leif ariel:

I'm Leif. I support psychotherapists and care practitioners in moving through the gift of burnout: often a painful, but necessary, wakeup call towards adopting new professional and personal paradigms that call us into deeper relationship with ourselves & our clients.

I believe wholeheartedly in the gift of the therapeutic relationship and work with therapists to move through barriers often caused by the subconscious energetics/somatic experience of countertransference, so their work can become an enlivening gift in their life.

I got my hands in the dirt, literally, working as a wilderness therapy field guide for 9 years. Through thousands of days of walking the desert, sitting in circles, being with the depths and heights of the human experience, I learned what it means to stay with myself while also being of the deepest service to my clients.

I received further training through the rigorous 4-yr certification program at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, which combines transpersonal psychology and deep study of developmental trauma, with the energetic underpinnings of the human psyche. There I was evoked into my deepest longing: to be immersed in the unfolding poiesis of life that can only be felt, only be experienced. The combination of emotion, thought, sensation, and mystery into which we are moved.

I also sit as a guide in Rites of Passage ceremonies whose form originated (in the West) at the School of Lost Borders. This work moves in the same circles as the desert, slowly blowing sand from the high cliffs until the freedom of each grain reaches our own bodies.

I see clients in Durango, CO and remotely.