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About Me
I am an existential psychotherapist, published author and poet, and writing facilitator based in Boulder, Colorado.
Several core values and truths guide my life. Among them are the remembrance that we exist as brief and beautiful on a lonely planet in a boundless universe; that our duty is to show up in kindness and love for each other and this earth; that gratitude and grief are relational dimensions through which we come alive; that we shape the reality of our experience through thoughts and speech; and that all beings are here to experience their full expression and belonging as one possible existence.
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The way I arrived to this understanding and orientation to life did not come easy, as I am sure your values, beliefs, and lessons also did not come easy. I grew up in Lebanon with a short term relocation to America during my mid-teens after my parents divorced. Over my childhood, I changed five schools till I enrolled in college. I severely stuttered as a kid, and dealt with school bullying due to stuttering and being queer. At eighteen I evacuated to Utah during the 2006 July war. During my time in Utah I earned my bachelors in economics and philosophy, started a hummus company, and later founded a restaurant (Laziz Kitchen) that served as a queer safe space in the community. During this time I also sued the state of Utah along with my then lover and two other couples for our right to marry (Kitchen v. Herbert). By my early thirties I realized that I had strayed away from center of my integrity and was deeply dissatisfied with my life. With the help of guides, teachers, and mentors, I slowly found my way.
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What I really want you to know is that I understand how it feels and what it means to struggle with the fact of being alive. With not feeling like you belong, or that there is room for you to exist. I too have faced harrowing questions around purpose, lovability, and expression. I am grateful for all these experiences. They taught me to how to love this world and everything in it.
In case you need to hear this today, your life is worth loving and living. I would be honored to earn your trust as your friend, companion, and guide in crossing the inner threshold to discover the world waiting within you.
My Approach
I see my role as a companion on your journey.
I work from a person-centered approach with mindful attention to transpersonal and existential themes. I utilize various forms of writing and poetry, art and nature based interventions, and mindfulness approaches rooted in spiritual traditions like Sufism and Buddhism.
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During our therapy sessions we'll have the chance to work on building confidence, improving interpersonal relationships, unpacking personal struggles, discovering purpose and meaning, and exploring core childhood experiences and narratives. Like any new relationship, we'll start by building trust and getting to know each other. I won't hold myself as a blank slate. You'll have a chance to learn about me as I learn about you. Healing happens in relationship, and in our sessions we can practice being in relationship together and address any obstacles or challenges that arise. My work is to encourage you and help you develop clarity about who you are and how you show up in your life. ​
I'll be forthright with you here; I cannot make any promises to fix you, heal you, or free you from yourself. To be human means to experience all these the givens of life. To feel grief, sadness, anger, and fear, and to also feel their relational dimensions of gratitude, joy, acceptance, and love. I also cannot promise that a time will come when you will be free of problems, or that you'll find a definitive fixed self. Though greater satisfaction, contentment, and peace in your life regardless of what is happening is possible. What I can do is help you turn towards your experiences with acceptance and curiosity, and guide you in discovery of the wisdom and brilliance that you already contain.​​​​​​​
Poetry
I express myself best through poetry. Here are some poems that speak to my therapeutic orientation.
Click on the title to get linked to the Substack post.
sometimes it is necessary to reteach
a thing its loveliness - Galway Kinnell
There is nothing wrong with you.
Just ask a redwood if it ever thinks it’s trunk
too thick, or an aspen if its branches too bare.
Neither does a dandelion look at a sunflower
and wish it could be one. And the black dahlia
certainly has not learned to reject the color of
its petals. There is just no way you could be
ugly. No way you are wrong. Whatever it is
they had you believe about your inherited sin,
and who you must be. Whatever the violent
conditioning - Remember, you are made of
dirt and water, shaped by light.
Your ancestors imagined you in a vision,
their mud bodies galloping in strides -
let their wisdom bite down into your shoulder.
You, loved into breath. You, the pinnacle of
a determined lineage. You, the beginning of
a dream, the divine’s uttered expression.
Just as a river hugs its banks. Just as a bee
opens blossoms. Just as the sun wakens
the earth, again, so are you, beloved, made in
the image of inimitable belonging, shaped from
a reservoir of tenderness, so deep and clear,
so certain, there is no question of your loveliness.
Place a hand to your heart. Breathe. Feel again
the pleasure of being. Learn, once more, how
it is to praise. Then stride yourself, humbly and
curious, into this immeasurable new day.​​​
All Things Bloom
You cannot crack open a heart.
No more than you can bend steel
or pry open a still pursed blossom.
No more than you can peel back
the sky or force a seed to sprout
by hammering its shell.
Some things aren't ready to stand exposed and naked in the light.
Some cannot bear the violence
of knowing, the insistence of change. All you can do is shine ever-on with indiscriminate hope in trust that
all things bloom, with determined patience that they will.
“It is about…behaving as beautifully
as one can under completely impossible circumstances” - Toni Morrison
It seems too simple, doesn’t it?
One day we are born, and on that
day we are promised our death, and
in between we have this opportunity
to be beautiful, to behave beautifully,
to learn a thing or two about what it
means to be alive here, together on
this Earth. No one said it would be
easy— the heartbreak, the loss, this
impossible pain. What else shall we
do? We are here after all, are we not?
Why all the fussing over who gets
what and where and how much of it?
Here is the daisy, smiling up as you
go by. Here is the cloud, waving on.
Here is the moon, singing sweetly.
Here you are. Here I am. Here we
stand in this here happening world,
and the bridge, the long beautiful
bridge.
You can read more of my poems here