About Moi

I live by a Mighty Triad comprised of three interelated circles: Creativity, Imagination and Desire. The center point where they overlap is Loving. This is my orientation to living.

It wasn’t always so. As a lil’ tot in school, I was subject to social conditioning that aimed to censor and rein in my imagination. I got the proverbial color-in-the-lines crap. And I was too loud (enthusiastic, thank you very much) and too messy (engaged with materials, please). I innocently absorbed these teachings on inhibition, comparison, and tidiness. Creative life doesn’t thrive under such dictates. Can you relate?

As a young adult, burdened by doubt and hesitation about my creative impulses, I devoted myself to inquiry; there’s nothing I wouldn’t question. With curiosity and direct experience as guides, I launched a search, and recovered squelched desires and marginalized aspects of myself.

This journey also required a confrontation with beliefs that assaulted my relationship to the innermost source of fertility: imagination.

Based on first-hand experience, I realized five principles:

*  Creativity is the cosmic activity around which the universe organizes itself. We can know this in our bodies as a felt sense of aliveness.

*  Creativity is not a thing, but an inborn, unfurling process that nobody has a monopoly on. 

*  There’s not an iota of creation in which this vital spark isn’t embedded. 

*  Imagination is unscathed by beliefs embedded from tinyhood by dominant cultural conditioning. (This saved me!)

*  Imagination is fearless and thoroughly indifferent to judgement and one-sidedness.  

When I was free to follow my wildly creative impulses, I did so with gusto. Spontaneity took the place of certitude and expectation; experimentation replaced conformity to rules. If there is an altar for my life, this is it.

So I share creativity practices with others. Not to achieve end results but as vehicles for the convergence of authentic self-expression and imagination. Creativity practices are processes in which we can lose ourselves to the tingle of aliveness, in all its forms.

These principles extend to other potent sites for transformative change: relationship, conversation and community, where our best instincts – love, compassion, and mutuality – share a vibrational field.

If you want to learn more about me, check out my Values statement.

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ESSENTIAL ROLES I EMBODY

*  Instigator on a mission to ignite the powers of creativity, consciousness and community by all means possible.

*  Maker of assemblage scultpure, mixed media artist books, creative writing, poetry, and whatever else grabs me.

*  Relationship Facilitator and Conversation Artist who helps folks undo whatever sabotages connection to innate aliveness.

*  Ritualist who actively supports and facilitates free expression of creativity and spontaneity within safe co-created space.

*  Community Builder who organizes and engages in spirited, meaningful collaborations and gatherings.

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EARNED AUTHORITY

I received extensive training, supervision, and mentoring in the following:
Couples, individual and family therapies, psychodrama, expressive arts, transformational coaching, spiritual direction, depth psychology, dreamwork, therapeutic uses of poetry, systems and complexity theory, and regenerative economics.

Somatic awareness and inquiry are integral to my work. For the last six years, I’ve incorporated Polyvagal Theory  and practices into my work. I am awed by the profound difference this has made in my own and my clients’ lives.

I’ve worked in hospitals, homeless and domestic violence shelters, community mental health and integrative medicine centers, and private practice.

Formal Training
I earned a Master’s degree in Human Services from Lincoln State University, Lincoln, PA, and a Bachelor’s in Psychology from Kent State University, Kent, Ohio. I’m certified in Transformational Coaching through Michael Neill’s Supercoach Academy and as a Psychodramatist by the America Society of Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama. Ta dah!

What do you authorize yourself to declare? Let’s find out!

Image:  Collection of Assemblage Sculptures by Krayna Castelbaum