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About The Work
About The Work
“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.
Executive Coaching
Coaching is a process to help formulate goals aligned with purpose and meaning and identify blocks, challenges, and opportunities. Through careful questions, clients come to an awareness of the forces that are creating their context and their habitual self. This clarity, along with strengthening of the intentions and goals, helps clients understand and move toward a place they want to be. We spend time digging deep into resources–inner and outer–to identify a path to the future full of grace and ease.
Coaching can come in both directive and exploratory modes. In the directive mode, we discuss a topic, look at alternatives and chart a course to success. In the exploratory mode, I raise questions and see where the answers lead us. Using both modes balances and tempers the active, “here’s how you can proceed,” with the more open, “where would you like to go?” As both a business school professor and a therapist, I find that working through both lenses help clients move more quickly than one mode alone.
Clients arrive with all kinds of questions: “How can I get along with my boss better?”, “How can I have a deeper relationship with my partner?” “How can I build a more effective team at work?” Sometimes clients arrive with big goals with lots of steps like: “I want a new job” or “I want to change careers/cities/partners,” “I want have more energy and focus and be less depressed and anxious.” I will meet you where you are with your questions and goals. We can dig in together.
About the Work
The Hakomi method of somatic psychotherapy carefully studies and tracks the physical, the emotional, and the mental body and how we organize ourselves to engage the world – both our outer world and our inner world. With careful attention in a mindful state, we track not only the memories and stories of our past but also the physical source of our emotions and core beliefs. creating more freedom and choice.
Hakomi is the most effective form of self-exploration I have found. It creates not only self-understanding and acceptance, but helps you reprogram the “selves” that push you forward and hold you back. With careful, mindful awareness, we slow down and look at your habitual responses frame by frame. The process brings forth a deep sense of inner strength, clarity, and confidence. In its essence, Hakomi is a process of guided self-study, self-healing, and self-expansion.
Clients arrive with all kinds of patterning that they want to change: depression, disconnection, anxiety, distraction, limiting self talk and the deeper more challenging emotions of fear, shame, and rage. While all this is a part of being a human, so too is our ability to wake up, become more aware, and direct our experience toward a deeper meaning and purpose. Underneath these challenging emotional and somatic patterns are often old wounds, deep emotions, core beliefs, and strategies for coping. Slowing down and studying how you organize your experience in a safe and supported way brings not only insight but transformation not only in the stories well tell ourselves but the deep somatic level where our anxieties, fears, depressions, and distractions live. The body knows how to heal itself and grow. Hakomi is a process that dives into the somatic origins of our psychological experience.
Locations
Working with medicines accelerates the unfolding of the deepest self. Plant medicines support clients in both the initial work of healing from their histories and the ongoing work of expanding into their deepest and highest possibilities.
