Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What if I have never done anything like this before, even therapy?
No knowledge or skills are required. All you need is the willingness to explore you inner landscape and the desire to transform.
Q. I have done lots of personal growth work. Do I need this?
First, blessings to you for all the healing work you have done. In healing yourself, you are healing the world, now and to come. Yet none of us are done. None of us are Buddha. Even Buddha wasn’t Buddha, meaning he wasn’t “done” until perhaps the last moment of his life. If you want to take the next step along your path, however high up the mountain of healing you are, then this is for you. Each Journey is tailored to you, because it arises from you. I am a powerful guide to hold a space for you to take those next steps.
Q. Is this therapy?
No. Therapy is a broad yet clearly defined modality with specific guidelines. It generally relies on healing through discussion. However, the goals of Deep Journeys and therapy are both emotional healing.
Q. How is this different than therapy?
The Deep Journeys process is primarily experiential and expressive. Transformation occurs through direct experience of the truth of who you are.
Q. How long will it take?
Transformation occurs in each Journey: each Journey is complete unto itself. You will feel the effects immediately. The healing of your life, in which you shift the dynamics of your interactions and self-care, require time. You created parts of your life out of your pain. The work is to create your life out of the love that you are. Bringing your external world into alignment with your inner world can take months. Ideally, between Journeys we continue to work to accomplish this in shorter sessions. Transformation is fast; healing is slow.
One of the great challenges in transformation work is to maintain the internal transformation when your world you have created pushes back on you. In a simple analogy, if you twist your ankle because you have left marbles all over the floors of your house, when your ankle gets better, the marbles are still there. In emotional work, once you have done the deep transformation, cleaning your “house” gets easier. It requires support to hold onto the inner transformation while you examine and change your world to reflect the new you.
We are like an arch. With each Journey, we put a stone back into your arch. And there are more stones to put back. It is a lot of work to hold up those stones when there are more to go: our other pain drags us down, threatening to pull down the arch. And then we get a keystone in place, and the arch stands by itself. We can relax. There may be more work to do, but we feel solid in our transformation.
The work we do is goal-oriented. We set a goal in our first meeting, allowing us to check in on your progress as we move along. The first journey offers clarity into the areas you may need to work on in further journeys, as we develop a customized program for you. Generally, the first level of goals is achieved in four journeys. We may then set additional goals for ongoing work.
Q. How long does the transformation last?
Transformation means that you are not the same person. You do not have to manage your old issues. They are gone. It can feel like you never had those issues.
Perhaps the deepest transformation is a shift in you from not healing to the path of healing. This transformation, when it occurs, is fundamental and permanent.
There are two states of healing. One is where you are asleep, and everything that happens pushes you further into the dark¾you may be stuck, or worse, your pain is increasing, your soul seeming to die. The other is when you are awakening¾there is no “awake”, there is only “awakening”: everytime I think I’m awake, I wake up¾then everything that happens pushes you further towards the light. Everything. And by everything, I mean all things, not just some things. You can develop the awareness that all the things that appear to push you into the dark are just opportunities to heal and move more towards the light.
While more old stuff may come up, you will not truly return to where you were. You will be dealing with that stuff in a new way, from a new place. You may get triggered, but it gets easier to release it and come back to center: the trained reaction is there, but the roots of it are gone. We often work at the Dynamical level to clear out these reactions.
If it feels like you are sliding back into your old self, this is more likely an indication that something else is coming up that needs to heal. When more stuff comes up, it can again dominate the quality of your life. It is an important skill to be able to monitor yourself for when you need to do another journey.
Q. Do you work with couples?
Yes. Sessions with a partner can be the most powerful of journeys because the relationship gives you access to your deepest pain. That is the gift of relationships. The gift of relationships is that they push us to the edge of places we don’t love ourselves, so that we can heal them. Relationships in crisis, or just needing work, are the greatest opportunities for healing. And there is no better place to do it than in the presence of someone who loves and supports you.
In relationships that are clearly over or ending, journeys are the perfect way to reach closure. The deepest questions that need to be answered to move on arise and are settled.
Q. Do I get more healing if my journey lasts longer?
No. Each journey is about healing a part of you. We go until you got what you came for. It is analogous to climbing a mountain. We are going up a mountain, to get all the way to the top, and come all the way back down. No matter how fast or slow you climb, it is the same mountain. If you get down sooner, it is a bonus for you.
Q. Why do I have to do it all at once? Can’t I do it in pieces?
There are two key pieces to the success of the Deep Journeys process of transformation. One is the experiential nature of a journey. The second is the continuous process of exploration and movement until you reach the core moment of transformation. This cannot be accomplished in pieces because you need to travel down through layers of yourself to get to the core. Transformation is analogous to climbing a mountain: you cannot climb part of a mountain one day, and part of the mountain the next. The only way to get to the top of a mountain is to start climbing and keep going until you get there.
Further, we never leave anyone on the mountain. We do not open up painful places and suddenly end the session. This can be devastating, and prevent resistance to further healing. Safety and a willingness to open up and touch your pain is created by knowing that there is time for it, and that you will get through it to a place of peace and deep joy.
A further analogy: Say you wanted to drive from San Francisco to New York. Every weekend you could get in your car and drive to Tahoe. You could do this for a decade. “Man,” you would say, “I did a lot of driving, and spent a lot of money!”. But you never got to New York. The only way to get from San Francisco to New York is to get in your car and keep going.
Q. Is there a connection between your quantum physics research and your healing work?
The most important connection between the two is not about quantum mechanics, but about an approach. In physics, we like to dig deeper and deeper to get to a fundamental truth. It is the same in my healing work. There are few fundamental truths of who we are (caveat: within our everyday ability to perceive them). The ecstatic moment of discovery in science is much the same in healing dynamics.