About us
Jonathan Joebgen (he/him), MSW, LCSW
Spiritual coach, mystic, and therapist
I am a natural seeker and enthusiast who has spent the last 20 years exploring meditation practice and spiritual/insight traditions. I had my first enduring awakening in 2018 and have since been passionate about deepening my understanding of awakening and the ongoing process of integration, exploration, and personal development post initial stream entry. I am a founding member of the FUTUS (short for Fuck You, Thank You Sangha) which has been meeting regularly since 2014. I am also a member of Miranda Macpherson’s Living Grace Sangha.
In addition to ALL THE WAYS IN, I have been a private-practice psychotherapist since 2016 and earned my Master of Social Work degree in 2011. Prior to that, I worked in entertainment publicity at NBCUniversal in New York and Los Angeles as well as in documentary television in Chicago.
I currently live in Portland, Oregon with my husband Stacy and our English cream golden retriever Bodhi Mercury. My other interests include paddleboarding, kayaking, enjoying our cedar hot tub, cooking, traveling, comics, and reading supernatural fiction, as well as spending time laughing with loved ones, preferably around a fire.
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My primary WAYS IN in order of appearance:
Marvel and DC comics, particularly the X-Men and supernational fiction
Christianity as lightly interpreted by my family and the idea of angels
LGBTQ+ identity and the coming out process of self-discovery and inner knowing
The LGBTQ+ community in all its expressions, from art to advocacy. The understanding that there could be an underlying sense of identity, connection, and understanding beyond that of gender concepts, race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, nationality, spiritual tradition, etc.
Social work, psychology, and the practice of counseling. Social constructivism and the idea that our perceived reality is the work of shared ideas, social factors, and conditioning.
Buddhism, meditation, and mindfulness and the teachings/work of Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chödrön, Tara Brach, among others.
The power of sangha and shared practice among peers. Currently a founding member of the FUTUS and a member of Miranda Macpherson’s Living Grace international sangha.
Ramana Maharshi by way of Gangaji and Miranda Macpherson.
Other contemporary teachers and enthusiasts: Miranda Macpherson; Adyashanti; Byron Katie; Eckhart Tolle; Hameed Ali/A.H. Almaas; Loch Kelly; Vanessa Scotto and Brooke Thomas via their podcast “Bliss & Grit”; Rick Archer and his “Buddha at the Gas Pump” podcast and interviews; David Thomas; Harri Aalto; among others.
The use of cannabis as an entheogen
The Ra Material: The Law of One
A Course in Miracles
Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation and the work of Lama Rod Owens, Rev. angel Kyodo williams, and Jasmine Syedullah
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Hello! I am a licensed psychotherapist turned awakening and integration life coach specializing in helping individuals access and utilize the depth of support available to us at the heart of the great spiritual/contemplative traditions and other WAYS IN. My style is equal parts educational and practical as it is explorative, collaborative, intuitive, and spontaneous. I am both reverent and irreverent. I love helping people to realize their highest potential already located within.
As a trained psychotherapist for over 15 years, I enjoyed helping people cultivate growth in the following areas: recognizing a deeper sense of worth and fostering self-compassion; working skillfully with fears and anxiety; improving their relationships and ability to connect openly; and finding their authentic self by embracing their queer and/or trans identity and coming out as their truer self. And time and time again, it felt like I was operating with one hand tied behind my back, not feeling that the framework of traditional therapy allowed me to incorporate the tremendous healing potential available through the various WAYS IN.
For instance, I think our sense of disconnection from the world and others and our experience being defined by limiting beliefs and judgments is a leading cause of depression. I found it difficult to feel as though I couldn’t help my clients in that context, to know about self-realization practices and learn how to use them to begin awakening to their undeniable wholeness and connection to all of life. Also, working with anxiety and uncertainty is a never-ending battle when we can’t fully explore and recognize the parts of ourselves that can never die and are always held and supported within the context of a loving and intelligent universe. Lastly, when working with relational issues, it was difficult to move past a “me vs. them” mentality without also being able to incorporate frameworks that recognize interconnectedness and the limitations of relating to others from a place of separation, dualistic thinking, and egoic defenses.
The field of psychotherapy is, thankfully, evolving to include these other avenues of healing and that is why we are beginning to see more psychedelic-assisted services. While wonderful, that too is limited if people aren’t empowered and taught to access these capacities and understand these expanded states outside the use of plant medicine.
While serving as an awakening and integration life coach, I will not diagnose or treat mental health conditions and our work together is not covered by insurance. I will, however, bring all my skill and training developed as a therapist into our work together to build rapport and help you learn how to access and incorporate the healing and creative qualities at the heart of your own WAYS IN.
Our work together can take many forms. I would love to support you in the following ways:
Help you to understand, identify, and utilize the various WAYS IN to achieve deeper self-realization experiences and integrate insights. Be a safe place to get validation and process your own understanding and experience of awakening.
Guidance in using your awakening insights and understanding to “circle back” and build on previous healing you may have done in therapy as your life unfolds in the present. Here my experience as a therapist can be a real benefit to help you to wake up, clean up, grow up, and show up, as Ken Wilber puts it.
Support in utilizing the various WAYS IN to navigate the inevitabilities of loss, aging, illness, uncertainty, exposure to conflict, and other challenging aspects of our human condition.
Be a partner in helping you to heal relationally through our interactions while anchored in presence and our intrinsic wholeness. Help you bring your whole awakening self to your relationships and help you find supportive community.
Couples coaching on the use of applied practices to resource in source as well as identify and work with egoic defense patterns while also relating from a place of compassion.
LGBTQ+ specific coaching support in using one’s coming out process as an analogy for the awakening process. Recognizing possibility and preparing to explore, from epiphany and initial experiences to ongoing integration and development, to “coming out” again to friends and community.
Helping to trust your intuition and inner guidance system.
Support and guidance to help you to take your awakening realizations and growth into the world so you can express your innate talents and capacity and share your own WAYS IN. This can take the form of creative coaching and business development.
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Please use our contact form. We will schedule a free consultation so we can meet and see if we’d be a good fit for this exciting work. All coaching sessions are virtual at this time, via Zoom. My fee is $175 per hour with sliding scale options based on need.
Stacy Brewster (he/him)
Creative and spiritual coach, mystic, editor, and workshop facilitator
I am a multidisciplinary writer, editor, creative and spiritual coach, mystic, and workshop facilitator, and a long-time practitioner of yoga, meditation, and other mindfulness and intuitive practices I bring to one-on-one coaching clients and my workshops.
I am the author of the story collection What We Pick Up (Buckman Press, 2021) and was the 2019 recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship in Drama for an original, queer noir television series I’m currently adapting into a novel. My short fiction, poetry, and book reviews have appeared in The Oregonian, Buckman Journal, New South, The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Plenitude, and The Madison Review, among many others.
For the last 15 years, I’ve facilitated writing workshops for nonprofits Write Around Portland and the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative as well as helped train facilitators and develop curricula for both organizations. In addition, I have trained as a life coach in therapeutic artmaking, vision boarding, mindfulness techniques, as well as self-healing and somatic healing through the Transformation Academy. My most recent trainings are as a teacher of presence through the Eckhart Tolle Foundation and on awakening through the pain-body with Kim Eng.
Curious about ancient wisdom and mystical traditions, I have also studied and have experience working with archetypal astrology, tarot, and the I Ching.
A graduate of NYU film school, my early career was spent in television production and advertising. Since Jonathan and I moved to Portland in 2007, I’ve worked primarily in communications and content production in fields of publishing, political campaigns, city government, and labor organizing.
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My own writing and creative coaching practice is a byproduct of the skills and disciplines I’ve studied and bring to bear, combined with my own enduring awakening experience.
I glimpsed some of the subtler aspects of my awakening through solo meditation and study, deep partnership and dialogue with my husband Jonathan, as well as the last decade of being in a larger sangha with a community of friends with intertwining spiritual and intuitive practices known as the FUTUS (for Fuck You, Thank You Sangha).
Not until late 2021 did this ongoing work blossom into a more sustained awakened sense of being, primarily through the work and words of teachers who, like wizards, arrived precisely when they needed to: Byron Katie (Loving What Is), Eckhart Tolle (various lectures, particularly about presence), and Judith Blackstone (Trauma and the Unbound Body). In addition to their teachings, numerous others laid the groundwork in my psyche and body and prepared me for profound insights I continue to integrate: David Lynch, Steven Sondheim, Julia Cameron, Pema Chödrön, Thich Nhat Hanh, Loch Kelly, bell hooks, Joanna Macy, Lama Rod Owens, Terry Tempest Williams, and so many others.
My primary WAYS IN in (rough chronological) order of appearance:
Any and all exposure to art: reading, going to museums or the cinema, seeing a play or performance
Being around and loving on dogs and other animals
Exploring my own creative practice and expressiveness through drawing, sketching, painting, writing fiction and poetry, singing, performing, dancing, filmmaking, screenwriting, and photography
Solving puzzles, making patterns, and problem-solving through crosswords, word puzzles and games, origami, calculus
Taoism
Coming out, exploring my queer identity and lineage, unlearning who I was not, finding joy and community in art, advocacy, and hidden queer history
Yoga, long-distance running, hiking, the practice of movement
Audiobooks
Road tripping
Baking, cooking
Buddhism, meditation, mindfulness, building sangha
Gardening, tending to houseplants, exploring nature more deeply, adventuring in bodies of water, paddle-boarding, kayaking, learning about different species of birds, trees
Archetypal astrology, tarot, the I Ching
Voice work through singing
Union organizing
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Hello! I am a writer, mystic, creative coach, workshop facilitator, and teacher of presence. I specialize in helping people awaken to their inherent creative gifts and unique voice so they might grow and thrive in their creative practice and career and build community while they do so.
My approach combines decades of experience with creative writing and facilitation with an awakened heart built up over the last decade in a local sangha and which grew into a deeper, enduring awakening experience beginning in late 2021.
As a queer writer with a disability, one who has worked day jobs throughout his career, I also bring my own lived experience of how difficult it can be to feel centered and supported in this work when systems were designed to exclude or marginalize you, and how easy it is to undermine ourselves, our art, and our healing by focusing solely on the hustle of production for a nebulous, unknowable market.
As a practiced meditator and teacher of presence, and as a member of both a local and global sangha, my work with you can’t help but come from an awakening lens. We’ll work on dropping the ego’s defenses and binary thinking, helping you find the sweet spot where you are able to be present so your purpose, intuition, and sense of self align with where you want to go creatively. This will look a lot of ways depending on our areas of focus, but it will start with an exploration of the many WAYS IN you have to do this work, the everyday practices that support your healing, intuition, joy, and creativity.
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This type of work is for anyone feeling stuck and in need of support related to their creative practice and/or a specific project in development. With creative coaching, I offer a therapeutic, ethical framework to help align your innate gifts and voice with the right mediums for channeling and expressing them. With project development, I also bring 25 years of production experience in different mediums and genres as a published fiction author, poet, screenwriter, producer, production manager, script supervisor, and communications professional, including work as an editor, copyeditor, and proofreader.
I’m most passionate about working with creatives who have been systemically marginalized, especially those who may be seeking support, inspiration, and community amid the powerful and chaotic paradigm shifts happening in the world right now.
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For one-on-one creative and spiritual coaching, here are some objectives and the approaches we’ll take:
investigating any limiting beliefs you may have about your skills or the way you choose to express yourself, then finding ways to soften or eliminate them
quieting negative voices you may have internalized
determining any barriers to creative practice such as income, disability, systemic oppression, lack of time or resources, then developing strategies to work with or around them to allow a greater sense of ease and spaciousness around your practice
bolstering a sense of permission around whatever it is you love to create, perform, or make manifest in the world
reestablishing contact with your guides, intuition, and divine source energy, your WAYS IN
reinforcing your why with affirmations and journal prompts
expanding your intuition through ancient wisdom traditions and mystical arts such as archetypal astrology, tarot, or the I Ching
deepening your mindfulness practices such as meditation, breath work, somatic work, movement, and ritual, using these skills to boost the signal of your WAYS IN
using art therapy practices to help regulate the nervous system, reduce everyday stressors and overwhelm, and help you get into a better physical, emotional, and spiritual space for creative practice
fostering practical habits for both your craft and your personal life, including time management, physical and mental wellness, setting goals, follow-through, creating space, and establishing boundaries
making a plan for your ongoing education in your field and other ways to spark inspiration and curiosity about what is possible with your practice
building peer support and community around your creative and spiritual practices
integrating personal insights that come from creative exploration
developing skills in discernment so you may better step outside your work and witness, without judgement, any gaps between what you set out to communicate and its execution, skills that will also allow you to both give and receive constructive feedback with grace
identifying ways to resource and sustain your practice through grants, fellowships, workshops, conferences, networking, and training
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If our work together starts with (or pivots to) project development, this may also include:
detailed feedback and advice on work at any stage, tailored to the type of feedback you’re seeking and the areas of focus you identify
full or partial manuscript review including editorial guidance, copy editing, and/or proofreading, as requested
setting goals and achievable benchmarks for your project so you feel a sense of movement
creating a plan for developing your project further
reestablishing contact with your guides, intuition, and divine source energy, your WAYS IN, so they can be a constant support for your project
expanding your intuition as it relates to a particular project
developing resiliency to prevent forms of self-sabotage related to your project
building peer support and community around your project, medium, or genre
identifying education opportunities and/or areas for growth around your craft
identifying ways to support or sustain your project through grants, fellowships, workshops, conferences, contests, networking, and training
exploring where to share your work, including how to identify markets, track submissions, and keep the faith amid the inevitable rejection that is part of every artist’s journey
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Please use our contact form. We will schedule a free consultation so we can meet and see if we’re a good fit. Sessions are virtual at this time, via Zoom. My fee for coaching work is $175 per hour with sliding scale options based on need. Project development will be estimated on a project basis.