The Awareness Practice™ Philosophy:
Enter the Refuge for Reflection.
Step into Your Clearing.
If you’re here, chances are you’ve spent a long time holding things together, navigating complex responsibilities, or trying to check all the right boxes. It can get incredibly lonely at the top of your own life.
Here, at The Awareness Practice™—you’ll move into a Refuge for Reflection in order to leave behind the unrelenting pressure to do and to cultivate the deep capacity to be. Crossing this threshold requires the intent to break through the frantic noise of daily challenges, inviting you into an organic holding environment where rigid structures soften into fluid, natural movement.
The Co-Created Clearing: The Refuge for Reflection
A professional, solution-oriented relationship never happens in a vacuum. It takes place between living, breathing human beings in a shared space—exchanging ideas, words, symbols, and emotions in the collective moment.
This co-created field, where my professional skills and experience meet your unique landscape, is completely invisible to the physical eye. Yet this invisible connection is the most real, essential element in the room.
The Awareness Practice™ is that rarified space designed to honor what cannot be checked off on a standard list. It is an authentic, purposeful, and creative connection that emerges entirely in the space between us.
Through a dedicated alliance of intersubjective curiosity, we treat your life as an unfolding canvas and familiarize with your internal and external landscapes. My approach uses a lifetime of personal, professional and clinical wisdom to help you unwind from systemic stress, return to your true center, and safely step into your own nascent potential. We’ll map the way together as you move toward your own preferred horizon.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Identify Your Core Horizons of Care.
The central horizons of The Awareness Practice™ promote your own courageous reclamation of self-direction, providing a protected sanctuary for you to transform your inner world, your relationships, and your life’s canvas.
The integrated framework of The Awareness Practice™ promotes your own courageous renewal of self-agency and encourages you to transform your inner world, your relationships, and the life around you.
Enter Your Horizon through One of The Three Domains: A Leaf of the Triskelle
The Awareness Practice™ honors the deep and evocative imagery and symbolism of the ancient and universal Triskelle. In the Greek, Triskelion means, “the three legs,’ with these legs often being styled to look like leaves, waves, spheres or spirals. Over the millennia, this icon has been imbued with many meanings, and some believe may represent the capacity to journey, to move through and to overcome life’s adversities. Likewise, the Awareness Practice™ has three approaches through which it helps individuals in their lives to move toward their goals.
Depending on what is clinically or strategically indicated for you to address the needs and goals of your current landscape, our collaborative roadmap unfolds through one of these three distinct domains of care:
Psychotherapy
A clinical holding environment offering customized, integrative approaches from the evidence base to those who face conditions meeting medical necessity criteria.
Employee Assistance Solutions
A steadying sanctuary offering high-performing professionals, employees and your families brief, solution-focused psychotherapy services to address a full array of concerns—such as exploring how to anchor your resilience, protect your boundaries, and combat cognitive fatigue.
Executive & Life Coaching
A collaborative arena to work through corporate stressors, align your leadership intelligence and find your balance through your work and life, and steer your life and work through critical transitions.
The Four Directions of Human Gathering
At The Awareness Practice™, the Quatre Fois symbol represents the structural wholeness, unity and integration of how we encounter ourselves and our communities. Each of our three domains, whichever we choose to meet your needs is available in four intentional formats:
Individual Work (The Solitary Self):
Excavating personal depths; navigating personal, relational and professional horizons through self-reflection; and moving toward internal alignment.
Family Work (The Generational Root):
Honoring collective landscapes, untying systemic or intergenerational knots, building greater awareness of dynamics, creating new steps through self-focus of what you are bringing to your relational dance, and building adaptive new steps as you move toward greater peace within oneself and in relationship.
Group Work (The Universal Echo):
Clearing the interpersonal mirror, overcoming isolation, and gathering collective wisdom in a protected sanctuary. In keeping with evolving clinical or coaching needs of my client base, groups include a 'Quarter-Life Crisis' Group, an Artistic Recovery Group, a Creative Role-Playing Group, a Social Anxiety Group, a Recovering from Betrayal Group, and a Children with Anxiety Group. New groups are regularly forming. Please inquire.
Couples Work (The Chosen Mirror):
Repairing and recovering from relational gridlock, adjusting shared dynamics, and co-creating greater harmony in partnership ‘architectures.’
The Awareness Practice™ Philosophy:
My work is fundamentally humanistic and existential, utilizing the experiential approach of phenomenology to understand how the intersubjective field emerges, creating the actual space between us where your journey unfolds. Carrying forth the torch of my intellectual lineage, I learned directly from masters in my fields how to seamlessly integrate the science of evidence-based principles into the art of the transformative collaboration involved in the practice of psychotherapy, EAP work and coaching, respectively. My proprietary approach blends a triskelle of seamless philosophical approaches that serve as a foundation for our work together so we can co-design a space between us that can become:
A place to begin to more fully live your experience and author your personal meaning. While our space is warm and conversational, it is grounded in a rigorous blend of clinical depth and formal philosophy. I draw heavily on phenomenological frameworks—the study of how we actually perceive and inhabit our lives from the inside out—and existential inquiry, which explores how we author genuine meaning in a complex world. What that means for you is that we don't just analyze your presenting concerns, situations or challenges from a distance. We look deeply at the living ‘architectural’ or structural ‘reality’ or narratives of how you experience your world, giving you the tools to consciously shape your next evolution.
A place to stretch your own capacity to hold opposing truths and begin to more fully experience your Self and its “Be-ing.” Behind the hospitality of my practice sits a deliberate foundation rooted in dialectical philosophy—the art of holding seemingly opposing truths in balance—and ontological frameworks, which examine the very nature of how we can 'be' and show up in the world. We live in a culture that demands constant, frantic doing. My approach uses these technical disciplines to help you untangle that pressure, allowing you to hold both your immense professional ambitions and your quiet need for personal sanctuary at the same time.
A place to focus on human connection, systemic realities and grounded outcomes. My methodology brings together advanced psychological theory with a deeply grounded, pragmatic philosophy. I utilize relational and systemic frameworks, which means we don't look at you and your experiences in a vacuum; we look at how you are shaped by—and shape—the complex networks of your relationships, your career, and your culture. This delving exploration isn't merely abstract, academic theory for the sake of it. It involves our making use together of a compassionate lens that can translate philosophical insights into your movement toward your values, and reaching toward real, everyday peace and realistic goals.
Cultivating the 'Holding Environment' while moving toward your goals and values.
Inspiring my way of cultivating a “holding environment,” this intrinsic sense of intersubjective place, comes from the depths of my intellectual lineage from my training and mentorship in my field, especially the work of D. W. Winnicott, who coined this term. Still, the comprehensive, integrative approach of The Awareness Practice™ also involves the studies and lessons of a lifetime, including ancient contemplative wisdom and earth spirituality; humanism, the humanities, and clinical social sciences; biophilia and the profound ecology of the natural self; and notably, of course, the rhythmic cycles of human development across the lifecycle.
As we deepen together in our alliance in our Refuge for Reflection, our process allows the rigid structures of engrained life patterns to soften into more flexible, fluid alignments.
So, a possible ideal might be that of the balanced individual who is grounded but fluid, spacious but illumined—one who is coming more into their own self-authorship while simultaneously balancing that with their self-in-relationship who:
- Values listening to the quiet conversation between mind, body, emotion and deep listening also with others,
- Honors the natural, unhurried rhythm of their own personal journey and that of others,
- Works toward preserving a safe, protected clearing in one’s own inner being, the capacity to be alone, away from daily impingements for self-restoration with an enhanced appreciation of collective experiences,
- Knows how to rest securely at home in their own skin while maintaining perspective and collaborating harmoniously with the world around them.
Your ideal may be different than this vision, of course. It is a place to begin a dialogue. Your own ideal will have space to emerge as we work together, but this image is a place to discuss the ideal of the qualities you would like to cultivate.
This deeply rooted philosophy requires our 'cultivating' and 'watering' it together through our work together to encourage growth.
This philosophy has deeply anchored the soil of The Awareness Practice™, a soil that is watered by each of us doing our part to promote growth and change.
The stance of The Awareness Practice™ is that true well-being arises from an ecological harmony that allows the inner self to safely breathe, unfold, and find a soft refuge that promotes self-agency balanced with self-in-relation.
It’s in this context that The Awareness Practice™ offers the Refuge for Reflection to support movements toward your own peaceful restoration! Please join me in this clearing of Awareness to identify and Practice the steps that help you along your way.
Making the Invisible Visible in the Practice Alcoves
Because The Awareness Practice™ is a place, it has many nooks, crannies, and alcoves for us to explore together. Initially, we are not trained to see these with our regular eyes, because the space between seems invisible unless we are trained to see it. An intrinsic part of The Awareness Practice™ approach is to for us to become consciously aware of “the space between” where the work is done, to make the invisible, visible, and to become far more conscious of our inner Being and its complex webs of meaning and connection that surround us in the space and time of our lives.
The Practice Space as our Refuge for Reflection
The Practice Space as Alchemical Vessel
The Practice Space for Your Creative Renewal
The Practice Space to Renovate Inner Narratives
“Just open the door, cross the threshold and join me in the clearing. I look forward to meeting you and exploring possibilities.”
~ C. Elizabeth Leach
Our Refuge for Reflection Creates the Container for our Work.
An invitation beckons to step back and witness the profound ecology of your inner world—the quiet conversation between mind, body, emotion, and consciousness. Together, we bring awareness to the legacy narratives within you that have become stuck or unyielding over time. By offering these patterns a safe, reflective space—the rigid structures naturally soften, allowing a more fluid, deeply aligned way of being to emerge.
To step into deep self-discovery—regardless of whether the work we are doing is in the container of psychotherapy, EAP work or coaching—you must first feel secure and ‘at home’ in this professional setting but in a new and experientially restorative way. In my field, we call this refuge a holding environment (a term first coined by the theorist D. W. Winnicott)—but practically, it means creating the professional frame that momentarily insulates you from outer demands to create an opportunity for inner clarity and new perspectives to shine through.
The Awareness Practice™ as an ‘Alchemical Vessel.’
This space functions much like a cookstove kitchen—gathering together in a warm space with a live, interactive crucible where we gather the metaphoric raw ingredients of your lived experience. Together, we engage in a personalized ‘alchemy’ to ‘nourish’ your essential Being, bringing these unique elements together in a customized, living dialogue. This conversation is aimed toward cooking up a ‘delicious dish’ of personal transformation that we create from ‘scratch’ together, as we move toward your unique goals. Let’s ‘cook up’ something unique together in the dialogue between us, made just for you, and so different than cookie-cutter or mass-produced experiences.
The Practice Space for Your Creative Renewal.
When working as I do—often with high performing executives, professionals, students and your families in high demand situations—I have often found that many times the performance pressures have limited so many from connecting with their own unique and intrinsic capacity:
- for creativity and play;
- for lateral, out of the box, and imaginative thinking;
- for zest, wonder and joy.
Here, at The Awareness Practice™, is your time and space from your busy life for a respite from these pressures to perform or comply. These barriers are temporarily removed, giving your mind the rare, protected space it needs to settle, reorganize, and realign with the still small voice within, your inner creativity.
Drawing upon D.W. Winnicott’s landmark framework of Playing and Reality, this alcove represents a luxurious transitional space where these performance pressures are temporarily alleviated. Here, engaging together in creative explorations to remove your frantic daily baseline—allowing your innate imagination, lateral thinking, and authentic self-authorship to emerge.
The pressures to be a ‘Human Doing’ are often high in the world, not just at work. But time in our shared space represents an opportunity to Be, to remember that you are a Human Being and who you truly are and who you are becoming, first as your individual self with a capacity to be alone and then as you reconnect to your self in relationship with others.
We all need and long to feel seen as we are to fuel the Self, before pendulating back to our activities in the world with a renewed potential for a natural evolution of greater purpose and meaning.
The natural rhythm of this journey (from world to session and back again), is like the cresting and receding of waves on the shore, that look very much like the waves of the Triskelle. Our dialectic and dialogic ‘backing and forthing’ becomes both your foundation and movement into your evolving in your emerging story. In this process, you are writing your own new chapter through your growing capacity to notice what works in your life. Here in this alcove, expand on these solutions as you discover what uniquely works for you as your story unfolds.
The Practice Space to Renovate Inner Narratives
Re-building the Architecture of Your Personal or Relational Story. We are so often not aware of the scripts that are running in our head that so often run our lives. Together, we reflect on what the stories are that you are telling yourself and others about your life and experience and study together how these shape your Reality. We become curious to discover how you may be constrained by inflexible and rigid scripts or other factors that impede your momentum. This work is about re-building your story from the ground up, with you as the story’s ‘architect.’ By refining your own intellectual, emotional, and (if you wish to include it) your spiritual frameworks, as you become more authentically connected to your own internal compass.