Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart. Don’t search for the answers. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
~ Rilke
Ryan Oelke, MSEd
Living the questions of our lives is often challenging and takes vulnerability, fortitude and resilience. One question that lies deep within all of our hearts is, Who am I? If I have done anything consistently in my life, it has been living and struggling with this question. It shows up in a multitude of forms, throughout all dimensions of our lives: Who am I on the deepest level of being? Who am I in relationships? Who I am in work? How do I want to show up in the world? What do I want to offer and give to others? What is important to me? What is my deepest nature?
Adding to the challenge, complexity, and mystery of this journey is how all the dimensions of our lives seem to blend and relate: spiritual, emotional, relational, vocational. How do we hold and embody these interwoven pieces? How do we recognize and honor all the ways they mutually support and inform one another? How do we integrate the wisdom and love that flow from this inward path and express it in our outer lives?
I offer spiritual guidance to individuals seeking support in this journey.
Together we’ll explore these questions and listen deeply to your experience. Foundational to our work is a reverent trust in both reality itself and the innate wisdom within you, arising of its own accord like the morning sun. We will explore what it means to “wake up” and experience our truest Self, called by many names (buddhanature, non-duality, God, etc). We will also patiently open to both the light and dark within you, the strengths and shadows of your self. Most importantly, we’ll explore the integration of spiritual awakening and personal growth within your daily life. Through this you will cultivate equanimity and patience, becoming increasingly present to your experience and the natural cycles of expansion and contraction.
In this process there will be, as in all of life, joy, sadness, frustration, curiosity, excitement, peace, and struggle. I offer you space to feel deeply and express it all as a way to discover and embody the answers that arise within you. Primarily I rely on my intuition and connection with you. I also pull from techniques and experiences gleaned from earning an MSEd in counseling psychology, over a decade of practice and study in vajrayana Buddhism, and from non-dual teachings. Perhaps most valuable is my own deep work with my mentors Hokai Sobol, a Shingon Buddhist teacher, and Afra Moenter, a non-dual spiritual guide and psychotherapist.
I believe all of the answers are within you, within your own experience. Where else would the answers be? Sit with that deeply as it is an inquiry rich with wisdom. Often I hear teachers, therapists, coaches, and healers suggesting something similar to this, but some make it sound deceptively easy. While searching for answers within may be a simple method, it’s often quite difficult sitting with the unknown, the mystery, and the questions of our lives. The answers we seek are already within the reaches of our experience, but arriving at them is akin to tending a field to harvest, which takes patience, courage, time, faith and hard work. I will sit with you in this journey of discovering who you are in this moment and who you are becoming, and help you live your way into answers that are uncontrived, authentic, and meaningful.
To schedule a free 30-minute session or a full session, please contact me here. I am available for sessions via Skype/phone and in person in Boulder, Colorado.
To know the pain of too much tenderness
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and
give thanks for another day of loving…
~Khalil Gibran
