BRIEF OVERVIEW OF INNER BALANCE COUNSELING

   Balance and Blessings

   Blessings and Balance

   for from Balance

   come all Blessings 

       - Grandmother Keewaydinoquay, Ojibway Medicine Woman

Inner balance counseling is an innovative, solution-focused, and holistic psychotherapy approach developed by Dr. Loraine Van Tuyl.  After years of providing psychotherapy services, she realized that despite the wide range of concerns presented by her clients, they seemed to long for similar notions of happiness:  to reconnect to their authentic center of inner balance, freedom, and peace. 

This realization inspired Dr. Van Tuyl to integrate contemporary psychotherapeutic models, ancient wisdom, and traditional healing principles to help clients uncover, discover, or rediscover their unique centers of inner balance as soon as appropriate and throughout therapy.  This integrated approach teaches clients from the start how to listen to and trust their inner wisdom and innate capacity for healing.  As a result, clients become active participants and collaborators in creating and sustaining their own vision of emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual health.

Dr. Loraine Van Tuyl's keen attunement to the rhythms of nature and complex multi-ethnic upbringing near the edges of the Amazonian rainforest of Suriname provided the fertile ground and seeds for her holistic approach to healing.   In 1997, she conducted a cross-national dissertation study to examine the impact of spiritual (non-dualistic and dualistic) worldviews on the manifestation of racial splits within the self and within various multiracial communities in Suriname and the US.  She concluded that dualism was not only at the root of splitting off racialized parts of one’s identity, but at the heart of most, if not all other kinds of  “separations” from the true Self.

Despite well-intended advice from mentors not to put all of her eggs in one basket during her extended UC Davis pre-doctoral and post-doctoral placements, she intentionally choose to stick with a “good thing”.  From 1998-2002, she tapped as much as she could from the deep well of wisdom that Dr. Arnold de la Cruz, a “closeted” curandero, led her to during their biweekly, one-on-one meetings during her formative years as clinical psychologist.   His teachings were derived from pioneering classics such as The Symptom Path to Enlightenment: The New Dynamics of Self-Organization in Hypnotherapy by Dr. Ernest Rossi, which complimented his expertise in guided imagery dialogue, gestalt techniques, self-psychology, and relational dynamics when working with individuals and groups.  Dr. de la Cruz was also the mastermind who created the year-long intensive Multicultural Immersion Program that she sought out for her specialization in cross-cultural psychology.  Under his supervision, she polished her non-dualistic stance as she developed experiential diversity workshops for students, faculty, police officers, administrators, churches, dorms, and other organizations, facilitated dialogue groups dismantling –isms, homophobia, hate crimes, and sexual assault on campus, held an open forum for Middle-Eastern students during the turbulent 9/11 era, trained students in the internship program modules, and filled in as lecturer for the didactic course of the MIP. 

Between 2001 -2004, she attended intensive initiatory retreats and received informal guidance from Dr. Tom Balistrieri, creator of Passage, an initiation program for university students.  She was exposed to many of the sacred traditions and healing practices that he was taught by the late Lakota Medicine Man, Joe Eagle Elk, author of The Price of a Gift: A Lakota Healer’s Story.  During her first participation in a sweat lodge ceremony, she met her main Spirit Guide, Rainbow Crystal Woman, who according to Brooke Medicine Eagle, author of Buffalo Woman Comes Singing: The Spirit Song of a Rainbow Medicine Woman, is the modern incarnation of White Buffalo Calf Woman, the most revered messiah in the Lakota tradition. 

The rainbow colors of her Spirit Guide represent the seven chakras, the seven directions (mind, body, spirit, emotions, Father Sky, Mother Earth, and the within direction), and seven rays of clear Light that would be projected through a crystal.  Their meaning inspired the creation of Inner Balance Counseling.   Over the years, the teachings of the Sacred Seven have guided her to a rainbow path of healing and many accomplished master teachers who continue to advance her personal and professional development through one or more of the three key portals:  mind (non-dualistic talk therapy, cognition, and mindfulness), body (energy work, yoga, qigong, and tai chi), and spirit (insight meditation, ancient spiritual and wisdom practices).  Thanks to her extensive trainings listed below, her mind-body-spirit private practice respectfully integrates the wisdom and modalities of ancient healing traditions and contemporary psychotherapies into a seamless whole.  

She has been a student of Dr. Isa Gucciardi since 2005 and has acquired more then 150-hours of certification training in depth hypnosis, applied shamanism, transpersonal psychology, depth hypnosis, integrated energy medicine, and Buddhist psychology through the Foundation of the Sacred Stream.  These profound as well as comprehensive experiential training programs have allowed her to  strengthen, deepen, expand upon, and appreciate her own understanding of healing and her Inner Balance Counseling model by examining it through the lenses of some of the most well-established spiritual healing traditions in the world. 

Other up-to-par trainings and teachers who have shaped her work and helped her to integrate spirituality and transformative approaches into her practice include the Sacred Art of Healing seminar by cutting-edge mental health providers and teachers in the field (Dr. Shauna Shapiro, author of The Art and Science of Mindfulness: Integrating Mindfulness into Psychology and the Helping Professions, Dr. Roger Walsh, author of Essential Spirituality: The 7 Central Practices to Awaken Heart and Mind, and Dr. Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart, and The Living Dharma); Sufi teachings of remembrance and reverence (Dr. John Laird and Dr. Susan Rahima Schmall, University of Spiritual Healing and Sufism); synergetic therapy principles through cognitive restructuring, muscle-testing, and tapping techniques (Dr. Henry Grayson, author of Mindful Loving); Taoist principles and qigong for trance-formation, as centerpost of bodymind healing in the "transcendent and transmutive dialectic"; and as "hypnotherapeutic anchor" (Dr. Michael Mayer, BodyMind Healing Center); and years of ongoing one-on-one consultation in mind-body psychotherapies, life-span integration, and energy psychology (Donna Morrish, MFT, hypnotist, creator of Paths of Grace).   A committed practice in bikram yoga and t’ai chi, and regular sessions of Reiki, chakra balancing, polarity therapy, deep tissue massage, and acupressure from gifted massage therapist and shamanic healer, Mimi Stern, have allowed her to deeply cherish her body over the past 5-6 years as temple of worship and cauldron for alchemical change and cellular purification. 

Last but not least, her dedicated service to the community has been long-standing. Since 2006, she and Mimi have offered Father-Daughter Drum Healing Circles to YMCA families for their end of the year celebration (see last entry in testimonials section) and have also facilitated a Sacred Feminine Healing Circle for a spiritual woman’s group.  The past year, she has been an active member of the Space Clearing Society of the Sacred Stream, serving and supporting healers in maintaining a most optimal space for transformation.  As co-leader of the Bay Area Surinamese Association (BRASA) for the past fifteen years, she has organized annual picnics and helped with events (such as the Maroon museum exhibit  of descendents of West-African slaves who escaped and established villages in the Surinamese jungle) that support the racially-diverse Surinamese community in the US.  She and BRASA members have also raised funds for socially-conscious projects in Suriname, such as the ethnographing and preservation of sacred indigenous land throughout the Amazon; the Shaman’s Apprentice Program sponsored by the Amazon Conservation Team; daily operations at het Parelhuis (Pearlhouse), home for HIV-infected kids;  renovation efforts for poverty-stricken elementary schools; and the purchase of school supplies and clothing for indigenous children in the rainforest. 

WHAT DOES “INNER BALANCE” MEAN?>