About

My Story:

Like many, I came to this profession through my own life story as a “wounded healer.” My journey started when I went to medical school in Germany more than four decades ago.

After a serious physical illness and a break from medical school, I ended up studying Buddhist meditation in Sri Lanka in 1980-1981. After graduation from medical school, I immigrated to the USA. By the early 1990’s I had become a clinical psychologist in California. I began integrating Buddhist with Western psychology, as I found that this worked well for 20th/21st-century suffering. For more than a decade I worked as a consultant, assisting people wounded by religion in authority. Those times helped me to become aware of how tender our spiritual longing is, and how this longing can be confounded by harsh dogma and misuse of power.

.After practicing psychotherapy for seven years in San Francisco and Berkeley, I moved to Santa Barbara, where I opened a private practice in the mid-1990s.

Nowadays I see clients with a variety of concerns, including depression and anxiety, many of whom seek help in times of relationship crises, major life changes and who have been traumatized in different ways. I work with those spiritually homeless and disappointed, who want to find their individual sense of spiritual connectedness. I work with many of those, who work with others who are suffering, with those who are social activists or teachers. I also specialize in seeing clients from international and minority backgrounds, helping them to bridge cultural and religious identities.

I draw upon an eclectic background, ranging from client-centered and Gestalt to psychodynamic and Jungian orientations. I have been studying mindfulness meditation, both as a personal practice and as a tool in psychotherapy, for over 40 years. I have been exploring how dreamwork (dream-tending, embodied dream-tending, intuitive associations) and mindfulness meditation can work in complementary ways, deepening the therapeutic process. I have noticed how the development of meditation practices has helped my clients to reduce their anxiety and embrace a fuller sense of self.

My teaching is mentored for the past 18 years by Meditation teacher and psychologist Jack Kornfield, Ph.D. and for the past 7 years also by psychologist and Dzogchen/ Mahamudra meditation teacher Dan Brown, Ph.D. I also studied for over 10 years with Dzogchen meditation teacher Alan Wallace, Ph.D.and took the cultivating emotional balance training with him and Paul Ekman, Ph.D. in 2011. I am also mentored by Dzogchen teacher John Makransky, PhD, who founded sustainablecompassion.org. John teaches how love is an important quality of the field of awareness. I teach mindfulness meditation and dreamwork in many different settings both nationally and internationally.

Many of my clients come to me because I approach psychotherapy with a solid psychotherapeutic foundation grounded in both Western and Buddhist psychotherapy.

I teach frequently with my husband, Michael Kearney, MD an author, speaker, and palliative care physician. See Michaelkearneymd.com. Michael and I founded the non-profit Mindful Heart Programs 8 years ago, mindfulheartprograms.org, which provides a meditation platform, retreats, and seminars, as well as mindfulness in school programs and ongoing programs for seniors. We are continuously creating new ways of being helpful in our beautiful and wounded world.