One-on-one sessions:
ONTODELIC INQUIRY
60 MIN ZOOM SESSIONS
In each 60 minute session, we share together in a field of deep listening that supports you to step more into your true Self, a position of aware power. By becoming aware of what’s alive within you at this point in your journey, we use the pains and puzzles of daily life: relationships, work, health, creativity, spirituality… to become curious and travel to the root, in your inner awareness, of deep patterns.
Awareness, itself the most potent aspect of our experience, is the deep catalyst and transformer.
Ontodelic Inquiry is a somatic modality that explores the depths of our body-memory, patterns, emotions, ancestral conditioning, and being to assist in gaining self-knowledge, efficiently completing cycles, exploring, and revealing new ways of being. We explore, seek to understand, and we heal.
We’ve all heard the quote “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” We work with the regenerative, de-conditioning, highly intelligent power of the witnessing awareness.
What does ‘Ontodelic’ mean? Greek word ‘Ontos’ meaning "a being, individual; existence.” Delous in Greek means “to reveal, to shine forth, to make visible.” So ontodelic is the process of the revelation of being, the unfolding of being. And our modality carries a shared root with the word ‘psychedelic’ (‘the revealing of the psyche’) and this insinuates the vast dimensions that exist within each of us, a continued frontier. We use the past within us to unfold the future.
This work is based on the understanding that much of our everyday suffering is produced by a lack of awareness of what’s happening within us that plays out as repetitive unconscious patterning from the past that distorts our experience of ourself and the world. The method is designed to bring such patterns into the light of consciousness.
Unlike cognitive talk therapies, our practice together explores the body-memory and sees the body as a window into our unconscious belief systems. Our work is gentle, experimental, often playful and always helps you see more about yourself, which catalyzes profound shifts. Our focus is on the inner life, more than the outer story. This gets us to causes in the mind-body, rather than symptoms in the life.
Working in a meditative way, we learn to slow things down enough to help study the ways in which movement, gesture, facial expressions, voice, tensions, impulses, and other ‘cues’ reveal subconscious psychological material.
Our subconscious is not who we are, it is an automatic operating system that became conditioned over time. Many of these conditionings no longer serve us.
We also introduce little experiments that we perform in presence, that we set up together, to trigger an unconscious response or reaction to then study. You are invited to observe whatever thoughts, feelings, memories, tensions, or voices that arise during the experiment. This is a powerful way to study the subconscious. This observation provides clues, like a thread that we can pull on to follow and unravel a discovery process, where we begin to explore the associated deeper memories, parts, histories, and implicit belief systems.
An organic healing process unfolds and the body knows how to do it. Together, we follow the natural intelligence of what’s happening- and compassionately support the suppressed emotional residues that emerge and meet the missing experiences. We may do parts work, provide key nourishment, and reconsolidate memories.
The answer lies not only in compassionately serving what emerges, but also we practice and depend on the catalytic stance of alert observation and getting more comfortable with observing pains and desires, fears and angers, movements in the system without rushing in ‘to fix.’ This approach comes from an understanding that our witnessing awareness is the most powerful de-conditioning component in our lives. At the root of our being, the awareness is actually universal, not personal, and through its capacity to duly note something, the proper response will emerge in our life. It is a profound discovery to see this in action. Shared witnessing awareness is the main alchemical ingredient that enacts transformation in sessions. New gifts and self-recognitions emerge during the session.
Ontodelic Inquiry builds bridges between your embodied self, your true Self, and the psychodynamics that give rise to habitual, multi-generational, and core patterns of behaviour and thought.
This work helps you integrate the capacity to more fully inhabit and transcend the body, psyche, consciousness and inner resources, places and spaces that have been frozen and dark until now.
THE LIFE-CHANGING KNOWLEDGE OF OUR PATTERNS:
We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” ― W.H. Auden
Or as one of my teachers put it, “Our core wound is driving the school bus.” This is why cycles repeat, because our wound is, to some degree, in the driver seat. For the psyche, a repeating cycle is a cry for attention in order to heal, integrate, and recover deep resources.
If we think of our deep psyche as a house of selves (…ancestral selves give rise to new life, then a 1-year-old self, a 2-year-old self, etc.) built slowly throughout the course of our life, then the foundation of the house is formed in the first 5-7 years and is storied into our body (and psyche). In those early years, we formed two to three strategies for how we needed to be in order to be safe, to get love and approval from the most important people in our life. As a child dependent on our caretakers, these adaptations were necessary to survive. They became habits, then automatic patterns. As we grew, they shaped our personality.
Now those safety strategies run our lives. We go into those behaviors as soon as we feel distressed. It's involuntary; our bodies just do it automatically. Many of us live inside our safety strategies. We do them almost all the time. We think, "That's just the way I am." They control how we act, what we think, and how we feel.
Being caught in a safety strategy distorts our thoughts and feelings. It even distorts our raw perception. While we're in one of our safety strategies, we're no longer fully present in the here and now. The past memories (and traumas) that led us to adopt this strategy are coloring and intensifying our experience.
To regain control over our own life, we must understand our own safety strategies. Then we can recognize when we're caught in one, take steps to shift out of it, and return to being present.
These strategies are not who we are, and are nothing to be ashamed of. We are the witnessing presence, and it’s by taking our position more as presence that we work with the pure unconditioned light of awareness.
Each strategy comes with gifts as well as challenges. When we aren’t conscious of them, our deep patterns self-replicate and recreate themselves in our relationships, health, sexuality, family, work, our communication, and psyche.
Likewise, this work of awareness ripples out and transforms all those very same domains of our life. And on a spiritual level, we gradually discover the power of awareness, our very own Self, and its role in our empowerment.
My training in core patterns involves many approaches. The book resource I heartily recommend to clients is ‘The Five Personality Patterns" by Steven Kessler.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF ONTODELIC INQUIRY?
This presence-based somatic work heals and empowers through the curious exploration of what’s unconscious within us. We can only change what we know. What we suppress or hide from ourselves implicitly occupies and rules our consciousness.
I often say, “It’s hard to see the picture when you’re in the frame.”
That quote speaks to part of why the relational nature of this work is so effective. In a safe field of co-regulated presence, we practice revelation.
I also often say, “We were wounded in relationship, and we can deeply heal in relationship.”
In a spiritually-stunted world that has little subtle sensitivity, most of us are used to our inner life being treated with little awareness. It’s a healing revelation to have our subtle inner life acknowledged and to be able to explore it in relational space with curiosity and without judgement. Alot can open up. Confirmations are easy.
As relational beings, trust and a safe curious relational place to unfold and explore is truly revolutionary. I hold a space where all is welcome, shame-free and confidential, and no topic is taboo. We are curious and open to discoveries. As we make discoveries, especially in the deepest patterns and how they act in the body, doors open in our life that were closed. New possibilities in relationship open up. Our automatic modes of mistreating ourselves are understood. In understanding, change occurs. Deep shifts begin to take place over the course of our sessions. We titrate and work at the speed of presence, saturating each experience with conscious intelligence. New life awakens.
I occasionally offer bite-sized tools, skillsets, and practices to continue to excavate with. We can role-play key conversations and open responsive communication. We can navigate destructive relational habits. We may experiment with viewpoints and find inspired action. Couples work is also something that I do (with my wife, we work with couples together). This kind of work unfolds at the foundations of our psyche and the discoveries, if prized, will change your life on every level.
Understand how mind-body awareness holds a vital key to healing and self-realization.
Realize & gain compassionate respect for the specific familial histories within you, the ancestral histories, and how they manifest as emotions and patterns.
Tap into the frozen charge stored in the body’s armoring that manifests as heaviness and ‘tamas’ - releasing vitality, power, and clarity.
Learn to relate and communicate in responsive new accurate ways with yourself, your relationships, and your world - becoming aware of (and therefore capable with) the subtle dynamics in relational space.
Discover the power of your detached witnessing stance, and experience the benefits of more alert light, and present spiritual gravity.
On this journey, you will experience authentic shifts in life-long patterns, revive and gain access to untapped portions of yourself, and ultimately regain unmitigated access to your Being, to your original light.
Ready to embark on the inner discovery work for your next steps in life?
With Roger's presence, in the practice of Ontodelic inquiry, you will access a somatic depth not available in talk therapy. There’s a curiousity and interest in what’s alive for you, your current process and the subtle movements of your soul…In the power of shared awareness, you harness the past for a new future, and open a door to a new way of inspired alert living.
INITIAL CALL
What brought you here? What are you seeking or hoping for? Talk to me about it. I'd love to understand where you're coming from. This is a free 30 minute call for us to feel if it’s a good fit. No obligation for anything further.
BOOK A SESSION
One-on-one sessions bring awareness to core beliefs and life patterns that no longer serve you. Together, we will open the door to a new way of living in the light of awareness.