Experience

I’ve been working with people for more than forty years.

My work has moved through psychotherapy, professional coaching, spiritual direction and mentoring, cancer support, university teaching, retreat leadership, writing, ritual and rites of passage, and the creative arts.

It’s been a wide-ranging professional life.

Psychotherapy, Coaching, and Spiritual Work

My graduate degree is in Systems: Marriage and Family Therapy, and I’ve worked as a psychotherapist for more than forty years, primarily with women.

That grounding in systems thinking still shapes everything I do. I see a woman in the context and ecology of her whole life—her relationships, family, body, work, culture, history, ancestors, creativity, spiritual life, losses, longings, and the circumstances in which she has had to become who she is.

My formal education was only the beginning. Over the years, I’ve pursued significant postgraduate training in somatic and psychodynamic work, dreamwork, spiritual direction, ritual and rites of passage, shamanic practice, ancestral healing, and soul work.

In 2004, I trained and certified as a professional coach through Coach University.

Psychotherapy helps me understand what has shaped a life. Coaching asks what might happen next. Spiritual work makes room for the questions that neither psychology nor action can answer.

I use all three.

Illness and the Big Questions

For approximately ten years, cancer and life-threatening illness were a major focus of my professional life.

As Program Director at Harmony Hill, I developed and led intensive residential retreats for women with cancer. I also spent ten years teaching and leading groups at Cancer Lifeline. I taught internationally about Illness As Initiation.

Those years meant spending thousands of hours with women confronting illness, fear, loss, mortality, identity, and lives suddenly divided into before and after.

That work changed me.

It taught me the limits of easy answers, the importance of not making meaning for someone else, and how much can happen when a woman is given enough room to discover what is actually true for her.

Teaching, Retreats, and Rites of Passage

I’ve taught and led workshops and retreats in Seattle, San Francisco, New Orleans, New York, Hong Kong, Stockholm, and elsewhere.

I’ve served on the faculty of Antioch University and Bastyr University, and spent decades designing and leading groups, retreats, rituals, and rites of passage.

For roughly twenty years I created and led rituals marking significant life transitions, including weddings, women’s midlife rites of passage, and Hero’s Journey programs. I also co-founded an organization devoted to rites of passage.

Much of this work centered on thresholds: the times when one identity or chapter has ended and the next has not yet fully arrived.

That territory remains absolutely central to my work today.

Writing

I’m the author of four books: If Only I Were a Better Mother; Exploring the Labyrinth: A Guide for Healing and Growth; Soulful Living: The Process of Personal Transformation; and Silver Linings: Finding Hope, Meaning, and Renewal in Transition

I was also a frequent contributor to New Age Journal, Spirituality & Health, and Personal Transformation, writing about healing, meaning, change, spirituality, creativity, and the passages that alter a life.

Beyond the Therapy Room

My education in human beings didn’t happen only in psychotherapy training programs.

I began my professional life as a performing classical pianist and later became a professional piano tuner, working with organizations including the Pacific Northwest Ballet and the Hong Kong Philharmonic and tuning for artists including Mikhail Baryshnikov.

I spent two years teaching English to refugees in Hong Kong, in camps operated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and later did additional refugee work in Seattle.

I also became a professional fine arts painter. My work won competitions and appeared in solo and gallery exhibitions.

All of that experience comes into the room with me—not as a collection of credentials, but as part of how I listen, what I notice, and how broadly I understand the possibilities of a human life.

And beneath all of it are more than forty years of women telling me the truth about their lives.

You can contact me at Melissa@MelissaGayleWest.com or 206-427-1325.