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You are not broken.

You are doing the best you can in a civilization that is antagonistic towards life and your essential nature.

By understanding this, we can cultivate a deeper compassion and resilience towards the challenges we face as we walk the path of healing. The truth of our being is love, connection to all that is, creativity, choice and freedom. The dominant economic and political systems on our planet, however, serve the accumulation of power and resources, with an extractive and divisive relationship towards both people and all life on Earth.

Our empathy, sensitivity, and freedom threaten the existing order. They are simply incompatible with a system that requires disconnection from those who pay its most obvious costs, whether that looks like slavery, imperialism, patriarchy, industrial animal production, destroying natural habitats, or exporting toxic manufacturing to poorer neighborhoods and countries.

Growing up in this system, we become divided against ourselves. Every time our connectedness, truth, or worth is suppressed, denied or rejected, we fragment; parts of us adopt varied and often conflicting strategies for survival, pushing the creative, free, and vulnerable aspects to retreat into hiding. This fragmentation causes us emotional pain, numbness, or even physical disease, and creates struggle in living the life we want.

There is a maxim, “As within, so without, as above, so below.” In a whole and just culture that celebrated our interdependence and spiritual connection, every aspect of life would be regarded not for its utility, but for its intrinsic sacred nature. On a personal level, we can begin to heal by repairing the internal relationships between aspects of our own selves. So many of us are familiar with harsh inner voices that say things like “you coward, you’re ugly, you idiot, you loser, you’re a failure,” and perhaps we can also hear the soft ones that say “I’m scared, I’m lonely, I’m heartbroken.” 

We need to discover these parts within ourselves, hear their origin stories, embrace them with love and understanding, and help them become a functioning community that addresses their needs and harmonizes their goals.  

This is the journey towards wholeness, integration and healing. And I am here to support you with the gifts of presence, acceptance, space and compassion.

Becoming Whole

Enter the shadows to find your light.

I offer myself as a guide and ally. Together we can recover and reweave the lost, wounded, or rigid parts of Self into a shining whole.

There is no place within us that is too ugly to be seen, no place too raw to be felt. When we have the courage to lay bare our selves to our own awareness, to hear their stories and feel their pain, we embody understanding and love. This is the awakened heart space required to truly connect, share intimacy, and live our purpose.

Foundations

Awareness and Shadow work

A useful way to understand the self is to think of it as a community. For example, there could be a member who learned that achievement earns love, and therefore focuses on doing, another who learned that attention had to be claimed, and therefore behaves like a gregarious showman, and yet another who mourned the inauthenticity of putting on an act, and therefore seeks to be alone. Some of our parts may be familiar, others may be almost entirely hidden. This can create stuckness, frustration and confusion. The goal of shadow work is to become aware of our community of selves. 

Feeling and Presence

One of my spiritual teachers taught that the avoidance of feeling is the root of suffering. Every habit, strategy and coping mechanism that we use to escape our feelings takes us away from our truth and our connection to Source; in fact, they are forms of self-abandonment. Babies and small children are quite adept at expressing their present moment experience; if these feelings are met with even subtle forms of denial, suppression, or rejection, the feeling itself becomes an internal threat to connection and self-worth. Because feelings generally are expressions of met and unmet needs, this internalizes a conflict between different needs, and leads to fragmentation and disorganization. The beginning of healing these patterns is to turn towards our feelings with care and acceptance, as we might hope to do with a crying child.

Connection and Space

We are a deeply interdependent species, relying on each other to both survive and thrive, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Because our need for connection and belonging is so fundamental, we can adopt many strategies and compromises that take us far from who we actually are and what we actually want. The key issue of authenticity is “Can I be be true to myself (my feelings, needs, desires and values) and have you too?” That is why when someone offers us spacious acceptance, (what the psychologist Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard”) it can have a profound impact and give us the capacity to embrace more of ourselves.

For anyone struggling to love what you deem to be the most unloveable parts of yourself… and allow for greater forgiveness and vulnerability, Oren is a great man to work with.” —Rose

Offerings

I work one-on-one with individuals and facilitate groups. I have studied and been informed by many types of healing work, including body and energy work. With in-person sessions I can incorporate more somatic interaction, but we can incorporate “bottom-up” somatic processes even in video sessions. You do not need to know exactly what you want to do before a session, this is a palette:

Completion Process Practitioner

Photo of Teal and Oren
Teal and Oren at Philia in Costa Rica

This is an incredible process (assembled by Teal Swan) that weaves together all the foundations described above, using feeling to guide you towards lost or hidden parts of yourself. We use a visualization or meditation to connect to those parts, become present with them, and meet their needs. There is a close relationship to the ideas and goals of Soul Retrieval; the difference is that in CP, you are the one doing the “work.” (Read a full account of a CP session.) I certified in 2019.

Parts Work (inspired by Internal Family Systems)

The goal of parts work is to create more awareness, understanding, and coherence between your many aspects of self. We do this by actually giving each of them a voice and letting them speak to each other. This can look like a sharing circle or mediation between different aspects of yourself. I draw on the framework of IFS, after having working weekly with an IFS therapist for a year in 2021-2022. I also conduct parts work group sessions and constellations.

Circling

The aim of Circling is often described as creating shared reality and grokking each other’s worlds. In the context that is laid out in the foundations section, Circling supports awareness, presence, and connection through spacious inquiry, reflection and the sharing of impact. I have four years of experience in facilitating Circles.

Compassion Key

This is a self-compassion process created by Edward Mannix. It has a lot of overlap with parts work and the Completion Process in its approach, but its strong focus on the compassion aspect of working with our parts can be incredibly effective and efficient. You can read more about it here. I certified in this process in 2023.

Medicine Assisted Sessions

I have tremendous respect for the power of plant medicines and their derivatives for assisting us in our healing journey. Attachment level trauma and other deep autonomic distress patterns that can be nearly difficult or impossible to resolve through top-down cognitive processes, and resist progress even with somatic work, can become readily accessible through medicines. This includes the widely available, and often misunderstood, cannabis plant. I draw a lot of inspiration in my approach to this work from Saj Razvi and the Psychedelic Somatic Institute.

“Oren is an incredibly patient, attuned, empathic and present professional… It was one of, or perhaps the one most detailed, compassionate, and helpful sessions of my life. I can now become my own source of unconditional motherly love and fatherly guidance towards a healthier, whole and sovereign version of myself. What a tremendous gift!”Paula

About

Oren Shefer is a counselor, intuitive empath, and guide.

I am passionate about helping people restore inner faith, be courageously vulnerable, connect deeply, and honor and embody their desires, creativity, and joy. My understanding of and compassion for the dark places within flows through my own long journey of healing alienation, depression and despair. An intuitive message I received several years ago reminded me, “We suggest you return to the center of your power and purpose—this being to unite people through your love and acceptance of them.”

I received my B.A. from Harvard University and did two years of graduate work in Cognitive Psychology at Princeton. Shortly after leaving, I began walking a path of exploration and embodied spirituality that has continued for over 15 years.

My background includes martial arts, dance, actor’s training, Jewish mysticism and the Santo Daime (ayahuasca). I completed Kripalu’s 500-hour bodywork training in 2008. I then connected with a number of other influences and people, including esoteric channeled work, Native American teachers, and a Guru in the Vedic lineages. In 2016, I completed a Tantric counselor training with Shawn Roop, and in 2019 became a Certified Completion Process Practitioner with Teal Swan. In 2023, I certified in Compassion Key with Edward Mannix.

“Oren has a huge tool bag of skills to help a person navigate through the dark and light shades of human complexity… His energy is clear, intentional, curious, and capable.” —Sage