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We all have places we repeat & are not able to move forward even if we’re in denial of this.
The thing about pain is, that while we hate it, it’s also a gift since it cues us in to what we must transform. Pain demands we attend our evolution. Even if we do not “feel” pain, yet we’re still capable of seeing repetitions we don’t want or we realize we’re numb, then we still have the opportunity for transformation. I do not use that word lightly.
The thing about pain is, that while we hate it, it’s also a gift since it cues us in to what we must transform. Pain demands we attend our evolution. Even if we do not “feel” pain, yet we’re still capable of seeing repetitions we don’t want or we realize we’re numb, then we still have the opportunity for transformation. I do not use that word lightly.
Psychotherapy Biography
Holaday Mason has a M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University. She has been a transpersonal, analytic psychotherapist in private practice since 1993 (MFT 31549). Her work has been called “ Shaman-analysis” by some, because she respectfully employs both classic Eurocentric methods of uncovering & transforming unconscious material (somskaras) & shadows with older earth based wisdoms & eastern philosophies in the work of deep soul excavation. In addition to her private practice work, she leads focused generative therapeutic/tantric writing workshops that focus on mining the imaginal & inner worlds for information in the combined service of healing ourselves & making art.
Training
There is no training ground more arduous an adventure than life itself. But without my teachers & healers I’d have remained lost in my singular versions of things. My own 20 years as a patient in psychoanalysis has been the greatest most difficult place to train & grow. We can’t take others beyond where we’ve been. I have also had the honor of being supervised over the years by many training analysts, mainly from PCC. I’m happy to give referrals if you ask. As a seeker of esoteric growth & knowledge, just a few of my teachers, both formally & informally, past & present: Saul David Raye, Eric Schiffman, Jason Fram, Trudy Goodman, Laura Amazzone, Chani Nicholas, Eric Francis, Vicki Noble, Pema Chodron.
Holaday Mason has a M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University. She has been a transpersonal, analytic psychotherapist in private practice since 1993 (MFT 31549). Her work has been called “ Shaman-analysis” by some, because she respectfully employs both classic Eurocentric methods of uncovering & transforming unconscious material (somskaras) & shadows with older earth based wisdoms & eastern philosophies in the work of deep soul excavation. In addition to her private practice work, she leads focused generative therapeutic/tantric writing workshops that focus on mining the imaginal & inner worlds for information in the combined service of healing ourselves & making art.
Training
There is no training ground more arduous an adventure than life itself. But without my teachers & healers I’d have remained lost in my singular versions of things. My own 20 years as a patient in psychoanalysis has been the greatest most difficult place to train & grow. We can’t take others beyond where we’ve been. I have also had the honor of being supervised over the years by many training analysts, mainly from PCC. I’m happy to give referrals if you ask. As a seeker of esoteric growth & knowledge, just a few of my teachers, both formally & informally, past & present: Saul David Raye, Eric Schiffman, Jason Fram, Trudy Goodman, Laura Amazzone, Chani Nicholas, Eric Francis, Vicki Noble, Pema Chodron.
Governing Philosophy
Psychodynamic & Analytic Work
In analytic theories of human beings, the focus is on the patterns in our lives, where we must attend to arrested development. Over a period of time, repetitions we can see & those we can’t see but are always revealed in our most intimate relationships, these immerge in the actual, real time, living breathing relationship with the therapist. Easier said than done.
The many methods of protecting our sense of who we are & what is “real” are very stealthy & the psychic terrain underneath is often a caldron of early & present day emotion. We often either do not feel at all or we feel too much because of certain defenses (denial, rationalization, projection, addiction, fusion).
Grief, regret, hatred, envy, missing, jealousy, rivalry, love… well it’s all rather biblical right? Nope, we just live in a global gestalt that colludes with an increasingly numb layering of psychic stockades, so the former only seems melodramatic. The truth is in the end game results. In the big picture: materialism, meaningless sex, corporate corruption, environmental collapse, the extinction of species, poverty, sexism, racism, age-ism, technology addiction & numbness, spiritual bypass.
To transform this deep-water inner world, we need another. Often, we’ll try to do this in romantic, marital, or other close relations. It fails because we always find people who will engage from similar levels of capacity. It fails because real relations are inter-dependent. Life, love & creativity involve the necessity to tolerate, negotiate, compromise, commit, sacrifice, metamorphisize, & develop reciprocity. Real relationships are fraught with things like separations, missing, the invasions of other people, their needs, ways of seeing/being. The personal is political.
Our defenses are employed to protect us from encountering how we may not be able to manage these realities & so we can’t develop the capacity we need to evolve. The sort of relationship we need is with someone who can withstand all the various pain that comes up in “the field” of the relationship, a person who can gradually facilitate actual development. It’s within a healthy dependency that we must work through what we cannot otherwise transform, if we do not, our defense become confused with our True Selves. Transformation happens within the subtle & often very difficult interactions that immerge over time between the two people working together—the therapist & the client.
Eastern/Yogic & Earth Based Healing:
Other ways of looking at humans widen the lens & consider the matter of Soul, Spirit & body as mirrored in the form ( forms) of a persons life— strengths as well as difficulties. These more mystic & often esoteric lenses, also perceive life as coming NOT from outside of us but from the inner realms, somskaras (which include that specific life’s unconscious). The difference is one of scope.
More body/earth/mystic-based practices consider the interconnectedness of all life force as well as the possibility of many sorts of lives & living beings. They also employ actively entering the realms of the imaginative in order to receive information & to process. This is distinct from dream interpretation but certainly includes understanding our sleeping dreams as letters from different levels of our “minds”.
Unifying Summary
I don’t see these modalities as remotely mutually exclusive; they simply work on a continuum or different places along the same road. It’s all a matter of growth & progression. In my own work as a patient, as well as a therapist, when the early issues/pains are contacted & worked through via the thinning of defenses & the acceptance of real help (which is often not what one believes is helpful or feels good), it’s then that the capacity of the soul to be the essence of creativity becomes more evident & the mirroring/manifesting nature of the human being is accessed. This is not magical thinking or wish or delusion, it is part of the fundamental nature of our amazing mysterious existence. &, yet, we must be very careful, very clear about the fine line between these things, because they are often blurred. The goal is to be integrated in this incarnation to the degree that one can genuinely begin the journey into conscious evolution of our sacred nature.
Here the old school (Euro centric)meets the older schools( Eastern & Indigenous). Here, west meets east.
I find that both models are needed to respect the whole continuum of a life. And, I see us, as a race, in dire need of focusing on unifying rather than dividing. We are this specific person with our “egos” & our body’s energies & somskaras. We so need to work through the defenses & underlying arrested places that pertain to this specific life. But we are also, more.
When we address the places in our psyches/bodies that have become so, so stuck & habituated as to constitute addictions to our defenses, when we can know our egos for what they are--meaning our identification with this body, this life, these somskaras, these defenses, however superbly elegant, when we can dissolve our ways of justifying our defenses (including, often with spiritualism of many sorts)—it’s then that these structures, the sense of being solid, being an identity, falls apart. It’s then we can begin to step into manifesting via action & feeling.
The beautiful truths of analytic observations & real roll up your shirt sleeve get into the shit & sorrows any human may have stuck inside can move into the territory of the mystics, the shaman, the yogis, the poets—
Many tools can help us into the center of the dark mountain of our souls journey.
I work with individuals, in writing workshops & with couples. In each of these structures of interrelatedness, there are different levels of work possible. In each one we will retrieve some of what is needed & through that, the potential transformation of the human condition.
In light,
Holaday
In analytic theories of human beings, the focus is on the patterns in our lives, where we must attend to arrested development. Over a period of time, repetitions we can see & those we can’t see but are always revealed in our most intimate relationships, these immerge in the actual, real time, living breathing relationship with the therapist. Easier said than done.
The many methods of protecting our sense of who we are & what is “real” are very stealthy & the psychic terrain underneath is often a caldron of early & present day emotion. We often either do not feel at all or we feel too much because of certain defenses (denial, rationalization, projection, addiction, fusion).
Grief, regret, hatred, envy, missing, jealousy, rivalry, love… well it’s all rather biblical right? Nope, we just live in a global gestalt that colludes with an increasingly numb layering of psychic stockades, so the former only seems melodramatic. The truth is in the end game results. In the big picture: materialism, meaningless sex, corporate corruption, environmental collapse, the extinction of species, poverty, sexism, racism, age-ism, technology addiction & numbness, spiritual bypass.
To transform this deep-water inner world, we need another. Often, we’ll try to do this in romantic, marital, or other close relations. It fails because we always find people who will engage from similar levels of capacity. It fails because real relations are inter-dependent. Life, love & creativity involve the necessity to tolerate, negotiate, compromise, commit, sacrifice, metamorphisize, & develop reciprocity. Real relationships are fraught with things like separations, missing, the invasions of other people, their needs, ways of seeing/being. The personal is political.
Our defenses are employed to protect us from encountering how we may not be able to manage these realities & so we can’t develop the capacity we need to evolve. The sort of relationship we need is with someone who can withstand all the various pain that comes up in “the field” of the relationship, a person who can gradually facilitate actual development. It’s within a healthy dependency that we must work through what we cannot otherwise transform, if we do not, our defense become confused with our True Selves. Transformation happens within the subtle & often very difficult interactions that immerge over time between the two people working together—the therapist & the client.
Eastern/Yogic & Earth Based Healing:
Other ways of looking at humans widen the lens & consider the matter of Soul, Spirit & body as mirrored in the form ( forms) of a persons life— strengths as well as difficulties. These more mystic & often esoteric lenses, also perceive life as coming NOT from outside of us but from the inner realms, somskaras (which include that specific life’s unconscious). The difference is one of scope.
More body/earth/mystic-based practices consider the interconnectedness of all life force as well as the possibility of many sorts of lives & living beings. They also employ actively entering the realms of the imaginative in order to receive information & to process. This is distinct from dream interpretation but certainly includes understanding our sleeping dreams as letters from different levels of our “minds”.
Unifying Summary
I don’t see these modalities as remotely mutually exclusive; they simply work on a continuum or different places along the same road. It’s all a matter of growth & progression. In my own work as a patient, as well as a therapist, when the early issues/pains are contacted & worked through via the thinning of defenses & the acceptance of real help (which is often not what one believes is helpful or feels good), it’s then that the capacity of the soul to be the essence of creativity becomes more evident & the mirroring/manifesting nature of the human being is accessed. This is not magical thinking or wish or delusion, it is part of the fundamental nature of our amazing mysterious existence. &, yet, we must be very careful, very clear about the fine line between these things, because they are often blurred. The goal is to be integrated in this incarnation to the degree that one can genuinely begin the journey into conscious evolution of our sacred nature.
Here the old school (Euro centric)meets the older schools( Eastern & Indigenous). Here, west meets east.
I find that both models are needed to respect the whole continuum of a life. And, I see us, as a race, in dire need of focusing on unifying rather than dividing. We are this specific person with our “egos” & our body’s energies & somskaras. We so need to work through the defenses & underlying arrested places that pertain to this specific life. But we are also, more.
When we address the places in our psyches/bodies that have become so, so stuck & habituated as to constitute addictions to our defenses, when we can know our egos for what they are--meaning our identification with this body, this life, these somskaras, these defenses, however superbly elegant, when we can dissolve our ways of justifying our defenses (including, often with spiritualism of many sorts)—it’s then that these structures, the sense of being solid, being an identity, falls apart. It’s then we can begin to step into manifesting via action & feeling.
The beautiful truths of analytic observations & real roll up your shirt sleeve get into the shit & sorrows any human may have stuck inside can move into the territory of the mystics, the shaman, the yogis, the poets—
Many tools can help us into the center of the dark mountain of our souls journey.
I work with individuals, in writing workshops & with couples. In each of these structures of interrelatedness, there are different levels of work possible. In each one we will retrieve some of what is needed & through that, the potential transformation of the human condition.
In light,
Holaday
