After college, my first job was at Hawai’i Preparatory Academy here in Waimea where I had the pleasure of teaching social studies to freshman. While working in the classroom, I found my relationships with students, whether that was teaching moments mindfulness or just being a good listener when students were having a bad day, to be the most meaningful parts of my job. I began to wonder how a profession in counseling would allow me to share my passion for spiritual knowledge and support others in navigating the human experience. It was with great joy and excitement that I stumbled across Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and their Mindfulness-Based Transpersonal Counseling (MBTC) Master’s program. I jumped at the opportunity to attend Naropa and received my Master’s in MBTC in 2024.
While at Naropa, I learned the foundational counseling skills of Gestalt, Internal Family Systems, Somatic Coaching, and Transpersonal Counseling. I developed my personal mindfulness practice and learned how to lead others through many different mindfulness exercises like Metta Loving Kindness, Jungian active imagination, chanting and prayer, somatic relaxation, and so much more. I had the opportunity to spend a year counseling Middle School students at September High School and the year after counseling at The Reentry Initiative, an organization dedicated to providing holistic mental health resources for criminal-justice involved individuals.While living in Boulder, I received additional training in a somatic coaching methodology called Body Based Breakthrough (B3) as well as training in Traditional Tea Ceremony from Global Tea Hut.
After receiving my Master’s degree, I moved back to Waimea on the Big Island of Hawaii with my loving partner, Jenny, and our bulldog, Chief.
It is my sincerest desire to share with you the many services and practices that have dramatically changed my life.
My name is Alex and it is with great joy that I might share some of who I am with you here…
I was born and raised in “The Bay” in California. While my childhood was relatively smooth sailing as far as childhoods go, as a teenager I struggled immensely with my mental health. I lacked a healthy orientation system and found myself craving something more. When I was 17, I encountered Buddhism for the first time in the form of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. I quickly discovered that the “more” I was craving was understanding. I wanted so badly to have answers to the big existential questions that were plaguing my experience of life; why do I exist, why is life full of pain and suffering, how do I know that I matter?
After high school, I went off to receive my bachelors at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. There, I chose to major in Religious Studies in the hopes that a comprehensive and comparative examination of the worlds great religions would provide the answers to the questions that I needed answers to. In my studies, I learned that every culture, every ancestor of the human race, grappled with the very same questions. I also learned that every single person who came before me had their own unique way of answering those questions. I learned that, while many of us might find similarities in our answers, there is no one, single, true source for those answers. Rather, each of us have the sacred opportunity to formulate a perspective, an orientation system, that is completely our own and best serves our experience of life and of Self. Most importantly, I learned that the healthiest orientation system, for me, was one that was the most flexible, adaptable, and open to the wisdom of all sources of knowledge. This discovery sparked in me an insatiable desire to encounter and explore as many different orientation systems as possible in the form of study, reading, and, most importantly, talking to others.