My Path
There has never been a clear dividing line for me between the natural world, personal exploration and spiritual practice.
My relationship with wild places began in childhood through my family's connection to the Canadian North. My parents established an art and adventure school in the Yukon in the 1970s, and some of my earliest experiences paddling and climbing in the Canadian Rockies taught me that stepping into wild places can change the way we experience ourselves and the world around us.
That relationship has continued throughout my life — through wilderness travel and teaching, spiritual exploration, environmental study, professional work helping people explore their own potential, and more than three decades of personal shamanic practice.
Shamanic Forest Healing is, in many ways, where these paths have come together.
The Wild Places
Wild places have been some of my most enduring teachers.
As I grew older, the connection that began in the Canadian North became a lifetime of exploring and working in wild places. I travelled northern Canadian rivers, sea kayaked remote coastlines, travelled by dog team, and climbed and mountaineered in the Canadian Rockies and the Himalayas.
I also spent years helping others experience wild places for themselves — as a wilderness educator, expedition guide, Outward Bound instructor and mountaineering instructor with the National Outdoor Leadership School.
But what stayed with me was never simply the adventure or reaching a destination. I became increasingly interested in what happens when we step outside the structures and distractions of everyday life. In wild places, our attention changes. We notice more. We listen differently. And sometimes we encounter parts of ourselves that are much harder to hear amid the noise of ordinary life.
That understanding continues to inform the work I do today.
The Living World
Over time, experiencing wild places led me to think more deeply about what our relationship with the natural world actually means.
I studied Environmental Studies, with a particular interest in Deep Ecology — an understanding of the natural world not simply as something that surrounds us or exists for our use, but as a living community with intrinsic value beyond its utility to humans. My thesis explored the difference between using nature as a setting for recreation and using recreation as a vehicle for experiencing nature.
It gave language to something I had already experienced in wild places: our relationship with the natural world can be reciprocal. When we slow down, pay attention and enter into relationship with a place, the forest becomes more than scenery. We begin to notice its rhythms, relationships and other forms of intelligence — and perhaps recognize ourselves differently within them.
That perspective continues to shape both my approach to Forest Bathing and the broader philosophy behind Shamanic Forest Healing.
As part of my degree, I also completed an internship with what was then the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada. An unexpected relationship that grew out of that experience would open another path for me — one that would profoundly influence my understanding of nature, spirit and different ways of knowing.
A Spiritual Path
A spiritual path is not a straight line, nor is it a destination.
A spiritual path is not a straight line, nor is it a destination.
That other path began with Salvador Francesch, whom I met while he was working at Indian Affairs Canada. An artist and scholar with a deep knowledge of Lamaism, shamanism, Tibetan Buddhism and the occult, Salvador took me under his wing and introduced me to ways of understanding the world that were very different from those I had encountered academically.
Through Salvador, I began exploring shamanism, Bön, Tibetan Buddhism and Western esoteric traditions. What began as study gradually became personal practice and, in the early 1990s, led me to make my own pilgrimage through Ladakh, Nepal, Northern India and Tibet.
While in Dharamsala, India, I attended teachings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I spent time living alongside Buddhist monks in a small Nepali village, and my background in wilderness travel and mountaineering allowed me to journey into more remote parts of the Himalayas and Tibet, visiting isolated monasteries and spending time with monks, practitioners and oracles. These experiences introduced me to very different ways of understanding our relationship with nature, spirit, consciousness and the unseen world.
I returned from those journeys with experiences and perspectives that became part of my own spiritual exploration. Shamanic practice in particular has remained an important part of my life for more than three decades — not simply something I studied, but something I have continued to explore and practise.
Helping People Find Their Own Way
My intention is not to provide someone else's answers, but to create a grounded space in which different ways of listening and knowing can become possible.
Alongside my relationship with wilderness and spiritual practice, much of my professional life has been devoted to helping people discover their own capacity, insight and direction.
For decades, I have worked as a facilitator, trainer and coach, helping individuals and groups navigate questions, challenges, transitions and opportunities for growth. My work has ranged from wilderness education and experiential learning to leadership development, team building and professional coaching.
Across these very different settings, I came to appreciate something that continues to shape my work today: meaningful change rarely comes from simply being told what to do. My role is not to have someone else's answers, but to create the conditions, provide the tools and support the process through which they can discover those answers for themselves.
That philosophy is one of the things that drew me to Harner Shamanic Counseling. Rather than positioning the practitioner as the person with special access to answers, HSC teaches people a method for developing their own direct relationship with helping spirits and seeking guidance through their own experience.
You do the journeying. You develop the relationship. My role is to help you learn and develop the practice.
Where the Paths Meet
Shamanic Forest Healing is not so much a new direction in my life as a place where many paths have finally come together.
In more recent years, I have deepened my longstanding personal shamanic practice through formal study in Core Shamanism, including training with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and in Harner Shamanic Counseling. I also became a certified Forest Therapist, bringing a more intentional framework to something I had experienced throughout my life — the potential for slowing down, paying attention and entering into a deeper relationship with the natural world.
These practices are different, and I respect the integrity of each. But I also experience a common thread running through them: direct experience, relationship and learning to listen in ways we may have forgotten.
Today, Shamanic Forest Healing brings those threads together. Sometimes that means helping someone learn to journey and develop their own relationship with helping spirits. Sometimes it means undertaking shamanic work on someone's behalf. And sometimes it simply means slowing down enough to enter into a different relationship with the forest.
The work is different for each person. My intention is not to provide someone else's answers, but to create a grounded space in which different ways of listening, experiencing and knowing can become possible.