Guide · Coach · Hypnotherapist
I didn’t find this work by studying it.
I found it by needing it.
At seventeen 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. 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 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. 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 homeless. 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. 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 strawbale construction for low-income families. Executive Director of the Colorado Straw Bale Association. An international conference.
What the building taught
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 construction requires — none of it was possible without developing, practicing, and eventually teaching the tools of inner sustainability.
Mindfulness was not something I studied first and applied later. It was something I was driven to by necessity, then came to love, and then learned to teach — because I couldn't help sharing what had worked.
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 through-line
I have not done any of this perfectly. I have 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.
My highest flow state is teaching what I love and inspiring others. I can't help it.
The outer building is complete.
What remains — and what I offer now — is the inner architecture. Hard won. Honestly held. Built from the same materials as everything else I've ever built: real conditions, trial and error, and a commitment to doing the work well or not at all.
That is Sylvanheart.
Certifications & training
Certified Life Coach
Certified Ikigai Coach
Spiritual Transpersonal Hypnotherapist
trained by Jen Catlin
Certified Mindfulness Instructor
Mindful Life Program
Wilderness Medicine Instructor
Wilderness Medicine Institute
NOLS Instructor
National Outdoor Leadership School
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.