Awakened Heart Space

Enter the shadows to find your light.

I offer myself as a guide and ally. Together we can recover and reweave the lost, wounded, or rigid parts of Self into a shining whole.

There is no place within us that is too ugly to be seen, no place too raw to be felt. When we have the courage to lay bare our selves to our own awareness, to hear their stories and feel their pain, we embody understanding and love. This is the awakened heart space required to truly connect, share intimacy, and live our purpose.

Foundations

Awareness and Shadow work

A useful way to understand the self is to think of it as a community. For example, there could be a member who learned that achievement earns love, and therefore focuses on doing, another who learned that attention had to be claimed, and therefore behaves like a gregarious showman, and yet another who mourned the inauthenticity of putting on an act, and therefore seeks to be alone. Some of our parts may be familiar, others may be almost entirely hidden. This can create stuckness, frustration and confusion. The goal of shadow work is to become aware of our community of selves. 

Feeling and Presence

One of my spiritual teachers taught that the avoidance of feeling is the root of suffering. Every habit, strategy and coping mechanism that we use to escape our feelings takes us away from our truth and our connection to Source; in fact, they are forms of self-abandonment. Babies and small children are quite adept at expressing their present moment experience; if these feelings are met with even subtle forms of denial, suppression, or rejection, the feeling itself becomes an internal threat to connection and self-worth. Because feelings generally are expressions of met and unmet needs, this internalizes a conflict between different needs, and leads to fragmentation and disorganization. The beginning of healing these patterns is to turn towards our feelings with care and acceptance, as we might hope to do with a crying child.

Connection and Space

We are a deeply interdependent species, relying on each other to both survive and thrive, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Because our need for connection and belonging is so fundamental, we can adopt many strategies and compromises that take us far from who we actually are and what we actually want. The key issue of authenticity is “Can I be be true to myself (my feelings, needs, desires and values) and have you too?” That is why when someone offers us spacious acceptance, (what the psychologist Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard”) it can have a profound impact and give us the capacity to embrace more of ourselves.

“For anyone struggling to love what you deem to be the most unloveable parts of yourself… and allow for greater forgiveness and vulnerability, Oren is a great man to work with.” —Rose

I work one-on-one with individuals and facilitate groups. I have studied and been informed by many types of healing work, including body and energy work. With in-person sessions I can incorporate more somatic interaction, but we can incorporate “bottom-up” somatic processes even in video sessions. You do not need to know exactly what you want to do before a session, this is a palette:

Completion Process Practitioner

This is an incredible process (assembled by Teal Swan) that weaves together all the foundations described above, using feeling to guide you towards lost or hidden parts of yourself. We use a visualization or meditation to connect to those parts, become present with them, and meet their needs. There is a close relationship to the ideas and goals of Soul Retrieval; the difference is that in CP, you are the one doing the “work.” (Read a full account of a CP session.) I certified in 2019.

Parts Work (inspired by Internal Family Systems)

The goal of parts work is to create more awareness, understanding, and coherence between your many aspects of self. We do this by actually giving each of them a voice and letting them speak to each other. This can look like a sharing circle or mediation between different aspects of yourself. I draw on the framework of IFS, after having working weekly with an IFS therapist for a year in 2021-2022. I also conduct parts work group sessions and constellations.

Circling

The aim of Circling is often described as creating shared reality and grokking each other’s worlds. In the context that is laid out in the foundations section, Circling supports awareness, presence, and connection through spacious inquiry, reflection and the sharing of impact. I have four years of experience in facilitating Circles.

Compassion Key

This is a self-compassion process created by Edward Mannix. It has a lot of overlap with parts work and the Completion Process in its approach, but its strong focus on the compassion aspect of working with our parts can be incredibly effective and efficient. You can read more about it here. I certified in this process in 2023.

Medicine Assisted Sessions

I have tremendous respect for the power of plant medicines and their derivatives for assisting us in our healing journey. Attachment level trauma and other deep autonomic distress patterns that can be nearly difficult or impossible to resolve through top-down cognitive processes, and resist progress even with somatic work, can become readily accessible through medicines. This includes the widely available, and often misunderstood, cannabis plant. I draw a lot of inspiration in my approach to this work from Saj Razvi and the Psychedelic Somatic Institute.

“Oren is an incredibly patient, attuned, empathic and present professional… It was one of, or perhaps the one most detailed, compassionate, and helpful sessions of my life. I can now become my own source of unconditional motherly love and fatherly guidance towards a healthier, whole and sovereign version of myself. What a tremendous gift!”—Paula