Accessing the Divine
through Image, Imagination, Creativity and Contemplation

As an interspiritual minister, my understanding of the divine has very little to do with religious creed or theological pronouncements. I believe that the experience of the numinous, or of the divine, can be had in as many different ways as there are people.

My own access to spirituality is through the door of images - whether they come from our psyches via dreams, through mythic stories, poetry, literature, art or nature. Creativity, in her myriad guises, is my muse and playmate. Creativity is my doorway to a deepening relationship with the ineffable - the divine, whose identity can never be pinned down by our limited language and perception. We are never “done knowing God!”

I also believe that our creativity needs to be balanced with a stance of receptivity - of always remaining attentive to the still center of pure potential. The unmanifest - the opening, the “bindu” at the center of the mandala of our life. Because, as Rumi says, “the clear bead at the center changes everything!” Indeed, the more we can remain open and transparent at our very core, we allow a clear passage to the mystery and the magic. At least in my experience, these moments of pure magic arrive unpredictably - as grace. And if we can allow them access, these moments have the potential to lift us off our feet - and place us in a whole new sense of our very being!

In our work together, you are in charge!

I am primarily guided by what your soul is wanting and needing at the moment. Your soul leads, I follow that lead.

Some of the modalities I use in my practice are as follows.

Soul Conversations

Deep soulful conversations are at the heart of what we do together.

The focus here is to listen to the voice of your own soul. We speak, or hold silence, or co-create a sacred ritual. Our intention is to create a sacred container, a temenos, where your deepest voice is invited to speak its truth.

If it feels right in the moment, I might offer practices such as guided visualization, breathwork, meditation, co-creating rituals, building altars, humming, chanting, drumming, making art, using poetry, writing, using divination cards, and more. These are always only an offer, not a requirement or even an expectation. You decide whether they resonate with you in the moment.

SoulCollage® 

I often incorporate SoulCollage® card making and reading in my spiritual direction work. The practice of SoulCollage® creates an invitational space for nebulous ideas and instinctual urges to land as concrete images, which can then be accessed by consciousnesses. I find it especially useful when working with psychospiritual material which has a hazy, undefined, pre-conscious and pre-verbal quality.

Dreamwork

Our dreams are wondrous communications from the deepest layers of our psyche. I utilize Jungian theory to understand dreams. According to this theory, when we are asleep and we dream, we access not only the superficial "conscious" layers of the psyche, but the deeper, richer and much older "unconscious" layers, including the mystical "collective unconscious."

However, dreams speak to us in images that are often archaic, and are thus difficult to translate into our linear, rational language. Given my long and varied engagement with "the image" throughout my life, I can assist you in circum-ambulating your dream images, and trying to understand the communication that the dream might have for you.

Chakradance

Chakradance is about a deep inward experience. It is a moving meditation, danced with eyes closed or downcast. It incorporates chakra-resonant music, guided visualization, intuitive movement and creating mandala art as a way to capture the experience. The modality of Chakradance is undergirded by Jungian psychology. It provides a profound, yet gentle, container for inner change - working at a pace that this comfortable for your soul. As we dance through each of the seven chakras, again and again, we begin to connect with, and eventually release life experiences and narratives that block our energy in any of the chakras.

Vocational and Life-Direction Counseling (the “anti-career” approach)

As a scientist, a director of a research core facility at a premier medical school, a spiritual director, a teacher and academic dean at an interfaith/interspiritual seminary, while also being a mother, a wife, a friend… I have a long and varied experience of wearing many hats - often several of them simultaneously. I have also worked and studied extensively with Rick Jarow. Among other things, I love his “anti-career” approach to help you create a career, or any other life change, from “inside out.” In this approach, we start from who you are, where you have been and what your soul is yearning for at this time.

We live in a normative culture that tells us that we must contort ourselves to try to fit into a mold that we believe the outer world wants. So, when our soul is yearning for a whole new way of being, we still try to fit a definition, or a job description. The anti-career approach challenges this very assumption that the outside world can tell us who we are at our very core. If you are willing to “work” this approach diligently, you can use your soul’s call for change to achieve true “individuation.”

Whether you are at the threshold of a career change, or a change in life-stage or lifestyle, we can work together to navigate the complexity of your “intersectional identity.” Often, these threshold moments are scary, because we don’t yet see what lies on the other side of the veil. However, they are almost always invitations to step into a more authentic expression of who we truly are.