My mission is to bring together medical and mental health healers, scientists, musicians, athletes, and spiritual leaders to find deeper meaning and joy to energize our work, connect to life deeply, and learn to be ourselves in a rapidly changing world, so that we can innovate and achieve powerful results where we are needed most.
The Soul of Life weaves together stories from people who frequently veer into the deep end of uncertainty in their life or discipline and find a spiritual sweet spot, living life from all of their being—with soul.
I’m a social worker with 20 years of clinical experience as a psychotherapist in private practice. My expertise is centered around healing from psychological trauma and I’m the founder and director of a busy clinic that was, prior to Covid, based in downtown Washington, DC.
Much of my life has been devoted to being a healer of relationships, which I believe are central to our physical health and are the cornerstone of safe and vibrant communities. In 2015 I published my first book, Love Under Repair, followed by Mindful Marriage in 2017, a mindfulness-based curriculum for relationship enhancement.
In April of 2020 I took a once-in-a-lifetime-during-Covid backpacking trip with my 14 year-old son. Our trek took us rim-to-rim-to-rim, 42 miles, across the Grand Canyon and back. We weren’t due to go until March but the nation was rapidly shutting down and we had prepared for more than a year. We literally got the last permit handed out.
Our decent into this bedazzling landscape coincided with another, stranger and far more unnerving, descent in my life to get to the bottom of disturbing neurological health problems I’d had for about a year. This terrain was checkered with memory loss, debilitating brain fog, and peripheral neuropathy (loss of sensation in hands and feet), despite being in athletic shape as a 42 year-old. Visits to more than twelve medical specialists and over forty exams and procedures found no obvious cause.
Finally, it was my relationship with an oncologist/hematologist that turned
this medical mystery into a life-saving gift.
Read the full story (10 minute read)
Something about this doctor’s
presence—not his prestigious scientific background or sophisticated technology—allowed
the diagnostic cross-hairs to settle onto me in a deep and simple way.
Scarce few health professionals will ever practice this kind of medicine in their lifetime. It is not typically taught in the classroom. It is not in their textbooks, journals, or data sets. This kind of medicine is more than something that can be merely described. It is in the soul.
I started The Soul of Life podcast to bring together people from a wide spectrum of disciplines so that we can gather the wisdom they embody at the edges of their abilities. Where uncertainty is high, possibilities are almost endless. Together, we’ll open ourselves up to explore what I like to call the full quantum potential of the human mind which is capable of far more than we often imagine. Even tangential brushes with this almost-impossible-to-quantify horizon in give birth to life-changing moments.
I’ll be the lead-learner, curating a library of stories that will help us connect the dots that need connecting in our life to enable us to:
- Remember who we are
- Restore our hearts, minds, and bodies
- Resolve to open ourselves more to life and to others
Each week I’ll introduce you to people that will help us learn to operate from a new dimension of power in our lives and in our relationships more extraordinary than we’ve ever imagined. Because of our time together, we’ll do it faster and more efficiently than on our own.
This is The Soul of Life.