Hello and welcome! I am so happy you are exploring your spirituality, and I hope you and I are a good fit for each other.

Things we can work on:

 1) You would like a spiritual practice

To change your felt experience, deep in your bones, you need an actual, roll-up-your-sleeves, day-to-day practice. Often, that means doing some exploring. I can guide and structure your explorations, give you essential diverse readings, show you the 10,000-foot, big-picture, “lay of the land” view of various practices, help you ask the right questions, and sometimes nudge you to investigate psychological blind spots that could be limiting your options. The goal is for you to find the practice that is most aligned to your heart and resonant with your life.

In my years of doing this work, my clients have ended up jumping into Tibetan Buddhism, A Course in Miracles, Self-Realization Fellowship (Paramahansa Yogananda’s organization), Sufism, Christian mysticism, and many other paths.

2) You want a spiritual practice to help you to heal, integrate, and transcend trauma

I am very pro-therapy, especially for trauma. I myself am in therapy, and I adore it. Nevertheless, therapy is only one dimension of healing the trauma in your body-mind. Another dimension is the process of awakening, ever more and more, to your True Nature or True Identity, which transcends your body-mind. That is the domain of spirituality.

Here’s an ancient metaphor. To think you are only your body-mind is like a wave on the ocean thinking it’s only that separate, isolated wave—a wave with whatever old patterns, wounds, scars, and traumas (as well as strengths, gifts, and beauties) it has. Spirituality is about gradually realizing—directly, experientially—that, in fact, you are not merely the lone wave. You are the entire ocean of Infinite Life or Radiant Consciousness. And that identity can literally become more real to you than the identity of your common, day-to-day body-mind.

People with trauma, however, face a potential pitfall with spirituality: we often have an unconscious tendency to use spirituality to dissociate from our emotional wounds. We confuse Transcendence with escaping the body. Meditation becomes a martini. Spiritual books, ideologies, and possibilities become mood-altering, state-changing escapist fantasies. Therapists refer to all of this as a “spiritual bypass.”

I can often help people with this because I unwittingly spent over 30 years making this error—and on a rather epic scale, if I do say so myself. Sometimes I still do make it. So I know this game. Working with our tendency to slip into the spiritual bypass can be a real gift for ourselves and for the people around us, because only as we face and metabolize our trauma can our spiritual practice become real, embodied, and alive.

The cool thing is that, at some point on the spiritual journey, people often come to see their trauma as a tremendous boon for their spiritual practice, because it can motivate people to practice with unusual wholeheartedness. Our trauma can become, in Ram Dass’ words, “grist for the mill,” and a remarkable teacher. Sucky but remarkable.

3) You already have a spiritual practice, but you want it to be more deep and alive

It is eminently possible to make your practice as fresh and vibrant as you want it to be. Sometimes we get stuck on a plateau, and we just need a fresh perspective, some new ideas, to do a few things in different ways. Sometimes exploring other practices can open doors in our own. At other times, our practice feels dry because there’s some block we’re afraid to face. I love helping people with these challenges.

4) You’re going through a heavy crisis, and you suspect spirituality can help you get through it

In some sense, we could say spirituality is “made” for heavy, seemingly unendurable crises. There are circumstances for which spirituality is the only true resort or option. To directly intuit the Vast Intelligence and Force of Love that, in truth, lives us and breathes us can beautifully equip us to flow through the hardest times in our lives. Sometimes, often when we least expect it, we can feel carried.

Conversely, our toughest trials can render us uniquely available to spiritual transformation. They can create in us a rawness and an extraordinary openness. The traditions are full of stories of oceanic grace unfolding only in those for whom the heart-need is most profound.

5) You want spirituality to help you with addiction

I agree with the perspective of Alcoholics Anonymous that, for many people, spirituality is the only thing that can free them from the grip of addictions. Spirituality, practiced sincerely, can loosen our self-centeredness, connect us to an indescribable feeling of innate wholeness, help us forgive ourselves and others, wash away shame, heal our heart, and help us feel our True Nature as Love. And that’s just for warm-uppers. All of which can be profoundly supportive of recovery from addiction.

6) You’re aging, and it’s scary

There are people out there who face aging with equanimity, curiosity, and peace. But for many of us, it can be very scary—just as it was for the young prince Gautama, who was so freaked out by it (by disease, old age and death) that he abandoned his princely life and vanished into the forest to obtain Enlightenment—Awakening from the whole nightmare of identification with the highly mortal body-mind (spoiler alert: he succeeded, to become the Buddha, or “Awakened One”).

But even far short of fullest Enlightenment, the ever-growing heart-intuition—or feeling-certainty—that you are infinitely and eternally more than your aging body-mind, that your True Identity is and always has been Radiant Consciousness, Self-Luminous Being, and Infinite Life—can alleviate vast amounts of anxiety about the vicissitudes of aging. As the Upanishads state, “Even a small amount of the dharma casts out great fear.” To refer back to our earlier metaphor, the ocean is not overly concerned about any individual wave.

About me

I’ve been in some sense “into spirituality” since I was six, when my parents had me trained in TM—Transcendental Meditation. This eventually led to my devouring hundreds of books about spirituality, starting around the age of 11 or 12 (my parents owned a bookstore, which profoundly enabled my new addiction).

From the ages of 15 to 28, I trained in Zen Buddhism under the legendary Zen Master, Dainin Katagiri Roshi, doing many sesshins (Zen retreats) and receiving lay ordination from him when I was 23—then the youngest person ever to receive lay ordination from Katagiri Roshi. During that time, I also did a great deal of study and a small amount of training in Tibetan Buddhism, including an unforgettable meditation retreat led by Sherap Chodzin, who, like Pema Chodron, had been a close assistant to Chogyam Trungpa for decades.

Katagiri Roshi passed away when I was 28 and, since then, I have practiced another rigorous spiritual way, which has included many month-long meditation retreats, two of them on a remote Fijian island.

I was also immersed in Rudolph Steiner’s anthroposophy for 17 years, simply because I taught in a Waldorf school for that long. Anthroposophy was not the path for me, but I studied it pretty deeply, in countless books, courses, lectures, and workshops (including with Werner Glass, Rene Querido, and Dennis Klocek) throughout those years. So I know a few things about Western esoteric (or “occult”) teachings.

Trainings

I feel like most of the value I have to offer comes simply from my decades of being “on the path.” Nevertheless, I have also done some trainings that affect how I work with people.

* In 2024, I became certified in Dr. George Pransky’s 3-Principles Coaching.

*  In the late 1990s, I did a training in Sufi Spiritual Healing (I'm not a Sufi, but I adore Sufism) in Los Angeles, CA. It focused on “getting out of the way” and being a vessel or conduit for what they called the Deep Love.

*  In the early 90s, I did a training in Radical Healing with Dr. Franz Bakker in Chicago. It, too, emphasized allowing the Divine Love to infuse how we work with people.

*  In the mid-80s, I did a different training in Dr. George Pransky’s 3-Principles (which was then called Psychology of Mind—it's gone through many name changes over the decades), taught by a psychologist named Craig Polsfus in Minneapolis. It focused on how to stay in the soft, open, inner-quiet state with clients, a state they called the “receiver mode.” This helps the client move into that receiver mode, too, which facilitates the most enduring shifts, openings, and insights.

*  In the early 80s, I did a training in Robert Fritz’s Art of Creating, here in Minneapolis, as well as a week-long training taught by Fritz himself in Boston. This work is about how to create what you want in life—how to bring new visions into being.

What’s next

If you want to explore whether coaching with me is right for you, the next step is for you and me to have a conversation, at no charge. These conversations typically last anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes, and they can happen by phone, Zoom, or, if you live in the Twin Cities area and it’s your preference, face-to-face, at a coffee shop or at my South Minneapolis office.

What coaching with me can look like

If, after your initial free phone discussion, we decide we’re a good fit, we’ll consider your goals and decide on the frequency of contact—weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.

Typically, coaching meetings/calls include:

·      A few minutes of meditation (guided or silent)

·      Discussion about some modest bit of study completed before the meeting/call (this can be material of your choice or, if you prefer, I will provide readings from diverse spiritual teachings)

·      For the rest of the meeting/call, we explore whatever questions, goals, and challenges are most alive for you

·      If you wish, I can provide accountability on your path

Cost

I charge $108 per 60-minute session, cash, check, or Venmo

Contact

email me at Markgp108@gmail.com