Services Offered

Personal, life, and creative coaching:

With over 20 years experience as a clinician specializing in mood and anxiety disorders as well as trauma, I also bring years of experience with equines and years of writing/publishing experience to the work I do with clients.

Feeling stuck with riding or creative goals? Having fear issues following a fall or accident? Returned to riding as an adult and experiencing anxiety?

I utilize Jungian-based sandplay therapy, equine-assisted psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, and have an extensive "tool-kit" of coaching techniques that can be useful in creating forward motion in your life.

Sliding scale fee is available for both coaching and psychotherapy services.


Writing Workshops:

Several times a year and by request I offer writing workshops that are geared to help writers at any level get started with new projects, deepen and complete existing projects, and prepare for the work of getting words out into the world.

Workshops can include sandplay, equines, and my woodland and labyrinth paths. I am sometimes available to do workshops at other locations.


Equine-assisted Psychotherapy:

... as I practice it utilizes one or more of my horses and/or miniature donkeys in the role of co-therapist. All work with the horses is done on the ground, under my direct supervision. Mounted work may be discussed on a client-by-client basis.

Equines offer an intensive and exquisite biofeedback function to the psychotherapy work. As prey animals, they are infinitely sensitive to their surroundings, and to the humans who handle them. They communicate without language, yet are often able to mirror our feelings and emotions with great clarity.

Within my herd I have horses who are gifted at offering assistance with issues relating to boundaries, both physical and psychological; mirroring emotions and feelings that may be subconscious and not yet clear to the client; and improving communication skills.

All the horses and particularly the donkeys are very accepting and loving when clients become quiet, centered, and open.

Work with these animal members of my family can be helpful in pushing through stubborn areas in traditional therapy, bringing repressed issues to the surface, and increasing mindfulness and gratitude in daily life. They have also been excellent co-therapists in working with clients with histories of trauma.

 I invite you to discuss treatment options that include work with my equines.


Sandplay Therapy:

... is based on principles first developed by Carl Jung and adapted by Dora Kalff. Clients are presented with trays filled with sand, along with a collection of small figures and miniatures which represent anything and everything found in the natural and material world.

The sandplay process offers the client the opportunity to work in the sand, dry or wet, with or without miniatures. The resulting trays often represent the client's inner world, conflicts, hopes, and dreams.

The therapist provides a safe and protected space for the journey by silently holding and containing the client's emotional states and conflicts. The process of creating the tray enables the client to nonverbally express both conscious and unconscious material. Through continuing trays, emotions and conflicts are worked through and past stresses and hurts are integrated. The result can bring the client to a state of wholeness.


To contact me about any of the above, please use the Contact Me button at the top of the page.

setting up the sandtrays and a poem

My sandtrays are all set up, and I'm unpacking miniatures. Slowly, the garret is filling up with my collection, and it's hard to explain how it feels to have it here at home.

Each of the pieces is something I added because in some way I was drawn to it, or felt it would be important to a client to use in the sandplay work. Most of the pieces have, by this time, been used in many trays over the years. A number of the pieces were important to clients, and were used repeatedly in trays, and others were used in final trays, representing the shift to wholeness.

In some ways the unpacking process feels like handling those little bottles in the last Harry Potter movie - the ones that held memories. The miniatures carry a lot of energy, and it's almost irreverent to unpack them too quickly. I feel I need to handle each one with an open mind, before placing it on the shelf or surface in the garret. So it's taking awhile to do, but it's special time and a good way to let the garret stretch and absorb.

Once I have everything set up, I'll do a tray to initiate the new space.

This morning I discovered this poem, which suddenly reminds me of the sandplay process:


Returned To Say

When I face north a lost Cree
on some new shore puts a moccasin down,
rock in the light and noon for seeing,
he in a hurry and I beside him

It will be a long trip; he will be a new chief;
we have drunk new water from an unnamed stream;
under little dark trees
he is to find a path
we both must travel because we have met.

Henceforth we gesture even by waiting;
there is a grain of sand on his knifeblade
so small he blows it and while his breathing
darkens the steel his become set

And start a new vision: the rest of his life.
We will mean what he does. Back of this page
the path turns north. We are looking for a sign.
Our moccasins do not mark the ground.

-William Stafford

it's all connected

I had an interesting dream last night - it started with my family of origin having a holiday meal together and then taking a walk. On the walk a neighbor, who happened to be a retired scientist, was displaying a truly magnificent and giant snake skin. Another neighbor who happened by explained that the snake had hatched out of a prehistoric egg the scientist had found in his travels - he had inadvertently put it in some water and the egg hatched into this gigantic snake.

Time shifted in the dream to my husband and children. We were on a family trip, having a picnic at some place we'd stopped to see. The snake was there, alive and well, and we all marveled at its beauty.

The dream morphed into another context of my life - with my horses. I was visiting a horse breeder I respect a lot, and the same snake from earlier in the dream turned out to be a pet of hers. The snake escaped while I was visiting and kept coming towards me. The sheer size of it was frightening, but I took its head and held it until she could come get it.

The dream morphed again to my husband's siblings, who were young and still living in the home he grew up in. One of them offered to farm-sit for me. The snake was there again, outside their house.

The fascinating thing about this dream is that the snake connected all the different parts and went through a complete cycle from beginning to end. I love the prehistoric egg part especially.

I'll be thinking about this all day long.

fire and light

Opened Eckhart Tolle's The New Earth today and my eyes lighted on this:

The fire of suffering becomes the light of consciousness.

a daily habit

Most days I open one of a number of books at random and read that page, allowing the message there to set the tone for the day. I've come to trust that what I read in the morning will start a little chain of events that leads me someplace good.

One of my favorites among these books is Susan Hayward's Guide for the Advanced Soul: A Book of Insight. It's a book of quotes from a variety of sources, and I've found that, over the many years I've done this, I tend to get the same quotes during certain periods of my life, and then things will shift and I'll start getting different quotes.

Today's quote:

Just look next time you are having some trip and riding a problem - just watch. Just stand aside and look at the problem. Is it really there? Or have you created it?

Look deeply into it, and you will suddenly see it is not increasing, it is decreasing; it is becoming smaller and smaller.

The more you put your energy into observation, the smaller it becomes. And a moment comes when suddenly it is not there ... you will have a good laugh.

-Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

Deepak Chopra on Synchronicity

Funny how things happen. I was reading a friend's blog and he was telling a story of synchronicity in his life. I had been thinking today of posting a Chopra quote here to kick things off. He mentioned Chopra in his story. I'm not really sure what will find its way here, but certainly stories of synchronous events will. Please feel free to share your own.


These messages come from a level of mind that knows life as a whole, and ultimately we would have to say we are really communicating with ourselves – the whole is talking to its parts. Synchronicity steps outside the brain and works from a larger perspective.

Eliminating mind from the equation won't work because the only alternative is chance. ... One reason Jung invented a new word for these meaningful coincidences is that the normal rational way of explaining them turned out to be too unwieldy. If I sit next to a stranger on a plane who is looking for a certain book idea to publish and that happens to be the very idea I am working on, the explanation of statistical probability does not apply.

Although not easy to calculate, the odds of most synchronous events are preposterous. Anytime two people meet and discover that they have the same name or phone number, the odds are millions to one against their encounter. Yet this occasionally happens, and the simple explanation – that they were meant to meet – makes more sense than random numbers, but it isn't scientific. In spiritual reality, however, literally everything happens because it is meant to. ... At synchronous moments, you get a peek at just how connected your life is, how completely woven into the infinite tapestry of existence.