Hi, I’m Ben.
Body-first, relationally honest, and often irreverent.
I'm not going to sit across from you being carefully neutral. I'll be in it with you, I'll say the true thing kindly, and we'll laugh somewhere in there too — the work is serious, we don't always have to be.
We go slowly, and we go into the body. Not because it's a technique, but because that's where the real information is — under the coping, under the story you've told about yourself. I draw on Buddhist contemplative psychology, somatic work, parts work, and a trained attention to what's moving underneath, to help you cut through the people-pleasing, the programming, and the performance, and make contact with what's actually alive in you.
I bring a neurodivergence-informed lens and a liberation-oriented one. Healing isn't about optimizing yourself for a system that's grinding you down. There's nothing in you that needs fixing — there's a self under all that holding, and the work is clearing the way back to it.
I trained in clinical counselling and Buddhist psychology at Naropa, and I've spent decades sitting quietly with what's underneath words. I'm not afraid of your anger or your grief. And I know this room from the inside — I didn't come to this work by accident.
Midlife — my own crossing: the dismantling of an identity that no longer fit, and the rebuilding from the ground up
Burnout — lived, not studied — including the discovery that the problem was never my capacity; it was measuring my worth by what I produced
ADHD, late-recognized — and the long exhaustion of masking before understanding why everything felt harder than it should
Career reinvention — leaving a stable identity in midlife to build something truer
Masculinity — setting down the scripts about what a man should be and discovering “what’s actually mine”; I hold that same open ground for the men I work with
Fatherhood — I’m a father of two boys, and I know how it remakes your identity, your marriage, and your relationship with your own father
Growing up with an alcoholic father — the hypervigilance, the over-functioning, learning to read a room before you could read a book
A long marriage — the real work of staying: renegotiating who you are inside a partnership as you both change
Losing parents — my father, my mother-in-law; I know grief as terrain, not theory
Money — money trauma carried into adulthood, and what it takes to move toward a freer relationship with wealth
Contemplative practice — meditation not as a technique I teach but a path I’ve walked for decades
Intuitive perception — I work with more than what’s said out loud: a trained, grounded attunement to what’s moving underneath — in your body, your energy, and the parts of you that haven’t found words yet
Sexuality, kink, power dynamics - Exploring desire as the language of the soul and transgression as a practice of liberation.
The terrain I know firsthand
People in midlife who hold everything together for everyone else. Caretakers and people-pleasers running on obligation instead of desire. Perfectionists who learned early that being good was safer than being real. Late-diagnosed ADHDers unpacking a lifetime of masking. Highly sensitive people who hid it to get by. Adult children of alcoholics who could read a room before they could read. Parents and partners performing a role instead of living a life. Burned-out helpers — therapists, healers, teachers, nurses — who give everyone else what they can't give themselves. People whose lives are coming apart loudly and are done pretending otherwise. Providers who did everything right and feel nothing. Seekers who sense something deeper trying to move. People who've done therapy before and are looking for something that actually reaches them.
People I tend to work with
Credentials
Registered Clinical Counsellor (RCC), BC Association of Clinical Counsellors
M.A., Clinical Counselling and Buddhist Psychology — Naropa University
ADHD-Certified Clinical Services Provider (ADHD-CCSP)
Certified Autism Spectrum Disorder Clinical Specialist (ASDCS)
Inner MBA conscious-leadership certificate (Sounds True)
Trauma of Money Certified Practitioner
Life Transitions Specialist Certificate
Over a decade of clinical experience across private practice and clinical settings
Integrative Sex and Couples Certification