My professional role of working with young adults began in 2013. Having worked in wilderness therapy, residential treatment, transitional living programs, and now privately as a professional mentor in the Boulder and Denver areas, I have come to deeply appreciate how transformative the mentoring relationship can be for my clients and for myself.
Creating a career as a professional mentor was not something that I set out to do. I, like so many, struggled with the difficult transition from high school to college. Without a clear idea of who I was or what I was going to do with my life, I found myself without direction and mired in addiction.
As I searched for a greater meaning in my suffering, I began asking those deeper questions, “who am I?” “what is really important?” and “what is my purpose in the world?”
These deeper questions led me to some important teachers and pivotal experiences that helped clarify my inner world and directed me further along my path. Some of these mentors were individuals, wiser men or women who had themselves undergone their own journeys of development. Another teacher was nature, spending time alone in the wilderness taught me stillness and self-reliance. Serving 3 terms with Americorps taught me that service must be an irreplaceable part of my life and working on the ambulance as an EMT showed me that I thrive in environments of consequence.
Over time I found that life was revealing me to myself, continually trying to teach me something and trying to take me somewhere. It was my adherence to this process that continued to take my questions and replace them with better questions, answering them in the form of experience and demanding more of me each step along the way.
I feel blessed that I am now in a position to support this process in others, truly understanding what they are going through and holding a larger context of where they are going and how their challenges can eventually become a source of strength for them and encouragement for others.
My approach to mentoring is primarily informed by my personal experience, as well as my studies of depth psychology, Jungian archetypes, the process of evolution, and meditation/mindfulness based therapies. I have worked with males and females, adolescents and adults, struggling with addiction, depression, anxiety, trauma, schizophrenia, psychotic disorders, executive functioning issues, trauma and the ever present need for greater meaning and direction in life. My work has recently transitioned to training and supervising other mentors.
I am continually learning and growing in how I approach each individual I work with and I firmly believe that an authentic approach to mentoring is crucial and therefore endeavor to demonstrate, by the example of my own life, a way of living that would inspire others.