Articles
In addition to my clinical practice and mental health consulting, I have published several books as a professional author and have contributed articles to various publications. My writings tend to be focused on the interconnected themes of personal development, creativity, mental health, and trauma. These are the areas of my professional work — but more than that, they are themes of infinite depth and scope. They reach out and connect to everything. As an author, I’m interested in the same things that I seek as a counsellor: a greater understanding of the unfolding story of every human — of humanity itself — and a deeper and more meaningful contribution to that endless interwoven narrative.
Mental Health & Wellbeing
When Movement Maintains the Pattern
The Shadow Side of Physical Activity in Recovery
A runner circles the park at dawn, feet striking pavement with metronomic precision. Five miles, then seven, then ten. The endorphins rise, the mind quiets, and for those precious hours the static …
Addressing Mental Health in the Workplace
A Framework for Leaders
Over the past few years, I’ve found myself doing more training with people in leadership positions. Something has shifted. The requests aren’t just about implementing trauma-informed practices or s…
How Early Experiences Shape Who We Become
The Developmental Foundation of Mental Health and Addiction
Pick up a stone from any beach and turn it in your hand. Notice its shape, its smoothness, the way light catches the striations of mineral deposits laid down perhaps millions of years ago. This sto…
Running as Nervous System Medicine
Trauma Responses and the Power of Movement
Trauma is an experience that exceeds our ability to manage stress. It disrupts our emotional containment: we lose our capacity for self-regulation, become drawn into instinctive coping, and often r…
Belonging, Not Steps
What Actually Heals in Recovery
One of the most common conversations in my work is about the pathways of recovery that people choose. Clients in addiction treatment have often participated in a variety of programs, many of which …
Why We Resist What Works
Movement, Mental Health, and the Nervous System's Need for Real Challenge
The research is unequivocal, even monotonous in its consistency: physical activity outperforms pharmaceutical interventions for most mental health conditions. It rivals or exceeds the efficacy of p…
Essentials of Trauma-informed Practice
Considerations for recovery, healing, and well-being
Trauma is an experience that exceeds our ability to manage stress. Clinically, it disrupts containment: we lose our capacity for self-regulation, become drawn into instinctive coping, and often rem…
Working with Grief, Trauma, and Related Challenges
Museums Offer Much Potential for Healing Work — But Safety Must be a Primary Concern
Adapted from Museum Objects, Health and Healing , by Brenda Cowan, Ross Laird, and Jason McKeown. New and powerful museum exhibition trends include a greater focus on emotional engagemen…
Beyond the Alphabet Soup
Trauma Responses, Uncertainty, and the Limits of Models
The Parade of New Models In recent years, trauma terminology has proliferated at an extraordinary rate. What began as the familiar fight-or-flight response has expanded to include freeze, fawn, fl…
Resilience and Well-being in Turbulent Times
A presentation for the Ontario Museums Association
During a time of turbulence and stress, how can we stay emotionally healthy and connected to ourselves and those around us? What kinds of coping are normal and helpful? …
Creativity Practice & Process
Wind
Opening to the Creative Process
I step off the gravel path, here where the shimmering summer air gives way to a darker quiet in the forest. A woodpecker perches on a nearby cedar, its rhythmic tock echoing clearly through the tre…
Earth
Grounding in Creative Work
The tips of my fingers are grimy and black, like a coal miner’s. Dark, umber streaks trace their way up my index and middle fingers, smudging into the pores of my skin, outlining the bloody scratch…
Thunder & Lightning
Following the Path of Inspiration in Creative Work
Out here on the road, with the power lines down and early morning light from the sky my only illumination, I watch a cascade of small branches drift across the road in a gust of wind. I’m not sure …
Deep Water
Depression, Fatigue and the Shadow Side of Creativity
Today the work is tense, rushed, possessed of a sharpness I feel inside, as though I might crack open from the cold. The heater is cranked up, I’ve opened the door to the adjoining furnace room, an…
Mountain
Stillness, Meditation, and Opening to the Universal
This little Stanley block plane, the first woodworking tool I owned and still one of my favorites, has a surprising heft. I cradle it in my left palm, sole up, where the contours of the lever cap —…
Shallows
Joy, Wonder, and Connection through the Creative Process
This rowboat is old, worn down so thoroughly by memories and by the sea that it seems, resting atop two sawhorses in my shop, almost insubstantial. The overturned hull is faded and chalky, crackled…
Fire
Illumination and Discovery in Creativity
Light, and fire. This is how it begins, far out on the horizon, beyond the threshold of shadows and the deep well of the land’s erasure. A vermilion hue like the grain of purpleheart climbs into th…
The Unfathomable
Following Creativity Back to the Source
The idea of making a mask — or a series of masks, if all goes well — came about as the result of a weekend trip that Elizabeth and I took to Tofino, on Vancouver Island’s west coast. It’s a rugged,…
Education & Learning
Education and the Unhappy Family
Changing education is like doing family therapy
Counselling is my primary career, the practice to which I am most devoted and for which I have the longest, deepest experience. Counseling will always be my primary vocation. But I am also an educa…
Intelligence of the Heart
Education as Personal Development
I spend a great deal of time with two kinds of people: teachers and students. In some ways, these two groups are at opposite ends of the continuum of learning. Sure, teachers and students co-create…
Creativity and the True Teacher
On Teaching, Learning, and Leading
I stand in the dark, watching the lighted lamps pass. Lantern-bearers follow one another upon the spiraling path. They glide through the darkness, almost silent, their faces dimly lit by the glow o…
Lamplighters
Finding My Way through Educational Culture
On the first day of the semester I come across one of my students huddled in her car, shivering, crippled by panic. Later that morning, another student begins to cry as I walk with her toward the b…
Taking Learning Outside
Our Heritage in the Natural World
Adapted from Object-Based Learning and Well-Being , edited by Heleen Chatterjee and Thomas Kador. We meander up the gravel path, through the evergreens, between the stands of alder. The s…
On Developing Knowledge
Building Capacity, Exploring the Edges of Knowledge, and Finding Ways Forward
This page is the first of three resources that focus on contemporary research and philosophy for developing more human (and humane) forms of education. See parts two and three for the full s…
Skills for Working with People
Integrating Academic Knowledge with Personal and Community Development
This page is the second of three resources that focus on contemporary research and philosophy for developing more human (and humane) forms of education. See parts one and three for the full …
Skills for Working on Yourself
The Inward Journey as an Educational Pathway
This page is the third of three resources that focus on contemporary research and philosophy for developing more human (and humane) forms of education. See parts one and two for the full set…
Beyond Learning Outcomes
Why Disorientation Matters
I ask the group a simple question: which direction is north? We stand together in a clearing, surrounded by Douglas Fir and Western Red Cedar, within earshot of the highway that cuts through this c…
Craft & Culture
Casco: The Ship of Robert Louis Stevenson
The Lore of a Storied Craft
They were led, one at a time, from the smoky dark of the hold and up the narrow companionway. Each man was flanked by a crew-member who spoke in clipped and rushing tones. The ship was quiet, the s…
Rogue Waves
Wanderers of the Sea
In February 1933, on its way from San Diego to Manila, the US Navy ship Ramapo was caught in the teeth of a relentless storm. The wind had slowly gathered momentum across thousands of nautical mile…
Myths of the Primordial Waters
Ancient Seafarers, Human Migration, and the Sea
Plato wrote that the past is like the wake behind a boat; it spreads, and diminishes behind us, and merges with the surrounding sea. The past rolls under and is gone. We stand upon the foredeck of…
The World Tree
Conservation and Conflict in Burns Bog
South of the riverbend, twenty minutes along a trail fringed with pink flowers of hardhack and gangly stalks of sweet gale, a black spruce that I call the World Tree stands against a spring sky. He…
The Resonance of Nautical Language
Curious Words Persist from a Bygone Age
In 2003, paleoanthropologists digging on the island of Flores (about 550 km west of Bali) discovered a previously unknown and now extinct branch of the human genetic tree: Homo floresiensis , dimi…
On Woodworking as Meditation
The Craft that Leads Inward
The warehouse is quiet today. An oldtimer carefully selects maple boards from a small pile at the back. Along the central aisle which stretches into shadow two of the staff move slabs of African bu…
Wood Finishing for Marine Use
Steps for Longevity and Lustre
Woodworkers and boat builders are, on the whole, a contentious bunch. They argue about all kinds of things: tools, methods, aesthetics, materials. But their favorite topic, the one to which they ha…
A Guide to Ethical Wood Use
What Woodworkers Owe to the Natural World
We tend to think of the tension between pristine nature and human ambition as a contemporary struggle, but the urge to own and exploit forests is a fundamental human impulse. At every point in hist…
Choosing Wood for Marine Applications
Navigating the Bewildering Array of Possibilities
In an age of plastics and composites, wood has not surrendered its claim on the mariner. The color and texture of grain, the particular warmth of wood in the sun, the way a teak gunwale is shaped p…