Services.
Soul Mentorship.
As Within Soul Mentorship offers a voice of guidance and wisdom, re-connecting heart, mind, and body for the purpose of deepening and liberating our relationships to self, others, the world, and the divine.
AWSM is a partnership of exploration between client and mentor with the purpose of supporting the client’s personal growth by:
cultivating emotional intelligence, resilience, and resource
restoring/enhancing liberation from unsupportive, dysfunctional, and/or harmful patterns of thought and interpersonal relationship
fostering greater psychological, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being.
To this end, AWSM practices deep embodied listening and compassionate acceptance with wisdom and methods gleaned from transpersonal psychology, neo-Reichian therapy, as well as archetypal astrology and Toltec I Ching traditions.
Astrological Readings.
Astrology is an ancient and powerful practice of reading the movements of planets across a backdrop of star constellations to elucidate meaning within the lived experience on earth. It is a language which, like all languages, enables us to participate in our lives with greater awareness and intention. Through the language of astrology we learn how to be not merely passive actors, but active co-creators with an immanently enchanted cosmos. We begin to experience how we are both an and the expression of the Universe’s unfolding, and we are able to embrace that lifework with integrity, discernment, and grace.
An astrological reading will consult the positions of the planets, points, and constellations at the exact (if available) time of a person’s birth to illuminate nuances of their history, persona, life circumstances, strengths, and challenges, as well as how to engage with these elements and in one’s life constructively, in ways that are supportive to the individual. This modality may be used in tandem with ongoing Soul Mentorship work or scheduled as an individual reading.
As Within Soul Mentorship as Decolonial Praxis
AWSM operates from a decolonial frame, recognizing that we currently live in and have inherited a traumatized and traumatizing social landscape, shaped by the legacy of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal colonization. From within this colonized framework, we are all simultaneously victims and perpetrators of harm. AWSM endeavors to support clients in a decolonial practice of healing and accountability from within this social frame, so that together we may live into a new framework based in belonging, mutual care and reciprocity, as well as personal and collective freedom.
AWSM recognizes that the personal self and the collective society are never separate, never mutually exclusive, and that thus to examine one’s own inner landscape and experience is, necessarily, never divorced from an examination of the world, and vice versa—as within, so without. As long as we remain unconscious of our inner-most shame, fear, and insecurities, we are bound to project them onto others, in our personal relationships, and into the world through our social and cultural mores and institutions. And thus, in the words of the late social justice activist, Grace Lee Boggs, we must do the courageous work to “transform ourselves to transform the world.”
To that end, decoloniality is a praxis of decolonization through the purposeful and persistent disentangling and emancipation from narratives and dynamics of dehumanization, cruelty, and separative supremacisms within oneself—in one’s own thoughts, emotional reactions, and relationships—as well as in society—in social policies and culture.
Decoloniality means, first and foremost, challenging and subverting ideologies, narratives, and socioeconomic policies and practices of imperialism, white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, xenophobia, sizism, saneism, ableism, and any ideology or practice that results in or encourages the exploitation, dehumanization, oppression, and/or denigration of any being.
Since we recognize that there is no fundamental separation between mind and matter, psyche and cosmos, the individual and the society, what we dream and what we create—again, as within, so without—decoloniality must be undertaken simultaneously on both the internal psychospiritual and external sociocultural levels.
AWSM also recognizes that the decolonial struggle has always been led by Indigenous peoples, and so we must endeavor to follow their lead and begin with an acknowledgment of the attempted native genocide in the Americas, as elsewhere, by European settlers, and engage in a process of restitution beginning—though certainly not ending—with the #LandBack movement. We have much to learn from not only the decolonial resistance of indigenous peoples, but from their pre- and anti-colonial ways of knowing and living as well.
We must acknowledge how ideologies, narratives, and systems of colonization have and continue to cause all of us harm, through separative, supremacist, exploitative, controlling, and denigrating hierarchies which have taught us to hate and fear one another, nature, and even our own bodies and selves. This has caused deep psychological trauma, social injustice and instability, environmental desecration and destruction, and spiritual impoverishment.
Decoloniality recognizes that until all of us are free, none of us are truly free, and so our personal inner liberation is necessarily linked with the liberation of all beings.