My Approach
The lineage threads and wisdom traditions I draw on- including my decades of combined experience in astrology, archetypal psychology, pleasure/bodywork and mythopoetic vocal lineages in the realms of theatre and performance art (including ‘extended range’ vocal techniques)- aim toward your emergence into a consensual, co-creative participation with your life, including and especially your unconscious, eccentricity and weirdness.
Part conversation and part therapeutically expressive work, we will divert the overwhelm of creative desire into the many streams it can flow. We do this by cultivating an aesthetic response to life, including to the parts of yourself and your experience that, on a conscious level, you find icky and inconvenient. There lies the juicy dynamic: the dance between the goals & desires of your conscious self, and the obscurations & cloudiness (and fertility!) of your unconscious. We work creatively together with voice, psyche, soma and your personal experience of the archetypal tributaries of the planets.
I use practices that are both time-tested *and* cutting-edge to create more space in your psyche for both sides to open up: the fertile possibility within the apparent yuck of inertia, melancholy, anxiety, darkness & manure on one side, and the manifestations of your conscious desires on the other side. Recognition is half of the truth, so clarity makes it possible for desires to flow, and the astrological chart provides a great diagnostic for what we can imagine, feel into and express together.
Through doing this work, your efficacy will be enhanced due to the awareness experienced and the liberation of stuck energy.
The true meaning of “revolution” isn’t merely to disrupt the status quo- it means “to complete a cycle..” By giving you loving, precise attention and presence, I help you complete cycles, begin new ones and discover a few more. In that sense, my job is to help you be revolutionary.
I come from a line of astrologers, performance artists and sound/music composers who have wielded the transformative potential within the connection between ecological sounds and the vibrations of figures that appear within the earth, sky and our psyches.
The heart of my approach in client work is not self-improvement, but investigating your experience and what it’s already trying to tell you, entering an inquiry of how you can deepen into that experience and emerge into greater creativity, fulfillment and integrity. It’s self-apocalypse, not self-development (apocalypse=revelation). We work with your desires and your shadows, your genius and your wounds- cognitively, somatically, psychically & expressively. There are times in life when all we need is a different perspective through cognitive reframing. Other times, we need a shake-up, and to move stuck energy, so we can step into the next stage of our evolution. In sessions with me, I explore your astrological chart(s) with you to first determine the cycles of life you are in. With this conversation as a point of entry, I then provide you with the perspective, insight and energetic loosening of stagnant vital force (through cathartic self-expression, pathways toward pleasure, shadow work/play and on-the-ground strategy.) Above all, you will leave a session with me feeling loosened up, in touch with your creativity, and with a positively inverted perspective toward ever-greater personal freedom.
WHAT IS ASTROLOGY?
We have free will, but our free will is only as effective as our self-awareness. Astrology offers us a key to both.
I began my public astrological journey in the occult bookstores of New York City and as master astrologer Montgomery Taylor’s teaching assistant at the CG Jung Institute of New York (at the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism). My background in avant-garde performance, experimental voice work, bodywork and mythopoetics shape my experiential approach to astrology.
Astrology is a wisdom tradition, thousands of years old, that places our lives in a context of collaborative kinship with the planets. It examines cycles of time and our personal and collective participation in them. These time cycles reflect the stories of our lives back to us, revealing choice points and opportunities for greater alignment with our soul’s code. Contrary to the modern rationalist paradigm which says we are each “tabula rasa,” or blank slates, astrology’s mythopoetic perspective holds that our souls choose to incarnate into this world in a specific time and place for a reason, and that we each enter this world accompanied by a genius, or “daimon.” It’s the quest of a lifetime to learn more about our unique genius and to live in alignment with its passions and necessities. In our sessions, I show you how.
Astrology has shown us, through larger planetary cycles, that we are in a time collectively when old analytical solutions no longer work. When the usual way feels blocked and energy seems stuck, your astrological natal chart shows the intuitive, right-brained alternatives to the left-brained measured solutions that are no longer working. My foundational training in astrology is Jungian, psychological and archetypal, and I am also an ongoing student of medical, financial and mundane astrology.
WHAT IS ARCHETYPAL PSYCHOLOGY?
This overlaps with the above section. Astrology is an open, organic system that aids us in the process of understanding our soul’s code, or how we live in greater alignment with our genius and our place in the world. Moreover, it aids us in shaping the story of our soul’s code by introducing us to the main characters in our story-that’s right characters plural, because we are polyphonic beings!-represented by the planets. But in order to use astrology effectively, we need to see it through an empowering and deep lens, and this is where archetypal psychology enters the picture.
“What do the planets have to do with my story and life situation?” you might ask. Well, our life situations, including our inner drives, motivations and yearnings, are fractal expressions of archetypal forces that correspond to the planets. “Archetype” is a fancy word that implies a universal pattern or experience. Lovers are archetypal. Warriors are archetypal. Dreamers and explorers and storytellers, too. And all of these parts of you, and your life, are archetypal. When these shades of your experience come into sharper relief, life not only offers you more choice; it becomes deeper and richer.
Archetypal psychology gives primacy, in the words of James Hillman, “the processes of the imagination.” It was archetypal psychology that I learned and instantly resonated to first because of its ability to find the generative value in the wounds of the soul. Its polytheistic attitude- capacity to value multiple perspectives on inner life as gods-gave me medicine from an early age, and formed the context that motivated me to study astrology.
WHAT IS PLEASURE/BODY WORK?
Erotic energy is the healing pulse of life and is one of the most powerful ways we can step into our creativity and transcend fear when used consciously. Since the beginning of my astrological journey, I have come to feel & know the planets as erotically charged entities. They bear much insight and raw material involving how we experience desire and gender. This area of inquiry has formed an aspect of my work called Astro-Erotics (more on this in a different section of my site). Pleasure is our birthright, and our desires have much to teach us about how our creativity wants to be used and how the darker sides of our lives want to be alchemized.
But sometimes we need some tools and guidance on how to navigate all this when what we want may not be clear to us in the first place. The pleasure modalities I engage with are all in service to these areas. I am a certified practitioner of Urban Tantra, the flavor of neo-tantra developed by Barbara Carrellas which finds the relationship between breath, energy, spiritual connection and kink.
WHAT ARE MYTHOPOETIC VOCAL LINEAGES?
Mythopoetic vocal work mines the relationship between singing and psychological image-making as a visceral catalyst for transformation, creativity and evolution. For years I have trained as an experimental vocal artist in the lineage of Pantheatre through my mentors, Enrique Pardo and Linda Wise, which traces back to Roy Hart and Alfred Wolfsohn.
The story of the vocal work goes like this: Alfred Wolfsohn served as a soldier in WW1. He came out of it with shellshock, and his main symptom was that he had constant auditory “hallucinations” of the screams of his fellow soldiers dying in the trenches of battle. After trying many forms of therapy, nothing worked to exorcise these screams…except for singing. Wolfsohn developed his own vocal approach that involved the transformation of the ‘scream’ into a lyrical sound- a tone, a pitch. He found this to be the most effective therapy. His approach evolved to include the full range of human sound and emotion, from the lowest bass sounds to the highest soprano sounds as expressive of parts of the psyche. The connection of this work to the word “mythopoetic” derives from the intimacy of these sounds with the cries of the soul: Wolfsohn was able, through the container of singing, to express his wildest depths into an audible form.
Wolfsohn’s foremost pupil, Roy Hart, formed a community in the late 1960s devoted to the vision of the “eight-octave voice”: a capacity to literally sing in eight octaves, but also a capacity to express the fullness and vastness of one’s soul through one’s voice. A large part of this work was the ability to sing the shadow skillfully so that one could live in full integrity. In the present day, the carriers of this work who are my mentors are Pantheatre, who blend mythopoetics with this vocal work and archetypal psychology (James Hillman was the ‘Honorary President’ Pantheatre and I am a member.)
A key take of mythopoetic vocal work today, in terms of my approach, is how the voice becomes a companion and a source of invocation, evocation and catharsis when we are going through the process of dismembering and re-membering ourselves, our fates and our ecosystems.