Brilliant Sanity Isn’t a Goal—It’s Already Yours

You don’t need to be fixed.

In the contemplative psychotherapy tradition I practice from, we hold to a radical idea: You are already whole. You may feel lost, anxious, ashamed, or shut down; you may carry trauma, grief, or dissociation. But none of that erases your basic nature, which—according to Tibetan Buddhist psychology—is openness, intelligence, and warmth.

Chögyam Trungpa, the Tibetan teacher who brought this tradition westward, called this innate wholeness brilliant sanity. It’s not a goal you achieve after six months of EMDR or even 10 years of meditation. It’s what you already are—underneath all the conditioning, all the noise, all the survival adaptations.

Even the Buddha himself, before he was The Buddha, had to learn this. He spent years growing up in luxury, then spent years in self-denial, and neither gave him what he was looking for. So he stopped striving. He just… sat under a tree. And instead of conquering his mind, he truly faced it. All his fears, cravings, doubts—he didn’t fight them; he simply didn’t look away.

That’s the heart of contemplative psychotherapy.

Not fixing.
Not labeling.
Not even “helping,” in the traditional sense.

It’s sitting with another human being and helping them see—sometimes for the first time—that they were never broken to begin with.

If you’re craving therapy that meets you as a whole person—not a diagnosis—I’d love to work with you. I offer contemplative, queer-affirming therapy for folks across Colorado.