APPROACH
Throughout our entire life - from birth to death, in moments of great joy or utter darkness - we are intimately connected with the Open Ground of Being. When we live in conscious connection and understanding of this fundamental reality, our lives become infused with Love and Openness and we know ourselves to be home.
The Open Ground of Being is so unassumingly simple and ever-present that we easily miss it. Cultural conditioning, unacknowledged trauma, or looking at reality exclusively through thought-based knowing can make us believe that we are inherently deficient and separate from Love, Life, or Spirit. Not recognizing that what we are looking for is the one who is looking, we erroneously continue to seek fulfillment and peace in objects, future goals, or special experiences - which is fleeting and temporary at best.
While my offerings center around the recognition of that which is already naturally complete and awake, I am deeply aware of how easily we can misuse genuine insights into the nature of reality - or even our spiritual practices - to bypass the crucible of our human experience with all its struggles, pain, and beauty.
This reveals one of reality's profound paradoxes: on one hand, we are the seamless ocean of consciousness - essentially unbroken and complete. Yet as human beings in our temporary wave forms, we are also subject to our organism's innate and vulnerable need for care and connection with others.
From the moment of birth, our soma and psyche has a biological drive to attach and bond. We depend on others not just for survival, but for the brain development that requires us to be seen, felt, soothed, and held. How we are handled - the quality of our caregiver's touch, their presence, gaze, tone of voice - shapes our foundational sense of what love feels like.
These early bonding experiences, along with our genetic and epigenetic inheritance, lay down a precognitive blueprint for all subsequent relationships. They form our implicit sense of who we are, what to expect from others, and our capacity for emotional regulation in the face of life's many challenges.
Even after profound spiritual realizations, these core patterns mostly remain wired throughout our psyche and nervous system until they are met with Presence and gradually released. This is why I offer an embodied, relational, and contemplative approach that gently addresses the unhelpful self-perceptions and neurobiological imprints that can perpetuate suffering and obscure our embodiment of true Connection in everyday life.
"To be whole, we need to include,
accept, and connect all parts of ourselves.
We need acceptance of our conflicting
qualities and the seeming incongruity
of our inner and outer worlds.
Wholeness does not mean perfection.
It means no part left out.”
- Frank Ostaseski