The Spiritual Dimension

This page exists for the people who want to know this about me. It isn't required reading—onthing on this page changes what happens in a session. This dimension is present in the work whether it's named or not. 

But if you're curious, or if this kind of thing matters to you in the people you work with, here's where it lives.

Where it started, and where it didn't.

I didn't grow up with a single faith tradition. I grew up inside questions.

My family is Ashkenazi Jewish on both sides of my family, a lineage that carries the weight of persecution, diaspora, and survival across generations. My great-grandparents fled pogroms and deserted their military service in order to survive. That history lives in the body long after the specific memories are gone. I've felt it, and it's influenced my upbringing in many subtle ways.

While my dad's family entered the US four generations ago through Ellis Island, my mother's side settled in Brazil, which means a different kind of spiritual inheritance along with Judaism. One that is syncretic by nature; that holds contradiction as a feature rather than a problem, that understands the sacred as something that moves between traditions rather than living exclusively inside any one of them.

I explored. I kept exploring. I still am.

Umbanda and the Afro-Brazilian traditions.

Through my Brazilian lineage I was introduced to Umbanda and Candomblé—Afro-Brazilian spiritual traditions that hold a fourth-dimensional understanding of reality, working with energies and entities that operate beyond ordinary perception.

I was identified as a filha de Iemanjá jovem; daughter of Young Iemanjá, the orixá of emotional depth, transformation, and holding others through difficulty, and of Oxaguiã; the orixá of cutting through to truth. Vovó, the grandmother archetype, guides me.

I share this not as a credential but as a fact about my lineage and the spiritual map I carry. The work I do, holding people through transformation, cutting to what's actually true underneath what's being presented, reflects these energies whether I name them or not.

It took me over a decade, but I've found a career path that inadvertently confirmed my spiritual lineage. That is how I came about the acceptance of this dimension of myself.

Taoism.

Taoism is the philosophical and spiritual home I've settled into most fully. I don't separate the two dimensions: for me the philosophy and the spirituality are the same thing looked at from different angles.

The central principle is the Tao itself, The Way, the flow; the movement of reality that exists whether or not we align with it. The practice is alignment. The obstacle is force. Or, as Ryan Holiday has put it, the obstacle is The Way.

It's the yin and yang symbol most people recognize without fully understanding: black and white, each containing a circle of the other's color. This is not about balance in the sense of equal amounts of opposing things. It's about the truth that each thing contains its opposite, that the dichotomy is the structure of reality, that you cannot know light without dark, heat without cold, expansion without contraction. These are the actual, truest architecture of experience.

I work inside the dichotomy. When a client is holding two contradictory emotions simultaneously and feels like they need to resolve the contradiction, I often tell them: the contradiction is the information. Both things are true. The work is learning to hold them both without collapsing either one.

The Taoist principle I return to most: so long as you flow with the current of the river, even when it's fast, even when it bends unexpectedly, even when you can't see what's ahead, you are moving toward something. It is only when you force yourself against it that you exhaust yourself without progress. And even then, you learn from the forcing.

This is a different kind of agency, one that works with reality rather than against it. That stays with the uncomfortable acknowledgement of a living contradiction, and says, this is correct, even if it's hard.

Vipassana.

In 2016 I attended my first Vipassana (but not last) retreat through dhamma.org. Ten days of silence, no reading, no writing, no eye contact with my fellow meditators. S.N. Goenka's teaching, recorded in 1991 and still the foundation of the course (and freely available on YouTube) is pragmatic in the way that the best spiritual teaching always is. He didn't ask me to believe anything; he asked me to practice.

What opened during those ten days is difficult to describe in language that doesn't sound either clinical or inflated. I peeled off layers of other people's words and judgements, freeing myself of voices and opinions that pulled me deeper into depression and self-loathing. As I began to free myself of these emotional burdens, something shifted in my relationship to my own perception. My third eye opened—that's the closest phrase I have for it, knowing how it sounds.

What I can say practically: Vipassana gave me a direct experience of equanimity that I had only approximated before. It's the foundation underneath grace. It's why I can sit with someone in the most activated state they've ever been in and stay steady.

The psychic dimension.

I am psychic. I say this plainly because I've spent enough time watching it be true to stop hedging around it.

What this looks like in practice isn't dramatic. It doesn't arrive on demand. It lives beyond knowing and inside the moments of true quiet and togetherness. It's present when I'm fully in the room with someone; when I'm not managing my own noise, not performing the work but doing it. Something surfaces that I didn't arrive at through inference. Something gets named before it's been said.

Multiple practitioners—tarot readers, energy workers, spiritual teachers across different traditions, including Umbanda— told me the same thing independently for a full decade before I began to take it seriously. For a long time I filed it under interesting and suspending disbelief, and kept moving. Then the instances became too consistent to keep treating as coincidence, and I did something about it. I started to trust it as information rather than distraction. Motherhood seemed to birth a new version of myself, one more tuned into energy and the subtler things in life, and once I began working with clients after my daughter was born, I found myself leaning more and more into the mysticism of it all.

I'm not asking you to believe in it. I'm naming it because it's real and it's present in the work, and I'd rather be honest about the full picture of how I operate than present a tidier version that leaves something important out. 

On holding contradiction.

Every tradition I've described here holds contradiction as central rather than problematic. Umbanda works across the boundary between the physical and spiritual. Vipassana teaches equanimity toward both pleasure and pain. Taoism makes the contradiction the foundation.

This is the thing I keep finding regardless of which direction I look.

The work I do is the same. I don't resolve contradictions for my clients. I help them develop the capacity to hold them, because that capacity is what makes movement possible. When you stop needing the contradiction to resolve before you can act, a whole range of options becomes available that wasn't before.

That's the spiritual dimension of this work. It shows up in every session whether it's named or not, and even if it becomes more a matter of philosophical debate instead of spiritual belief.