Transformational Coach & Psycho-Spiritual Mentor
Inner work for outer change
My Story
I was a pretty philosophical kid. Around eleven or twelve, while other kids were slipping naturally into groups, I was thinking about theodicy and consciousness. Later, I spent long hours alone in the public library, reading epochal books of philosophy and literature. One afternoon, I sat down on the carpet in my room and began to meditate. I didn’t know what I was doing. As the silence settled around me, something powerful and unsettling emerged. It wasn’t an answer, but a shocking question: What could I do, free from fear?
I felt shaken to my core. The freedom I glimpsed somehow terrified me – I wondered what I was seeking. At school, I felt trapped in a dull world, like an outsider. I found a way to go to college early. When I walked up the steps to the admissions office at UC Berkeley, there was no question what major I would declare. I chose philosophy, pursuing the question concerning the meaning of Being.
At college, I studied everything from science to poetry. My motto was “understand or die.” I read for hours, often forgetting to eat. I sought the physical laws that hold sway above the flux; the hidden movements of human history. I read sacred texts and the arguments of atheists. I was fascinated by the origin of the Word, captivated by the experience of the Ineffable.
In a way, I was exploring everything except my own, simple self: my personal world – the inescapably unique material of my life, emotions and relationships.
What was missing was an engagement with my family of origin, my childhood, the environments that shaped my personality. Unbeknownst to me, I was suffering from what in this moment of history is called complex trauma, or disconnection from myself. It would take years to integrate the fallout from the early years of my life.
“Like a fragmented ghost adrift in an undifferentiated landscape, I graduated college ahead of my class.”
Like a fragmented ghost adrift in an undifferentiated landscape, I graduated college ahead of my class. It was a quietly grueling and empty existence: I was out of touch with my body, my emotions and my authentic desires. I worked as a teacher and at restaurants while living on the periphery of society, on a sailboat. My girlfriend at the time was a dancer: so I began exploring somatic practices, still seeking.
Years before, while making my way up a grassy hill on the coast, I had had a premonition that I would travel to a different continent. I had written in my journal about moving across the sea, far away from my family, seeking what I called “an unknown and essential solitude.” I sold all my belongings and got a one-way ticket to Europe.
After exploring Italy, I arrived in Berlin at midnight. At the time, I explained to people that I wanted to know how language constitutes the self. Who would I become once I was able to speak to myself in a foreign language? Strangers became friends, life unfolded. While living in a tiny room, I taught myself German. I passed linguistic exams and received a full scholarship to study philosophy again. I had “unfinished business” is how I put it, and continued seeking.
“In hindsight, I see that I was profoundly unmoored during this time.”
In hindsight, I see that I was profoundly unmoored during this time. The therapists, coaches, and spiritual guides I worked with later would have recognized unintegrated early life experiences and inner fragmentation. Eventually, however, being a stranger in a foreign place gave me the distance I needed to see my unconscious patterns more clearly. I was on the path to myself, without knowing it.
One evening, at a dinner party of artists and intellectuals, I overheard a friend talk about healing from what he called “trauma.” I got very interested and asked him to tell me more. Something caught my attention, drew me forward. I sought out a therapist immediately. In our first session, she gave me the gift of being interested in me for my own sake – “Why are you here?” she asked. I told her I wanted to bloom. Gradually, I began to turn inward, inquiring into my relationship with myself, recovering a world of felt meaning.
Little by little, I reclaimed my own perspective: “standing behind my own eyes,” as a friend once put it. I had been seeking everywhere outside myself for “answers,” instead of making space for myself, greeting my inner life with curiosity. In a way, what was closest to me had been farthest: not only how I had been hurt and neglected in my childhood, but what I truly longed for.
I was embarking on a long journey that led me through a multitude of psychological, spiritual and personal development practices. Everything from the latest trauma-informed somatic modalities to depth-psychology, life mastery systems, ancient wisdom, and self-styled alternative healers. I moved away from seeking abstract answers and toward embodied experience, investigating human-oriented spiritual schools and intensively practicing yoga and meditation.
As I became more aware of my inner world, who I am, and what really moves me, I gained coherence and orientation.
“Most of all, I began engaging with life: every encounter could become a revelation, a portal for more creativity, the next steps.”
Most of all, I began engaging with life: every encounter could become a revelation, a portal for more creativity, the next steps. I began loving being with other people and their unpredictable uniqueness, as I slowly emerged from the emotional isolation of my childhood. Momentum grew, as I got in touch with my own unique way of being and loving. One day, I scrawled a butterfly across a photocopied page of the Phenomenology of Spirit. I quit an unnecessary graduate seminar. What was all this philosophy for, if not for living one’s own life fully, richly, truthfully?
“I sensed that everything that led me away from myself eventually led me back to myself, as I rediscovered philosophy as a way of life.”
I sensed that everything that led me away from myself eventually led me back to myself, as I rediscovered philosophy as a way of life. I felt alive and free. “Birds don’t apologize for chirping,” I told myself and smiled. I was devastated and shattered when my then life-partner almost died in my arms, having weakened herself to a breaking point: the self-destructive patterns of an eating disorder. During the Covid lockdown I lost my job as a translator. It was the darkest winter of my life, spent in hellish isolation and mental pain. Severe shock trauma left me in an enduring state of generalized terror. With the world closed down, I did my best to find support.
Looking for a path forward, I began studying to become a psychotherapist in Germany. I was determined to understand what had happened and to make things better again. I began training in the latest modalities for healing complex trauma. Driven to get to the bottom of things, I began exploring unconscious personality patterns and emotional survival strategies from multiple perspectives, drawing on systems beyond clinical psychology.
I developed a strong intuition for what was happening with others while feeling painfully disconnected from myself. Despite doing well outwardly, I was despairing. Eventually, I found myself in a bureaucratic building on the outskirts of Berlin for an oral exam to become certified. I listed off in a foreign language the symptoms of various mental health disorders to prove my knowledge. I could feel that this wasn’t the right place for me, and I was crestfallen. What I wanted to do was related to clinical psychology, but different. It was spiritual, rooted in aspiration, and not for working with diagnosed mental illnesses.
I had lost the thread of what I was seeking, focusing only on labels and suffering. I had created a cage – an elaborate explanation for why everything goes wrong. I had become devastatingly aware of how my childhood had created difficulties in my life; I had worked out my parents’ personality patterns and how my ancestors, people I’d never even met, were still “screwing up my life” – I could explain all of it in various psychological systems, and in multiple languages! All my experience and insight seemed useless to me, futile. I felt cut off from the source, like I had lost myself.
“In my search for greater truth and clarity, I immersed myself in a form of self-inquiry that integrated Western psychological exploration and Eastern meditative awareness.”
In my search for greater truth and clarity, I immersed myself in a form of self-inquiry that integrated Western psychological exploration with Eastern meditative awareness. Alongside others engaged in this work, I explored essential stages of human growth in a deeply personal manner. I increased my capacity simply to be with what is – beyond judging the contents of experience as good or bad. We traversed the heavens and hells of our inner worlds, not leaving anything out, guided by the love of truth.
Over time, it became clear that this work wasn’t about reaching an elevated spiritual state. It was about growing up – learning how to live and relate honestly and creatively. I discovered a reassuring stillness beneath my striving: a peaceful and accommodating emptiness that was also full and alive – a wellspring of power. I tasted what it means to rest in myself, cultivating a gentle personal sovereignty for truthful contact with others.
Later, while I was making progress healing from post-traumatic stress from my ex-partner’s near death, I found one of the closest people in my life in the midst of a bloody suicide attempt. The pain was almost too much to bear. During this period, I sometimes felt like I couldn’t go on. I felt glimmers of hope that one day in the future I could share my life with others who want to live fully, creatively and sanely – in accordance with who they are.
“Despite my inner turmoil, I experienced momentary feelings of gratitude – peaceful pauses.”
Despite my inner turmoil, I experienced momentary feelings of gratitude – peaceful pauses. I found myself wondering how I still had the capacity to value my life and stay connected to it. Why had I grown healthier, more resilient, more capable of being myself?
I started getting closer to what I had been seeking all those years. The answer was strange in its paradoxical simplicity and obviousness. It wasn’t based on a belief, but an experience. It became clearer to me while I worked with other people. I had begun offering sessions, using my experience to help people transform the unconscious emotional patterns and personality structures that get in the way of what they most want for themselves.
Something obvious began to enter my awareness, as if I were seeing for the first time what was right in front of me.
Others were coming to work with me for inner change. The mere fact of seeking me out was already evidence of a movement toward something more creative, more alive, more personally true. It wasn’t coming from knowledge or method, but somewhere else. What was this mysterious force, leading people? — and what had been leading me all along?
Without knowing what it was, without being able to explain it – there it was, unmistakable. A moment of contact with something deeper. I could feel it in our work together, in what was said and left unspoken. At first, a spark, nothing more: but it contained so much. The elaboration of conscious individuality. My clients were growing and changing not because I was giving them something, but because I was meeting them as they are and honoring their intentions. By co-creating a space of presence and inquiring into what is, our relationship becomes a vessel.
“Tears welled up in my eyes when I thought about it. A misattributed spiritual platitude I had discovered years ago echoed in my mind: ‘What you are looking for is doing the looking.’”
I inquire into what my clients really want, what they sense is asking for attention, and what already feels alive in them. This anchors us in the growth that has already taken root, rather than keeping us in the past. This individuating force is the light that guides our embodied inquiry, clarifying and nurturing nascent change.
What I offer is not a system, path, or methodology from the outside, but a space where you are trusted and where my presence – my knowledge, skills, and experience – is activated in service of your growth and transformation.
Tears welled up in my eyes when I thought about it. A misattributed spiritual platitude I had discovered years ago echoed in my mind: “What you are looking for is doing the looking.” It became clear to me that lack of self-acceptance is a kind of death. I had experienced this firsthand: the dullness and confusion of a disconnected life – and the spectre of literal death.
Through my work with clients, I began to see that what I had been seeking was myself: the fullness of who I am in all its complexity and truth. And I had been afraid of myself and my longing to live in accordance with who I really am.
When I work with others today, I begin not with solutions but with a conscious relationship based on intentions.