When you're smart, some things come easier to you. Staying two steps ahead of the people around you is often enough to get you by. As a result, you may over-rely on the strategies you know, not pushing your mind beyond its natural capacities. You succeed in some areas of life, but remain stuck in others.

No matter how smart any of us are, we always see life from a particular vantage point, within an interpretive framework. Many of the things that seem obvious to us only seem that way because our understanding is limited. Actually, it's worse than that. Believing that you already know can foreclose your natural desire to discover something new.

The remedy to knowing too much is beginner's mind: humility, curiosity, openness. This is particularly true when you're stuck or suffering. If you want deeper understanding, sometimes you have to start by unknowing the things you've been taking for granted.

You can't always think your way out of suffering. Sometimes you can reframe things, tell a different story, make new meanings. Other times, you need to address something more somatic: emotions, felt sense experience, habitual tensions, patterns of energy in the body, primal drives, the ineffable, the transcendent. If you're accustomed to living a life of the mind, your awareness of these other dimensions of your experience may be underdeveloped.

There's nothing worse than being able to outsmart your counselor. Actually, there are a lot of worse things, but it's still nice to have a counselor whose mind works as fast as yours!

I consider our work to be a meeting of the minds, a collaboration. I'll help you enhance your intellect with non-cognitive capacities. I'll guide you to a deeper, more holistic understanding of yourself, particularly in any domain that troubles you. Together, we can find out what neither of us already knows.