Guide · Coach · Hypnotherapist
I'm not a therapist with a neutral office. I'm a man who has been lost in this terrain and found his way out — more than once. Everything I offer, I earned the hard way.
About Dusty Sylvanson — Life Coach & Hypnotherapist
My First job as a carpenter, 16 years old, I was ready to face the world on my terms. At almost 18 years old, the consequences of the life I was living caught up with me. Harmful choices, a way of being that was costing everyone around me — including myself — more than could be sustained, from living on the streets, to jobsites and too much trouble to be named. That reckoning led me to recovery. And recovery returned me to what was always already mine — the woods, the mountains, the natural world I had first learned to love and found refuge as a child in the countryside, playing in the forest, and as an Eagle Scout, long before the world redirected me.
Through that door: the outdoors. The wilderness. NOLS. Years teaching wilderness medicine across the western United States, and further — Nepal, India, the places where conventional help can't reach. I loved the teaching. I loved the mountains. I followed that love like a compass heading.
And then I lost the way.
Tragic events.
At twenty-eight I sat with death up close, in ways that left marks I didn't know how to carry. I built a yurt by hand at twenty-nine and lived alone on the land, trying to unravel trauma I didn't yet have words for.
At thirty, a motorcycle crash nearly killed me. In the space that opened up, I made a choice to come back and do the work.
PTSD I didn't have language for yet. Attempts to find relief in self-defeating and destructive ways that cost me nearly everything. I found myself facing homelessness, again. Empty of inner and outer resources. Thirty-one years old and starting over in the most literal sense.
At thirty-two, recovery found me again.
The Building Years
I returned to what I had always loved: working with my hands. Natural materials. Nature. The particular satisfaction of making something real from raw material.
That love led me to straw bale construction and timber framing, and eventually to founding Straw & Timber Craftsmen — a design-build company in Gunnison, Colorado that I ran for twenty years.
Eighteen years of employees. A nonprofit school teaching students straw bale construction, which yielded a homes for low-income families. Executive Director of the Colorado Straw Bale Association. An international Natural Building conference.
The Through-Line
I have not done any of this perfectly. I followed my heart and faced my fears and accepted help from others and worked through the inner and outer challenges — and as a result, surpassed again and again what I imagined was possible.
That is the pattern of my life. I follow the bliss, do the work it demands, and then I teach what I learned.
The transpersonal and spiritual dimensions of this work have roots that go further back than any certification — in years of nature-based and contemplative practice that preceded the formal training by decades.
My highest flow state is teaching what I love and inspiring others. I can't help it, nor can I keep it in.
What The Building Taught
Mindfulness was not something I studied first and applied later. The seeds of it were planted in early recovery — at seventeen, learning to pay attention to my own interior, to examine honestly, to stay present with what was difficult. I learned to meditate at eighteen, before it was something people talked about at dinner parties. The word I was taught then was awareness. But I had no skills to go with it — just the concept, and the necessity of figuring it out.
I had found my way back to Buddhist practice in 2008 — the formal lineage of what I had been doing instinctively since recovery. By 2016 I was ready to go deeper, and spent the following year in an immersive mindfulness teacher training. I began teaching in 2017. Certified as a life coach in 2018. Since then it has been a mix of teaching, coaching, workshops, and showing up wherever I can be useful.
In 2008, I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis and over the next decade the body that had built everything started sending a message I couldn't out-work. In 2015, I started planning my exit — not because I'd lost the love for building, but because I wanted to leave on my own terms. In 2023 as Straw & Timber Craftsmen Inc wound down — deliberately, as planned — I found myself serving families and youth in the community: parent education, parent coaching, working alongside the mental health professionals of this small mountain valley who show up every day for the people who need them most. That work is ongoing. It is a joy and a privilege. And everything I have learned there I bring here.
Running a business with integrity. Building with genuine care and spiritual connection to the natural world. Managing stress and creativity and family and employees and the relentless problem-solving that twenty years of running a construction business requires — none of it was possible without developing, practicing, and eventually teaching the tools of inner sustainability.
The outer work demanded an equal inner practice to sustain it
And through all of it — the building, the leading, the designing, the teaching — I discovered something that wasn't on any blueprint.
The Outer Building Is Complete
Here's the question that changed everything for me: How do I want to experience this life?
Not what should I achieve. Not how do I manage what's wrong with me.
Just — how do I want to experience myself as I go through this journey with others, while I'm actually living it?
If you're standing at your own version of the gap — the person you are and the person you would like to be, I have traveled this way, and collected skills, tools, a curious mind to share, heart to connect and a soul to teach and simply to walk each other home.
What becomes possible — more often than I can predict — is that a person finds their way back to themselves. Not a new self. The one that was always there.
That Is Sylvanheart
Certifications & Training
Certified Life Coach
Certified Ikigai Coach
Spiritual Transpersonal Hypnotherapist
Certified Mindfulness Instructor
Wilderness Medicine Instructor
NOLS Instructor
I am not a therapist. What I offer is a guided journey — grounded in deep experience and a genuine belief that every person who finds their way here already carries the intelligence they are looking for. My job is to help create the conditions in which that intelligence can be heard.