About Shawn

I'm someone whose been lucky enough that - when my life was incredibly intense with suffering or chaos - someone was there to quietly accompany me.

It wouldn't have been helpful to sit with just anyone. I needed people who genuinely understood what was happening to me. Luckily, that's what I found. When spiritual shifts left me turned upside - unsure what was and wasn't real - I was accompanied by people who who were at home with unusual experiences of reality. When my nervous system was lit on fire with terror and horror, I was accompanied by people who'd spent time in their own hells, and weren't fazed or bewildered by mine. So - much gratitude.

I've spent 30 years or so working to be someone who can meet people usefully in their trauma and spiritual change. That's meant professional training....and thousands of hours wandering my own inner landscape getting comfortable with all the demons and Dragons roaming around in there.

To me, the role of counsellor means showing up with you as you step into your own inner world - through the gate of the body sensations, or through Spiritual awakening. Or both.

I'm here for the work of unravelling trauma and supporting you as you go down the endless rabbit hole of meeting your own depths.

Some Therapeutic Approaches that Inform my Work:

Somatic Experiencing. Years ago - in spiritual circles - I was often advised to "take my hands off the steering wheel" - to just relax out of trying to control the traumatic-storm energies colliding around inside me. When I would follow this advice, it would feel like being thrown off a cliff in a sack full of angry tigers.

So - what a blessing to find Somatic Experiencing and other body-based therapy models. SE taught me to create a sense of containment in which a person could carefully, gradually work with the body's intelligence to work with trauma. Which was the opposite of falling off cliffs with tigers. This opened up a decades-long research into ways of holding a sense of agency, sovereignty and presence while experiencing the extraordinarily intense energies and emotions associated with trauma. SE also started me on learning about the polyvagal nervous system's complex interplay with beliefs emotions, instincts and waking dreams. And ultimately, it continues to teach me how attunement to physical sensation and the inner world can transform trauma...

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The tradition of grief-tending and ritual. This lineage has shown me a way of sitting in the Heart that isn't clenched against loss: how the Heart can settle onto the graveyard soil of the world, letting itself be saturated by sorrow. You'd think a person would drown in grief with this approach. So what a surprise to find instead that this openness offers its own support and sustenance - a wild aliveness that can carry the weight of the grief without being worn down by it. The idea of a counsellor carefully holding someone's pain at arm's length in the name of professionalism has always made me grit my teeth. The grief tradition offers another way: to meet people human to human, heart to heart. Finding common ground in the shared feeling of how incredibly painful being alive can be sometimes...along with the unshakeable knowing that we are so much more than what we feel in any given season of suffering.

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Jungian psychology has offered me a map of psychic reality that matches and helps make sense of my direct experience. I feel especially indebted to Donald Kalsched, a Jungian who describes our "archetypal self-care system". His work offers a Western framework for understanding how the characters of our inner world shape themselves in response to trauma.

Some spiritual lineages and apprenticeships informing my work

Each of spiritual teacher I've learned from has mixed their own personal experience with the ancestral knowledge of the lineages they were involved in. Or - maybe more accurately - each held the context of a tradition (or traditions) as something that supported them in a direct meeting with reality. The experiences and instructions handed down from old cave dwelling saints and fire-breathing shamans and masters of all kinds helped them settle and root into their own unique intimate meeting with self and world. I'm apprenticed to this way: of deeply respecting inherited wisdom and tradition, without being strictly limited to its viewpoint. Or as the poet Gary Snyder put it, ""All of us are apprenticed to the same teacher that the religious institutions originally worked with: reality."

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Zen and Chan teaches me the incredible beauty of falling back to an Open Spaciousness - what the Tao te Ching calls the "Valley Spirit". So: the endless learning of what it might be to show up as a receptive spaciousness that imposes nothing. The long apprenticeship of finding out how emptiness naturally give rise to genuine compassion. And the way in which the world can become so intimate as we fade out from the defence systems that cut reality into self and other.

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Daoist Alchemy, Magic & Soul Retrieval teaches me to sense energy...its flow and nature inside the body, the value of rooting it up into the Stars and deep into the Earth. The revelation of how energy can be structured through intention for purpose. And the important truth that..if you're going to stand out in a lightning storm hoping to harness transpersonal energies, its really, really important to be rooted firmly in the bone and gristle of your physical body...and in an embodied sense of altruistic purpose...

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Proto-Tantric Traditions & Vajrayana - teaches me the Heart can be lit like a lantern in the same moment that the most primal, carnal instincts are in play. And how this creates conditions for an alchemy in which wild and unpredictable energies can be welcomed home and become protective, generous...infused into the body's primal self-possession and primordial strength.

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Advaita Vedanta teaches me the value of falling back to original innocence: to care for and honor that expression of awareness which can be so nakedly vulnerable to people's negative judgements..while at the same time understanding that innocence is not seperate from the power that hangs stars in the sky and wakes the flowers in Spring with its thunder :).

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Shamanism teaches me that integrity can be rooted in holy etiquette and the sobering realm of vow and sacred contract. Shamanism holds an invitation to ongoing, endless surprises of what can happen when one learns to relate to - and bow to - something something bigger than our ordinary human frame of reference. How fluidly things can move and change then. So - exploring of a perspective like the poet Jane Hirshfield's: "To see the world truly, we need a consciousness that has been steeped in the more than human - that has travelled away from the tamed, from the familiar, from the narrow limits of self."