Feeling Outside the Box: A Journey to Reclaim Intuition in Therapeutic Practice

This year marks a significant milestone for me—twenty years as a licensed psychotherapist. Over these two decades, I’ve had the privilege of learning from two extraordinary mentors, Joe Loizzo and Bob Thurman. Together, we explored the integration of Buddhist principles with psychology and neuroscience, shaping new contemplative and integrative methods for clinical application. Now, after years of practice, I feel called to share some of these insights with fellow therapists, coaches, and healers.

In light of this, I’m excited to announce the launch of Intuition—a four-week, semi-private supervision group starting September 17. This program offers a unique opportunity to reclaim access to the right brain and body in therapeutic work, moving beyond the left-brain dominance that often defines conventional approaches. It’s time to create a more holistic integration that bridges the divide. As interest grows, I plan to offer more oppoties for clinical mentoring and group support in the future.

The Limits of Conventional Psychology

Cognitive neuroscience has long been the gold standard in psychology since before even I was an undergraduate, but the rationalist, reductionist paradigm underlying it imposes significant limitations—particularly in psychotherapy and healing.

Psychodynamic approaches rooted in Freud and Jung have ventured beyond these boundaries but have never fully gained mainstream acceptance. Academic institutions continue to produce graduates trained to think within narrow, left-brain frameworks, often fostering a culture of symptom-isolation and treatment-dependence.

In many cases, the client's presenting problems are seen as isolated events requiring specific interventions. Just as cancer is treated aggressively by surgery and chemo without much attention paid to underlying causes or associated effects of treatment of the rest of the body, in mental health, panic, and anxiety, for example, are often treated with strong medications, while the environmental conditions and underlying causes may be overlooked. This approach fails to place clients within an interconnected context, and worse, can foster their dependence on healthcare providers and institutions rather than empowering clients with the knowledge and tools to understand and heal themselves.

The emphasis on left-brain, rationalist, reductionist thinking has sidelined the right brain’s realm—imagination, intuition, extrasensory perception, higher states of consciousness, and the mind-body’s innate capacity to heal itself. Practitioners are trained to defer to institutional authority, often at the expense of their own agency and intuition. Like school multiple-choice exams that disregard the emotional, creative, and social intelligence of our children, therapists are confined to narrow categories of thought and pass through a series of hoops in their training that have nothing to do with the soul. This, despite the very word psychotherapist deriving from the Greek, to heal the soul. The best exemplifies just how disconnected we have become. Once licensed, therapists must adhere to strict, often outdated, governing body regulations, including the mandates of insurance companies, that often prioritize institutional interests over client wellbeing. Perhaps this is one reason why a growing trend of thought leaders in the medical field such as Jordan Peterson, Zack Bush, and Gabor Mate, are now relinquishing their licenses to commit to patient care and their novel research which defies the status quo.

Pre-industrial, indigenous, and spiritual healers access a deep, experiential knowledge of the human condition—known in Buddhism as prajna—a world modern psychology has largely disregarded. These older traditions often possess a holistic worldview, understanding that diseases and symptoms represent imbalances that can often be remedied through outlook, mindset, diet, and lifestyle. While these traditions empower clients as agents in their own healing, they also have limitations, particularly a lack of trauma-informed perspectives. Mantras and prayers alone, for example, are insufficient to resolve complex trauma or PTSD. However, today we have the opportunity to combine the best of both worlds: modern trauma-informed care with intuitive, embodied wisdom.

I believe the psychedelic revolution will play a role in healing the soul-brain divide that has grown ever wider as we heal from our culture’s over-reliance on the religious-like dogma of scientism. Despite the recent setback with the FDA rejecting the clinical use of MDMA for PTSD, public policy will inevitably shift as collective consciousness expands and challenges the consensus paradigm. In the meantime, we can continue to learn a great deal from contemplative and indigenous systems of healing and aspire towards more integrative methods that place healing of the embodied soul at the center of care.

Reclaiming Intuition: Join the Journey

The Intuition group is designed to help practitioners break free from the constraints of conventional psychology and explore new, (or shall I say old) dimensions of healing. Each week, we will prepare and present clinical cases, formulate diagnoses and treatment plans, and receive feedback and support within an interdisciplinary team. We’ll speculate on the meaning of transference and countertransference dynamics and experiment with exercises designed to center intuition, somatic responses, dreams, and even synchronicities between sessions.

This journey goes beyond intellectual understanding—it demands courage. To truly integrate intuition into our practice, we need to embrace uncertainty, and ambiguity, take risks, and learn from failures as valuable teachers. By trusting the deeper authority within ourselves, we can access greater insights that may be critical in serving our clients.

Space is limited, and registration is now open. If you are a therapist, coach, or healer in the mental health or wellness space, please register to be part of this pioneering journey. If you are a graduate student or trainee who doesn’t yet see clients, please contact me before registering.

Hope to see you there.