What is Guiding/companioning?
A guide is someone who has competent skills, intimate knowledge by direct experience, and a great love for the environment or ecology in which they are guiding. In the work I do with those I serve, the ecology is the psyche and the body, complete with mythic landscapes, archetypal and creaturely characters, and the whole range of self from pre-natal, to current, and beyond. While I’m a very competent guide, in truth, I’m an apprentice to a greater nameless guide, to whom I place my ultimate trust.
As this apprentice, I companion people and help draw out the healer and guide within them, so that each person will reclaim and learn to trust their internal compass needed to chart an authentic life, with eyes wide open, aware of their internal and external challenges to this authentic life, and having cultivated the resources to face them. But healing is not the end game for me and those I serve. Soul initiation, the awakening and eventual embodiment of one’s mythopoetic nature into the largest conversation or expression with the world, is the Holy Grail we are seeking. It has been said that I am both psychospritual death doula and midwife.
While some talk is needed in sessions, unlike in talk therapy, I rely most often on non-ordinary states of consciousness that interrupt the default mode of our egos, and allow what is alive in the system to speak for itself. We do this through:
dreams
somatic process
nervous system support
deep imagery process
shadow work
parts work
time on the land
movement
psychodrama
art
and a whole host of other modalities.
We meet what ever traumas and healing work are required for the next right step on the journey, all while tracking the signs of soul as they appear in the tapestry of one’s life.
To be clear, I’m not a therapist, but the work is highly therapeutic. I chose not to take the culturally recognized and licensed therapist path for many reasons. I believe that the goals of therapy don’t reach far enough, the modalities for healing are too limited, and I’m philosophically, morally, and spiritually opposed to pathologizing the human condition. Furthermore, most commonly in therapy the wound is centered, the therapist takes the “healer” role, therefore the wound is perpetuated and the healing is slower. Lastly, in traditional therapy the surface of shadow is barely scratched, and soul is not even a subject of conversation.
Liberation is an inside job.