Pueblo psychotherapist sees how therapy, spiritual mentoring lead to healing and change
A Pueblo psychotherapist who believes all spiritual paths have merit has incorporated a strong spiritual component in her work as she seeks to help her clients breakthroughs of healing and transformation.
Leia Marie, known to readers of The Pueblo Chieftain as a columnist for the newspaper’s faith and religion section since 2008, has been a psychotherapist since obtaining her master of social work degree in 1985. Although spirituality was never a part of her college courses, she has spent a lifetime exploring many spiritual paths.
One of her first jobs was working for The Street Program in Maine, a state-funded program dedicated to helping children who had been sexually abused or exploited. Marie worked with children who were being sexually exploited on the streets.
“Over 90% of them had been abused in the home, so I got great training in dealing with trauma. There is nothing like a 5-year-old rape victim to make you question the existence of God, but there also is nothing like watching her heal to know there is something going on, there is some magic there, and we just need to tap into it.”
It is in those moments when Marie can help her clients realize what is true for them like the "clouds are parting and sun is shining through the window pane.” She has thrived on those breakthrough moments, even though pain is a part of getting to them.
“It's the pain and the glory,” she said. “My spirituality is entwined with my personal and my professional life.”
More:Leia Marie: Tutu and Dalai Lama
The winding spiritual path
Marie was raised Catholic but at age 16 was drawn to meditation and was “given an alternative way of looking at the world, looking beneath the external forms to what was at the heart, the living core of them,” she said. She studied Sunni tradition, mysticism, esoteric Christianity and then moved away from that when “maybe I absorbed too much and called myself an agnostic,” which is a person who does not claim to believe or disbelieve in God.
“I wasn’t sure any longer of specific beliefs and so I was exploring a different facet of spirituality,” Marie said. Later she would return to meditation and delve into goddess traditions, Native American traditions and Buddhism.
She has learned along the way that people from different perspectives, be it new age to Catholicism or evangelicals, may believe other forms of spirituality are wrong, but Marie believes “there is beauty in all of it and all spiritual parts are a part of the whole.”
She said she would like to see the line dividing Eastern and Western ways of spiritual thinking to become blurred or erased alltogether.
“We try to divide everything, but it’s all one — it's life. That’s where God lives,” she said.
“If that divine exists everywhere that means it’s right here and you can get to it in various ways,” she said.
Going out into the world
Today her psychotherapy practice includes Reiki and spiritual mentoring, or spiritual direction. She said as a business woman, she knows health insurance will pay for psychotherapy, but it doesn’t cover the other forms of spiritual mentoring.
Among Puebloans who read her column, “there is a longing, a thirst for it,” and the demand for spiritual mentoring has grown exponentially since she started writing the column 15 years ago. So she will simply tell new clients to pay what they can afford and an amount is agreed upon to cover her time.
Now 67, she has felt compelled to “go out in the world more,” so she wrote a book.
“The book came out of how much I love those moments of breakthrough and transformation,” she said.
The book, “Enchanted: A Tale of Remembrance,” opens with a mythological tale of people who have lost their way. It has short stories that follow the lives of various individuals as they reach insight and awareness, “even if it’s painful,” she said, “it explains what it means to be fully human.”
Marie’s book is publishing on Amazon March 23 and is available in ebook form for $9.99 and paperback for $14.99. A virtual launch party is set for 6 p.m. March 22 on Zoom.
For a link to the Zoom meeting, email Marie at silvermountain@mac.com.To find out more about Marie’s practice, visit in-awe.net.
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Chieftain reporter Tracy Harmon covers business news. She can be reached by email at tharmon@chieftain.com or via Twitter at twitter.com/tracywumps.
This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain: Pueblo psychotherapist uses spiritual mentoring to lead others to healing
