You can’t take anyone further than you’ve gone yourself.

Everyone in this field says it. Far fewer build a life around it. The training keeps going outward, another modality, another certification, another tool, and the one thing that most changes what you can hold in a session is the one thing almost nobody buys: time as the client.

The ceiling is yours, not theirs

You’ve felt it. A client arrives at the edge of something and you feel yourself tighten, or steer, or reach for a tool a beat too early. Not because you don’t know what to do. Because the thing in front of you is a thing you haven’t been all the way into yourself, and some part of you knows it.

The depth you can offer is the depth you go to in your own work. That’s not a moral failing and it isn’t fixed by learning more. It moves when you go down there yourself, with someone holding the rope.

This is also why doing your own work alone keeps you stuck. The parts you can’t see are exactly the parts you can’t go looking for.

There’s a second thing, quieter. Holding people is its own kind of load. Most practitioners carry it well for years and then find they’ve slowly stopped being able to receive anything, because every room they enter is a room they’re responsible for. That one doesn’t announce itself. It just shows up as tiredness that doesn’t lift, and a slow narrowing of what you’re willing to feel.

Whether I can meet you

You’re already assessing this, probably faster than you’d admit, and you should be. Someone who works at your depth needs to know the person across from them can go further.

Nothing surprises me and nothing intimidates me.

That’s the part I’d want you to know before deciding whether to bring me the thing you haven’t said out loud. Two practitioners who have worked with me put it better than I can.

Being the client again

Some of you haven’t been on that side of it in years. Some of you have a quiet sense that you shouldn’t need to be, which is worth looking at on its own. And some of you have been in rooms where a peer worked on you and you spent the whole session half-facilitating, watching the method, managing the other person’s experience of you.

None of that is a problem here, and all of it is material.

You don’t have to arrive as a blank client. You can name what you’re noticing about the technique, argue with a frame, tell me when something didn’t land. That’s not resistance and I don’t need you to put your knowledge down at the door. It’s usually the fastest route in, because the thing you reach for when you start analyzing is often the thing you’re circling.

What I will ask is that you let yourself be worked on. Not performed for, not compared with. Held.

What we’d actually work with

The same things you work with, turned around and pointed at you.

• ✦Breath. Chosen for the system in front of me rather than run as a protocol. Some systems need to be set down. Some need to move first, because a system running flat doesn’t need more stillness.
• ✦Nervous system work. Capacity, activation, pendulation, and the way back. What it takes for your system to stay present with what rises when the pattern gets touched, which is the ceiling on everything else.
• ✦Somatic work. Where it lives, what it’s holding, what it was protecting. Worked in the body rather than described.
• ✦Hypnosis and journey work. The parts that don’t speak in conversation get a way to be heard. Often a part isn’t given words, it’s asked what it’s been listening for.
• ✦Energy work. Where it’s called for, and not where it isn’t.
• ✦Boundaries and load. What you’re carrying that was never yours, how to tell the difference in real time, and what it takes to hold someone without merging with them.

Where I come from

I studied biochemistry and chemistry, then a master’s in computer science, then spent fifteen years as an analyst reading patterns in systems too large to hold in your head, looking for the thing underneath that explained the rest. For a long time I thought I’d gone the wrong way. Biochemistry taught me the body. Fifteen years of analysis taught me how to read a system and find what’s actually driving it. Those are the two halves of what I do now.

I don’t practice one methodology, and I don’t belong to one school. That was never a strategy. It’s what happens when you keep following the thing that works.

Indigenous and shamanic traditions. Archetypes, from Jung through Myss and most of what sits between. Daoism, Chinese medicine, Buddhism, Christianity. Astrology, human design, the I Ching. Sacred geometry. Herbalism, which came first and is still running. Stone and crystal medicine with Sarah Thomas, who trained under Jeffrey Yuen, an 88th-generation Daoist priest, and I’ve worked with him directly.

And the science, which matters as much as the rest of it. Van der Kolk, Levine, Maté, Wolynn.

I don’t study passively. I take a thing apart, question it, turn it upside down, and carry it to my guides, my teachers, and occasionally the medicine, until I understand where it’s right and where it’s wrong.

I’m not claiming a lineage. I haven’t been initiated into an indigenous line and I don’t hold anyone’s tradition. Both “medicine woman” and “shaman” have been used about me by other people, and I don’t lean on either. What I’m claiming is purpose, and the work of a life. The formal certifications are on my page, and they’re the smallest part of this.

What this isn’t

This is not supervision. I’m not a licensed clinician, I don’t review your caseload, and nothing here counts toward continuing education or any credential.

It’s not business coaching, and it isn’t a certification.

It’s your own work, done properly, with someone who can go where you need to go. What that does to your practice is real and it’s a side effect. The work is for you.

And it will teach you more than another technique will. Techniques are worth having and you already have plenty. What changes what you can do in a room is having been all the way into something yourself and come back, because then you know the ground, and you’re not guessing.

When we can meet ourselves, we can meet another.

Where to start

Most practitioners start with the Joy of Becoming, six months of held work built around exactly this. It opens with a written map of your own patterns, runs through a long middle where they get worked rather than understood, and ends with you living differently rather than knowing more. Ten sessions, a weekly circle, and recordings you keep.

If six months is more than you want to commit to yet, the Terrain Session on its own will show you the ground you’re standing on, and a single one-to-one session will tell you whether we work well together.

If you want to read more

• ✦Shattered into Medicine — on the alchemy of holding space, and what it costs.
• ✦One Wound, Many Masks — how one root pattern shows up wearing several faces.
• ✦Eleven things nobody told me — the calling and the old pattern, the limits of what you can do, and the harm you’ll cause anyway.