Journey to practice: 1

Why didn’t I pursue licensure after clinical training for counseling? There’s no place for soul in the United States healthcare system. 

That’s it. 

That’s the reason I didn’t pursue licensure in the United States. 

I studied psychosynthesis psychology through The Institute of Psychosynthesis in London. The opportunity to start my degree online arose due to the pandemic. I planned to complete the initial three years (two of seminar study and one of thesis writing), start clinical training in counseling, and arrive in London for the subsequent four years of psychotherapy training. But logistical issues, underscored by the pandemic, cut my plans short. Trajectory diverted. I obtained my master’s degree after three years, then had to end my participation in the program at the school in London.

I was initially hopeful about simply converting my education and clinical training into a program based in the United States. The allure of the healing potential of the guided meditation exercises of psychosynthesis, the compelling engagement of a transpersonal worldview that I align with and my own journey through the excellent experiential education provided by the Institute– created a platform for me. I believe that narratives are rewritten with the combination of inner transformation and an expansive, inclusive transpersonal psychology. I believe in creating a space of care and soul-touching. 

As I spoke with mental health professionals, professors, and practitioners about licensure in the United States, the consensus stood: “If you don’t have to, don’t bother with the licensure.” Other practitioners reported feeling restricted in their practices because of it. Another reason for foregoing licensure was the inflexibility of being able to practice the modalities I knew would help to call the soul forward: including the inability to openly use tarot card guidance or astrology in a counseling or therapy session. (Note: this is a multilayered professional issue. Some of the spiritually-oriented practices conflict with worldviews of establishment practices. And, more importantly, there isn’t a lot of evidence from structured trials or surveys about the benefits or outcomes of using astrology, tarot, or New Age modalities. But there is more evidence around the efficacy of energy healing modalities like reiki, and I think will just take some time for the fields to merge in a meaningful way. Right now, integration is in flux.)

I rode the pipeline of chaotic childhood to therapist wanna-be. I had the constituent compassion to be in a helping profession. And I practiced, learned, and grew professionally through counseling sessions (with new-to-me clients) and supervision when I was in the program in London. Confident, but only when I practiced what I learned in psychosynthesis psychology. 

The value of my education was underscored when, after numerous conversations with administrators and advocacy groups back in the states, a woman remarked that I have a tool that most American practitioners do not have: a grounding in framework. What she meant was that I understood transpersonal psychology, which tells you immediately that I am one of those who work with things beyond the predominant mental health framework in the United States, which is therapy focused on the personality and a material worldview. 

The woman, who advised regulatory boards in mental health services in different states, said that it would be fine to market myself as a mental health practitioner and find ways to uphold integrity in my practice. It would look like no contact with clients after hours, no diagnosing, no conflict of interests through acquaintances, ethics, and more. Her guidance meant a lot to me because it made me feel like I had accomplished something with my master’s and training, even though I ended up in a completely different professional status than I had anticipated.

I had the transpersonal framework. This ontological base grounds me. I am able to assess treatments, techniques, and belief systems therein. I am open to each individual’s worldview without needing it to fit neatly into any psychological assessment. We have a wealth of ways to connect, including through tarot card or astrological guidance. And the goal of my workis to open access to the soul’s experience. From that point of contact, agency, rejuvenation, and joy emerge.

Even with all of this,  I still couldn’t find my voice. I couldn’t find that one coherent, stable, consistent way to tell the story of how I practice, why I practice, and where I fit into the system. I did, however, find an echo chamber. Pieces of what I thought, mercurial tendencies to switch perspectives based on shifting perspectives, and inconsistent versions of me appeared. 

I wrote about defining the challenge to define your own mental health. That blog emerged from wanting agency in my own self oppression–the shifting perspectives and inconsistent versions of me–that were all in response to the broken pieces of the system. At the core of the journey was to seek mental health treatment as a betterment to the experience of inner life, which is a direct mediator of the soul experience.

Now, before I continue, let me explain why I started to call my clients “students.” 

They are learning about themselves as much as I am learning about them.

Meeting with students in one on one sessions, counseling-like sessions brought waves of opening, transformation, retreat, transformation. Some students took months between sessions, citing “intense inner work.” I needed time to process the transformation in them as much as I watched transformation in me, in how I related to them and their stories, how to deliver the guidance that brought them closer to the goal of souls touching (mine and theirs). 

Others didn’t do work at all, finding contentment to let me guide meditations so they could fall asleep. They were scattered across the globe, too. Time zones made things challenging. 

The students who worked with me varied wildly in financial status. I found myself teaching others about boundaries and professionalism. I was flexible with pricing. I offered cash-free sessions. The growing sense of not embodying my own voice was soothed slightly when I thought of my circumstances around my practice and licensure. 

I believe that participation in therapy is largely governed by insurance coverage, not connection and accessibility. Many psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists have divested from insurance networks to fill their practice, citing too many administrative hours and chasing payments for rates that are insufficient reimbursement for services rendered. 

But in my practice, I have created a space for souls to touch through the shared journey and through inner space.

This blog isn’t condoning or condemning licensure at all. For me, it’s a politically motivated decision to center the human, the being who seeks guidance. Challenges in life arise to create an intense outer experience that trickles into the inner experience. People want to connect with something greater and feel a part of the universe. I believe that improving mental health, seeking counseling and therapy should lead the human being to awakening–that this student-of-their-own-life awakens to their potential inside: to source joy and strength from within, and to open to compassion and empathy and see others in a more friendly way. A human awakening links us to inner power and the sense of interconnectedness of the human family. 

The systems of oppressive structures of the healthcare system: insurance, inaccessibility due to cost, a lack of resonance between clients and clinicians, and the dissonance of a do-gooder mental health practitioner who wants to help but only uses limiting frameworks that are soulless leaves the echo chamber wide open. 

And for me, this means stepping outside the system while rebuilding it for myself and my students. I know the system is broken. We all know it’s broken.

Early in 2025, I attended a workshop held online by the Psychosynthesis Trust, another school in London. The loose theme of the workshop was trying to answer the question: where is psychosynthesis going? Diane Whitmore, Thomas Yeomans, Piero Fierucci, and others who have been working in the field of psychosynthesis (and who personally knew Assagioli, the founder of the discipline of psychosynthesis) suggested that psychosynthesis was being applied in many fields separate from the therapeutic space. The panelists also conceded that most of the people in their therapeutic practice (as clients) were middle-aged white people. This didn’t surprise me. It is a privilege to have a self-care practice and therapy–the costs of time and money make such a routine inaccessible to some. My flexibility in pricing is a direct response to the broken system of insurance. This is my way of building a practice with an ecosystem that is more humanistic and transpersonal.

 

What did surprise me was when Ferucci suggested that we “take psychosynthesis out into the world.” Almost immediately, my mind started racing about the possibilities of publishing–not material about psychosynthesis, but material in a psychosynthetic dynamic. Opposites, tension, material that is fundamentally out of resonance with some field, and through such an engagement, a third way, a middle ground emerges–that is synthesis. 

I thought of all the books that are published on metaphysical and New Age topics. The narrative is that these are some sort of fringe domains. What if I could bring work that is raw and authentic into a form, abook, that challenges this tension? What if I published books on, say, channeled information and attributed that to a non-human intelligence, or a tome on atypical and exceptional experiences (often the material I speak about with students), but in all cases, accept the works as true and represent them as they are (that is, not misattributing authorship? Sparks flew. I thought of a favorite author, Philip K. Dick, who lived with schizophrenia–his posthumously published Exegesis work reads like an account of spiritual awakening. (The book’s publication was delayed due to the publisher’s inability to categorize it). 

Books are more accessible than individual therapy sessions. 

All of the struggles and emotional whiplash of pursuing licensure–not pursuing licensure–being dedicated to psychosynthesis–wanting to connect my work to a grander vision of shifting narrative. Perhaps learning the trappings of licensure and the processes to obtain it, regulations that vary by state, is what underscored my mission to the collective. I had to recognize where I fit in, acknowledge that for other people, licensure is the way that serves the mental healthcare system’s needs. I need more freedom. I need a broader next step and ideological flexibility. 

And then I started to think about writing as medicine, as sacred, things I’ve always held dear. Holding space tenderly for the collective body of thought–published materials and content–is as powerful as holding space for an individual in a therapeutic session. So I doubled down on more words. More medicine.

Journey to practice: 2

There are literal machines that live among us, running programs that are so large that they are incomprehensible to most. A globalized world in which we are all connected through data. That leads to too much information. And, it’s not all concrete information. Some of it is archetypal, feelings and emotions carried across lifetimes. 

There are literal lifetimes unlived within us, trailing timelines that belonged to our parents and their parents and their parents and the world. Generations of human experience are literally in our DNA, data of code unlocked through lifetime and societal circumstances. Kaleidoscopic tales that are known through interpretations of ages, languages, and cultures, the establishment Gedankengut –a body of thought– upon which surgery is performed through psychological interpretations and pathological establishment.

But where is a person’s voice?

I practice the idea that the utterance of a word is medicine. This experience is the soul’s door into the world. Before that, there is voicelessness. After that, there is a resounding voice whose volume is a measure of aliveness. What does the soul see? Smell? Taste? Touch? Speak?

I have long been a person who has reached for her own (and guided others toward) writing as a transformative experience. My genre of choice is autofiction–autobiographical fiction.  It is massaging thoughts, memories, and impressions from one’s life with fictional flourishes to create the meaning of truth. It’s a way to give yourself what you need. This is why I like autofiction as a container for moments–relieving the thoughts, memories, and impressions so they can be witnessed, and the energetic charge attached to them can be diffused. The writer can disidentify –remove the emotional association– and find some psychic distance from the moment. This type of healing is pre-story. This differentiates autofiction from memoir, as the creative process is at a different place, serving a different function. Pure autofiction precedes the story for me because autofiction is about a moment in time and space. String the moments together, then you have a story. You can coddle together the meaning and the story of how you got there.

I tell my students to write in the first person, write what you need, not the truth. Writing autofiction as a container paired with integrity can help reveal the truth in a moment, as the door to the soul emerges. 

My dabbling with autofiction came from many years of failing to grasp memoir writing. Memoir is a genre with well-defined rules and open creativity, but its goal of publication, and with that, needing to measure up against other stories, dissuaded me from its use in therapeutic space. I was often told that my writing would “do so well” and that “I have potential, if I just applied myself.” I eventually realized that I wasn’t writing what most traditionally published writers were writing. I was writing my reality. I was writing moments and sensations in time, using the practice to solidify and confirm for myself my reality. I was writing into the space where authenticity screamed as loud as the inner chaos I didn’t care to mask. Hyperindividualized worlds don’t sell well. There is no larger, widely applicable truth to a cacaphonic series of words. At that realization, I grasped memoir through what I lacked in my autofiction.

In Meta Work, I explored how trauma and a disordered mind affected my ability to work. In KiezKucker, I let you, the reader, explore the construction of my story by making a choose-your-own-adventure out of a spiritual awakening experience. I produced and published my own books so I didn’t have to validate creative agency to others. I didn’t go deeper emotionally in KiezKucker because in those vignettes, those moments, I couldn’t go deeper emotionally in my own experience. In a way, I was also different from writers who sought publication. Publication in a mainstream publisher or for a reader who wants entertainment is not something I always align with–that’s not what I was going for with autofiction. I sought inner validation of moments exactly as I experienced them. This was what was healing at the time for me. 

Autofiction is risky because soul touching is risky business. 

Having a voice is a risky business. A voice bears your soul.

Autofiction gives a container for the voice, and this is an initiatory action. The tension of opposites– inner life and the world at large–needing expression is released. The initiation is toward another level of authenticity. This is psychosynthesis in action.

I want nonsensical images, flashes of insight undigested, glimpses of deep time–all of the things that come as stewards of human experience, that which we hold in our bodies and minds and try to repair through therapeutic work. 

Write them out. 

I want to chew, swallow, digest, imbibe, repeat things that aren’t related. If we’re thinking of them (things), they’re bubbling up from somewhere, and they have some meaning to unpack, some parts to integrate

This is what we need to write. This is the voice we seek. Authenticity is the prize after identity-shattering transformation aka healing work.

We know the images of others through the impressions gleaned from media–but as I mentioned, publication is a choice. The ideas we have in our culture reflect what has been published. Publication is a gatekeeper. What we know about ourselves is a reflection of what we read, see, and imbibe. But I invite you to turn those impressions off and turn on your own voice. Seek your own reflection. Seek your soul. Ask…

 

Why am I here?

What is my purpose?

How am I connected to something greater than myself (is that even possible)?

 

I honor my position slightly outside of the system: I offer a practice based on an energetic systems worldview–a post material worldview, a multidimensional perspective. Such is the path to soul since the soul is acknowledged as the source of human experience. Or, even giving voice to the resistance felt to this grander connection, this interconnectedness of being–because a voice yelling for connection is still a voice.