1. Its good for you, a tonic to strengthen your resilience for modern life. Lets face it life is complicated. Why go through it alone? Establishing a relationship with a therapist is like going to the gym, exercise for the mind. Participating in therapy strengthens your capacity for self-reflection and self-compassion and it alleviates feelings of isolation, anxiety, depression and shame. In general therapy helps you make the most of what you got, tolerate what you cannot control and engage with the life you are living.

2. Having someone to talk to provides a space in life where there is an opportunity to say everything, show up unedited, speak the unspeakable and get it out of your head. When you describe your experiences in the presence of a trained listener interesting things happen, patterns emerge and the landscape of your mind starts to reveal itself. It is a process of self-revelation.

3. Relationships are everywhere; family, partners, peers, school, work, neighborhoods…. The reality is that humans are dependent on one another, we are built to live in communities. How other people respond to us provides us with a mirror. Discussing your relationships with a therapist provides a confidential space to sort through desires, aversions, transactions and repetitive situations that occur in relationships. Learn to navigate relationships more effectively.

4. Explore big life decisions like career choices, relationships, moves, transitions and so forth. Think of a therapist as a professional confidant whose main agenda is to support you. When you invest in a relationship with a therapist you invest in having a presence in your life that can witness it all so when those big life decisions come along you have someone that knows you and can help you hold the big picture.

5. Emotional experiences can be fruitful. Emotions are useful information they provide motivation, creativity and connection. And emotions can be confusing, make us impulsive and cause distress. Describing your feelings to another person helps discharge built up tension and gives you space for self-reflection. Communicating your emotions regularly is good mental health hygiene. Putting your feelings into words makes you less vulnerable, less reactionary and more resilient when faced with difficult emotional experiences. Learn how to surf the power of your emotional world.

6. Pain hurts! It is healthy to seek relief. Pain is a sign that something is not working, out of synch and ultimately unsustainable. Stress is a form of pain. Someone once said, “Its not whether the glass is half full or half empty its how long you have to hold it.“ Addiction is often an attempt to manage pain. It is an effort towards relief. Both mental and physical pain can be addressed in the therapeutic relationship. There is a direct correlation between mental health and physical health. Therapy helps find effective ways to alleviate and manage pain.

7. Integrate life experiences. We all have a past to sort through. The older we get the more we have. Therapy helps us understand how we got to be the way we are, what we have to work with and articulate what we want. It is a place to take inventory, assess needs and give meaning to the whole process. Therapy is a way to weave the different parts of our lives into a meaningful experience that can sustain and nourish us through all the stages of life. It is never too late or too early to begin the process.
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Intention as a road trip, is it about the destination or the trip?

Intentions get dropped, picked up again, lost, found, thrown out and re-discovered. Intention is easily distracted, gets high off itself, wakes up sober and wanders off again, sporadically falling into a pace that rises and falls like a tide, steady in its cycles, chaotic in mood, disintegrates, re-born and onward it goes.

Imagine intention as a path through a landscape. Begin with great expectations that lead to dramatic take offs tempered by false starts, cautious step by step carefully constructed beginnings, grand proclamations in moments of strength, raging resentments put into curses, desire longingly planning a course… Along the way there may be mirages of success, intersections of indecision and possibilities, the obstacles of realities, horizons of just a little bit further off. The path of intention is rarely predictable except in its uncertainty.

Enter into forests of projections with dense medicinal magical growth and all the wild beasts an imagination can improvise, nightmares, daydreams and erotic fantasies, along with meadows of present delights with wildflowers, butterflies and song birds, unpossessable moments of joy. Above the tree line high peaks of insight with fresh air, panoramic views (beware of lightening in the summer afternoons and avalanches in the winter and spring), sheer cliffs of self-doubt, narrow ledges of icy pretentious, footholds of words from those who have been there before. Cairins of hope, opportunities for self-reflection in puddles and lakes, waterfalls of break throughs moving things ahead with great force into pools that can be swum in, “See what I have done!” 

Back below the high mountain tops plateaus of realizations, insights past their peek effects asking “what now?”, fogs of the lonely illusions of disconnection amplified by exhaustion, hunger and lack of a warm touch followed by dawns of inspirations. Countless miles on hot vast plains filled with endless tasks requiring days of investment (maybe years). Behold scenic overlooks of hindsight precariously perched just above the Swamps of Regret stuck in a low isolated perspective wallowing in endless whirlpools of bottomless ruminations, the seductive quicksand of self-pity, tar pits of self-judgement, swarms of mosquitos, each bite says “you are no good.” The antidote to regret is to use it to fuel future intentions.

Along the way gardens, villages and cities of cultivations where the deeds of others shine bright, landslides of debt, seasons of wealth, graveyards of leftovers from the buried histories of complications under trees feeding the roots of integration. Beyond it all oceans of the collective unconscious filled with cross currents of motivations hijacking each other’s energies, resistances and old world archetypes, sand made of everything worn down over time.

Intention is an action towards something, a decision, a choice. Having an intention is an experiment in reality testing. Consider the proverb “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The common prevailing interpretation is that intentions are no good unless they are acted upon. Or is the road to heaven paved with bad intentions not acted on? What may sprout from good intent may result in unintended consequences.

​Having the intention to go somewhere requires a journey to fulfill itself. Intention as a a road trip, is it about the destination or the trip? The word is a noun that sets off a series of events, like a motor boat across a lake. It is always easier to plan a better road trip in hindsight, then it's possible to know where to sleep & eat and which roadside attractions are worth the effort. There is a notorious Chinese proverb, “Good luck, bad luck, who knows?”, about the farmer’s son who breaks his leg. Each new event that comes afterwards shifts the perspective of wether it was lucky or unluckily incident. Hindsight constantly readjusts it’s view of the past through the lens of current events. Intention is a reaction taking note, gathering force and moving on. 

Medically intention refers to the process of healing a  wound. There is the first intention in which there the  two sides of a wound start coming together, right up next to each other. Second intention is when those edges begin to weave together merging into a more secure connection that bridges the gap. First intention is a step toward union and second intention is the integrating process that secures the relationship and heals the wound. Intention is the catalyst of many adventures, the seed to a process of negotiating the gap between our desires and the realities of the the world we live in.

“An adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered, an inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.” -  C.K. Chesterton

​Intimacy is a curious thing. We yearn for it, often when we get it we push it away only to yearn for it again. Other times we get it and it slips away from us leaving us alone and feeling abandoned.  In Close-Up toothpaste commercials of the 80’s lovers run into each other’s arms kissing passionately, fall into the ocean, bodies pressed together with theme music. A Chantal Ackerman film shows lovers in the night run out of the darkness into each other’s arms with a ferocious desire and then break apart and run away from each other back into the darkness with a equal intensity. The sound track contains only the sound of their movements, feet over grass, brushing past bushes, bodies colliding. The rhythmic motion of towards and away can lead to climax, frustration and annihilation or all three.
 
Intimacy is often a desired place to reach, a feeling to cultivate or avoid.  It suggests closeness and a knowing. The closeness could be physical or it might be close as in similar. The sharing of a particular point of view or feeling for something can often generate closeness, an intimacy of likeness; sport fans come to mind or Phish fans. One can become intimate with a landscape; there is a knowing that happens overtime as you spend time with something, learning its range of climates, topography and tools to cope with it. And the wilderness, like relationships, is never quite the experience we thought it would be.
 
There is immediate intimacy, attraction that feels like a magnet when eyes lock across a crowded room, love at first sight. There is a kind of intimacy that slowly develops overtime, like the movies where the protagonists start off hating each (hate is a form of intimacy) and because of circumstances in which they must join together to survive end up falling in love. Yet is love always intimate? Sometimes we love the idea we have of someone more than we know the person we have projected those ideals onto.
 
In a dance performance one dancer speaks to another as if they were lovers. As one speaks the other moves sometimes appearing to pay attention other times distracted by their own movements. The theme of connection and disconnection feels choppy, misaligned and grows more separate over time. It has none of the slow-mo sensation of Close-Up toothpaste commercials. There is no theme music only the interior dialogue of one partner and then the next switching roles between the speaker and the dancer. Yet they stay together, playing their parts till the disconnection becomes what holds them together, a pattern between two that contains a relationship. Bad breath may be tolerated here.