of archetypes, symbolized by the positions and relationships of the planets and stars at the moment and place of our birth. With our first breath, we receive this symbolic imprint—not as a fixed fate, but as a dynamic map for growth and transformation.
As we move through life, the planets continue their motion, activating different parts of our birth chart in cycles that mirror the unfolding of our personal and spiritual development. These cycles offer us a spiral evolution of selfhood. Faced with cyclic archetypal challenges, we learn as we go from our mistakes and successes to choose and act better the next time around. While astrology can become quite complex, each astrologer finds their own focus within the many approaches to its celestial symbolism. My own practice begins with the natal chart—our birth imprint—and then explores how its core archetypes evolve over time, especially the Sun, Moon, horizon line (Ascendant–Descendant), and the twelve zodiac signs and houses that structure experience.
Popular astrology often reduces the system to Sun signs, but the Sun is only one protagonist in a much richer story. Just as the Sun is essential to all life on Earth, it symbolizes our core vitality and purpose in astrology. But how that purpose unfolds depends on the emotional environment the Moon provides in dynamic relation to our evolving Suns and on the guidance of the other planetary archetypes.
If you’re feeling called to explore your chart, what you’ll find is not a set of predictions, but a conversation—between your lived experience and the deeper cosmic patterns that have been evoking your True Self from the beginning. Whether you’re facing a transition, seeking clarity, or simply wanting to know yourself more fully, astrological consultation offers a compassionate, symbolic mirror. Together, we’ll listen for the story your chart is telling, and work toward greater understanding, alignment, and healing.
Astrology and Psychology: some notes.
Along with his colleague , Stan Grof - Scholar-in-Residence at Esalen Institute between 1973 and 1987- Rick Tarnas, then program director at Esalen, developed a deep interest in the use of Astrology to make sense of psychedelic/Holotropic experiences. Together they discovered a deep correspondence between altered state experiences induced by psychedelics and the mythology associated with the outer planets Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. These planetary archetypes, very closely correspond with what Grof had independently formulated as the ‘Basic Perinatal Matrices,’ 4 distinct stages in the process of birth.
Building on an interest in the traditions of Western Astrology in my own family, including the metaphysical researcher and writer, Manly Hall, I studied it extensively in the late 1990’s, and formed a consultation group for therapists who were also astrologers, before turning to focus on deepening my clinical skills through the newly forming field of Relational Psychoanalysis. I also pursued an interest in how movies represent sexual abuse trauma and and beginning around 2005 studied more somatic approaches to therapy for trauma. In the last half decade, however, my interest in Astrology returned and I am currently exploring it’s usefulness in therapy for those clients who are interested and request it.
In spite of being grounded in the science of Astronomy, Astrology is a metaphoric language often assumed to violate scientific method and dismissed as the gold standard of superstition. However, as a discipline and a profession it is very complex and multifaceted, with a long and rich history, and requires the equivalent of a 4-year college degree to practice competently. As I practice it, the ‘authority’ of Astrology lies in the authorship we bring to how it’s mythology and timing relate to our daily, lived experience, and in this sense it is a fully empirical practice. While it can become a belief system, it is best held lightly and open to new learning from experience. It parallels the current use of ‘parts’ language in psychotherapy, as developed through Internal Family Systems, with the added ability to predict when certain personality ‘parts’ and their interactions are likely to be activated for healing and growth.