For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by what exists beneath the surface of things. The feelings we struggle to name, the longings we tuck away, the extraordinary inner worlds we carry with us and so rarely allow another person to see.
I wanted to understand why we were all suffering in such predictable ways and why so few of us knew how to talk about it.
That curiosity led me into the study of human development, psychology, and eventually the deeper mysteries of what it means to be a soul using this human experience to grow. But the greatest education of my life has come through living it.
When my mother developed early-onset Alzheimer’s at 51, I began a long and intimate apprenticeship with grief.
I would come to know the helplessness of loving someone I could not save, the extraordinary tenderness of accompanying another human being through suffering, and the strange, sometimes astonishing ways beauty continues to find us in the midst of the deepest heartbreak.
There would be other losses, other thresholds, other experiences that asked me to discover what it means to remain open to life when everything inside me wanted to close.
And somewhere along the way, my curiosity became devotion.
I became increasingly interested in what happens when we stop trying to escape what hurts and begin developing the capacity to be with the fullness of our experience. When we learn to trust our sensitivity, listen to the wisdom of our hearts, and discover that we can be profoundly changed by life without losing our capacity to love it.
I companion others through the exploration of their own interiority — going to the layers beneath the layers of what it means to be human, accessing the felt experience, and tending to the parts of themselves they may never have sat with, looked at, honored, cared for, or known were there.
- I see what is unseen.
- I tend to nuance.
- I live for the paradox.
- I find the sacred in both the holiest and the most profane places.
This way of being informs everything I do, from the intimate spaces I share with women and couples to the words I write and the life I continue to create.
If there is one word at the center of everything I make, it is staying — the willingness to remain with what is, in ourselves and with each other, rather than fix it, flee it, or perform our way past it.
The pain does not shrink; the capacity to be with it grows.
