Profile Details

Inner-Life Wayfinding:
Exploring together a life of great mystery and meaning

After twenty-plus years working as a clinical psychologist, I completed an apprenticeship in spiritual direction through Sojourners Institute (Minneapolis). This experience has deepened my clinical work since October 2024. Inner-Life Wayfinding is a way for me to serve and accompany people looking beyond mental-health work to expand, deepen, and refine the inner life.

“Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakens.”
– C.G. Jung

You may find this work helpful if…
…you sense something more to life than what you have so far built or understood
…you want a place to reflect on spiritual, existential, or inner-life questions
…you mainly engage your inner life in solitude and would value an occasional conversation
…you’re seeking not symptom relief but orientation with meaning and mystery

In wayfinding we will draw on a contemplative, relational presence in the companioning traditions of spiritual direction. It is not coaching, counseling, or psychotherapy, and it is not a substitute for mental-health treatment, crisis care, or medical services. If you are seeking help with distress, instability, or mental-health concerns, I am glad to suggest other supports to seek instead. This could include us working together instead through my psychotherapy practice, Autumn Waters Counseling (see the website link on this page). If you seek deep and reflective conversation to orient your life toward flourishing, meaning, or a sense of calling to something more than or beyond yourself, then let’s connect and explore the possibilities.

The inner life awakened in me through water. Just north of my childhood home flows a small meandering creek. Its narrow knee-deep curves wend through low-lands, fields, and intermittent woodlots left to grow wild. Throughout my youth I wandered in an along this modest, little waterway, and in it I found a reliable companion and guide. Exploring water in my journals led to expanding on a line from the Daodejing (or Tao Te Ching), “The greatest good is like water” (Verse 8). Delving into the nature mysticism of the Daodejing, reflecting on water and its way, and wandering in and along streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans around the world has inspired a collection of verse I’ve titled water shows a way. Here is verse one:

may we all
welcome the call
to seek explore and
simply wander
in the mystery of all
flowing as one

we need not search far and wide

this mystery calls from everywhere
including deep within

and if we doubt or lose our way
we may
find all flowing as one as we
attend to the ways of the natural world

≈

the seasons and the sky reveal
beginnings
and endings
are moments
among many
within natural cycles

predator and prey reveal
how essential is knowing
when to be still
and when to act

in natural stillness we
find clarity

in natural action we
find balance grace and supple strength

answering the call some observe
the way of the tree
rooted and reaching
the way of the reed
yielding and remaining whole
the way of the seed
beginning small and growing large

among these ways and many more
the attentive observe this
present with all
flowing within

what is this?

mystery of the mystic in us all
mystery of all flowing as one

open to this
some find
water shows a way

Next steps?

To discuss the possibility of meeting in-person or by video, please email me so we can arrange a time for me to call you (no fee). The call can give us a chance to sense if working together seems like the right fit for both of us. And I can answer your questions about this work, how I approach it, and what I bring in terms of my training, experience, and intentions.

FAQs

What is the fee?
A one-hour session is $105.

How often might we meet?
A common frequency is once every 3 or 4 weeks, and I can be flexible when life calls for meeting weekly, every other week, or less often than every 4 weeks.

What is wayfinding and how does it apply to the inner life?
Wayfinding refers to the ancient practice of navigating without fixed maps, using careful awareness of one’s surroundings, noticing currents, weather, stars, landmarks, and subtle shifts in direction. Applied to the inner life, wayfinding means learning to recognize the signals already present within experience (e.g., questions, longings, tensions, values, images, dreams, and moments of aliveness) and allowing them to orient our lives with patience, grace, and trust.

What is the difference between inner-life wayfinding and mental-health work like counseling or psychotherapy?
In some ways, they are similar. For example, both are grounded in a relationship of shared attentive presence. They both are concerned with personal transformation. And both require intention of mutual good-faith (being honest with ourselves and each other and taking responsibility for our choices and their consequences).

A core difference is that mental health work seeks to relieve symptoms of distress, dysfunction, or both. (This is the language of diagnosis, and a diagnosis is required with counseling and psychotherapy.) Mental-health work seeks to restore basic wellbeing and honor the basic needs related to ourselves, our relationships, and our work life. From a deeper perspective, psychotherapy has Greek roots meaning “soul healing,” and to heal means to make whole again.

Inner-life wayfinding (spiritual direction, contemplative companioning) explores beyond the basics and our baselines. It wanders into the unknown with wonder, not to seek answers but to “learn to love the questions” as Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet. This exploring and wandering take us beyond ourselves and beyond our limited and limiting notions of who we are or could be or “should” be. The wholeness of this work is not made or restored by us but found in something greater than or beyond us. This something more has been called life, the universe, the Divine, and the great mystery. My definition of spirituality links up with this sense of something more. The Latin term spiritus means “breath,” so I define spirituality as “a sense of connection to something beyond ourselves that breathes life into us as we breathe life into it.” The more time I’ve spent wayfinding with this perspective, the more I sense that life in this definition could be written or expressed as love.