Paul Ryder PhD holds degrees from Harvard (AB physics), Rutgers (MS Developmental and Social Psychology) and Pacifica Graduate Institute (MA and PhD Mythology and Depth Psychology). Before embarking on a healing practice he worked both in corporate settings (Andersen Consulting, Xerox Learning Systems) and universities (Rutgers University, University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University). His approach to deep pattern recognition, principle discovery, learning design, and strategy development has been employed by a wide range of clients, for the federal government (DoD, FBI, CIA, NSA) to New Economy icons such as Tom Peters and Fast Company. A startup veteran and member of the executive team at Ninth House Network, Ryder went on to found three businesses, RevoMetrix, LLC, RNM Global, and Kenneson, LLC.

In 2012, Paul turned his attention to bringing his business and leadership experience into a private coaching and healing practice. Has worked with clients all over the globe employing the deep pattern recognition and principle discovery skills he learned in his corporate and academic work and adding the healing skills of somatic psychotherapy, plant medicine work, and executive coaching. In 2021, he founded The Congregation for Sacred Practices–a cooperative guiding ministry to work with healing practices in a sacramental setting.

Dr. Paul Ryder continues to teach Leadership and Organizational Behavior in the Executive MBA program at San Francisco State University.

“Se hace arte y poesía para conocer, no para ser conocido”
“We make art and poetry in order to understand, not in order to be understood.”
–Samuel Vásquez

I am an artist–a man who plays in and with a medium to explore the parts, relationships, movement, and nature of the medium, the object of study, and the awareness it creates inside himself. My primary medium is the body/mind. Like any medium, the body/mind has it’s characteristics, its limitations, and its own beauty. I have found, as least for my body/mind, that it also has its corruptions–habits and patterns, traumas and adaptations, fears and strategies. Part of the artist’s work is to purify and prepare the materials. For me, working with these corruptions is to clean, align, and calibrate the body/mind–what we might commonly term, “healing.” The art-ifacts of my art making come in the forms of my own healings, shifts in awareness, expanded perspective, resilience, capacity for love, better relating, deeper compassion, more continuity of intention/less distractibility, and a felt sense of meaning and purpose. These changes are my changes.

Then, like a perfectly prepared telescope, I can point it toward the object I seek to explore. The point of healing is not healing for healing’s sake. It’s to purify the medium, the instrument, in which and by which I can study the subject: Source.

Source, God, Life, the Void, the Unborn and Undying, the unspeakable Creator of the infinite things . . . . This is the subject I have been studying since I was a child. What I’ve learned is that It is indeed unspeakable and yet knowable. The knowing is not in the ordinary sense of knowing–as in knowing your multiplication tables or the capitals of all the states. The knowing is more a vibration, an energy, a recognition and a remembrance–like visiting a grandparent. There might be a discussion, a teaching, or just a chance to hang out in a wordless presence. In every case of deep and sustained contact, there’s a restoration, a cleansing, and a restart. The cumulative effect of contact with Source seems to be the healing of the body/mind, a deepening capacity for love and truth, and an expansion into the full possibility of Life.

And this is where the circle lies. After decades of practicing my exploratory art, I have found that healing always has the fingerprints of Source on it. I have also found that my “subject” is not only an “object” but is, in a non dual sense, the subject studying Itself as an Object. That is to say that “my” exploration and art making is the activity of Source itself as Source seeks to understand itself through the medium called Paul. In the end, the life that flows though me is cleaning, healing, and calibrating Itself to experience the fullness of Itself as alive. It turns out my telescope is pointed both inward and outward.

As an artist, I can share with you my methods. I cannot make the same changes in you. Only you can. You have to make your own explorations and experience your own outcomes. My methods have developed over time and pull from a variety of other art forms: somatic experiencing, depth and archetypal psychologies, yoga (in both the physical “Hatha” sense and the spiritual “Tantrik” sense), Christian mysticism, Hakomi somatic psychotherapy, Vipassana meditation, sound and vibration therapy–and plant medicine as an accelerator in these modalities. I can introduce you to these and coach you in their usage. I can support your efforts through love and knowledge. And while I can offer a great deal of perspective on the unfolding of your deepest self, the practice is yours.

I help clients use their own body/mind to explore their lives, recognize their patterns, heal their wounds, gain new insights, stabilize a new perspective, chart new directions, and live into a future full of meaning and purpose.