What people say
I can honestly say that, for the first time in 50 years, I’m learning how to just be. How to relish the present moment, which, magically and mysteriously, unlocks the door to the treasure house that is the rest of my life.
- Jennifer Green, Salem, Oregon
From the moment Jon and I connected, I had this deep experience of loving presence and complete trust. Something bypassed my mind and my ability to figure things out, and communicated directly to my heart and soul that I was safe and in the right place. There was a creation of power in our relationship that he honored and witnessed as being mine. It was my power. I had the experience of being wonderfully, beautifully powerful, in the most loving, energized way.
- Laura Lind-Blum, The Idea Midwife, Waterbury Center, Vermont
Jon can help you recognize where you are, and become more clear. My work with him has not been about plotting out my future, it has been about helping me come into deeper relationship with myself so that next steps unfold easily and effortlessly.
He creates a safe, spacious container for you to go as deep or wide or high as you’re capable of in any given moment. It’s a matter of him being able to see the facets and help me make them real in me.
- Sandra Leader, Carmel, CA
My feelings changed from, “Quick, fix me, I can’t stand how I feel, make it better, hurry,” to, it’s not about hurry, and it’s not about fixing, it’s about staying where you are and getting more and more and deeper and deeper sensations that this is okay. You’re fine, this is okay.
It helps me reframe experience. I don’t see anything that’s happening quite the same as I’ve ever seen it before, because my viewpoint has been enlarged. There’s more, there’s peace, there’s joy, there’s love, there’s health, there’s everything.
- Layne Young, artist, Salem, Oregon
Ellen’s Story
I want to tell you a story about Ellen.
Three years ago, she loved her job.
By May of last year, she was starting to wonder what had happened. The work that had been challenging, exciting, creative, and rewarding had changed. Now it was frustrating and restricted. She felt caught up in internal politics and newly-imposed rules and regulations.
Jobs change; corporate cultures change; and people change. But like many people in this sort of situation, Ellen felt responsible. Somehow, she believed, she’d caused management to stop trusting her. Although intellectually she knew she was still the same person — the person who’d been a key player in the company’s 300% growth in three years — deep down, she felt as if the changes were either her imagination, or her responsibility — or both.
In June, Ellen joined one of my group programs, hoping to explore what was happening in her life and find the peace and joy she’d left behind.
Over the course of the program, she opened to deep places of pain and joy. She opened to her grief that the company she’d gone to work for no longer existed — that it had changed, as companies do, into something that wasn’t a fit for her.
She found healing for the pain, and rediscovered what it meant to feel joy — and to understand more about what she did and didn’t want from her career.
When the company laid her off in late December, it was both a shock and a relief — and the work she’d done within the group space gave her the tools and understandings she needed to weather the change with optimism.
She said, “I feel like I’m this sculpture in process, and I never would have been at this point if I hadn’t had the tools and the nurturing beforehand.”
Her words and images describing her experience appear in a 5 1/2 minute video below.
The Living Map™ process that helped Ellen through her journey is an invitation to stop in the midst of life’s hurry and haste to see what’s really true for you.
It’s just one of the tools I use with clients — and it’s a revealing expression of your nonverbal, non-intellectual experience in this moment.