The Sacred Wound: When Love Remembers Itself
To say everything is empty is to say everything is relational. To practice alone is to miss the very heart of what we’re awakening to.
If you’re a serious meditation practitioner who has touched profound depths yet still carries unhealed places that feel exiled from love—if you sense a gap between realization and the lived tenderness of embodied wholeness—you’ve found someone who knows this territory intimately.
My earliest memories were infused with the original wound: an unshakable sense of separateness that tells us we are alone in a cold, uncaring universe. Before my father’s sudden death when I was eight, before the collapse of my enchanted childhood world, there was already a baby inside me who felt fundamentally unwelcome, unlovable, cast out from the garden of belonging.
This wasn’t just psychological—it was cosmological. The world itself and the people in it felt fundamentally unsafe, indifferent to my existence. And when my climatologist father died (a man devoted to “the infinite profundity of understanding our place in the cosmos”), that early wound crystallized into a life-organizing narrative: love is unreliable, sanctuary is temporary, and survival depends on hiding the tender places that long for connection.
For decades I tried to heal this through everything but love itself. Video games, alcohol, career achievement as a software engineer serving tens of thousands of nonprofits—even months of retreat and years of rigorous solo meditation practice guided by master teachers. I had the maps, the techniques, the insights. I could taste emptiness, witness the arising and passing of phenomena, access profound states. Yet I remained fundamentally miserable, my nervous system in chronic protection mode, my body breaking down from autoimmunity and burnout.
The dharma I had learned cognitively finally revealed itself where I least expected: not through perfect practice or spiritual accomplishment, but through learning to meet my own exiled parts with the same tender attunement I would offer a frightened child. Through parts work meeting heart practices, I worked through layers of wounding in my psyche only to discover the terrified baby in me wasn’t a problem to transcend—he was the doorway to the deepest realization.
Everything changed when I realized experientially that reality itself is sentient and loving. Not love as an emotion or experience, but love as the fundamental nature of existence—the intelligent, attuned awareness in which all experience arises. And if reality is alive with love, then I am not separate from reality. I am an integral, welcome expression of the love that reality is.
This recognition didn’t happen through more insight, better technique, or longer retreats. It emerged through relationship—through being met with such complete attunement by another human being that the defended places in me finally felt safe enough to reveal their truth. In that spacious welcome, the original wound could finally be seen for what it always was: not evidence of cosmic indifference, but love calling out to itself through apparent separation.
Working together, we create the same field of fundamental welcome that allowed my deepest healing. This isn’t coaching in the conventional sense—it’s a collaborative meditation into the living mystery of how love recognizes itself even in our most defended places. We discover that your sacred wounds aren’t obstacles to awakening but the doorways into the precise medicine the world is asking you to offer.
We work with the understanding that everything wanting to heal is also seeking to contribute. Your depression carries gifts of depth. Your anxiety holds exquisite sensitivity. Your rage protects precious boundaries. When these parts are met with loving attunement rather than spiritual bypass, they reveal not just their original pain but their essential contribution to your soul’s capacities and purpose.
This is the bodhisattva’s recognition: that individual liberation and collective healing are not two separate movements. As you learn to offer fundamental welcome to your own exiled parts, you naturally develop the capacity to hold space for others’ healing. The love that heals you through you becomes the love that heals the world.
We cannot complete this journey alone because the wound of separation can only be healed with relationship. Only by discovering experientially that we are held by a loving cosmos—that our fundamental nature is the same loving awareness that moves the stars and tends the flowers—can any of us remember what was never actually lost.
If you’re ready to discover that your deepest wound has always been your deepest gift, that love has been seeking you through every moment of apparent exile, please reach out - I’d love to explore this together.
Philosophy
Heart Centered - The warmth of loving awareness provides both a means to profound healing and an end in itself.
Attuned - Tending sensitively to our embodied emotional experience in relationship forms the basis of my practice.
Trauma Sensitive - I view developmental trauma as what’s in the way of spiritual realization, rather than a lack of effort or discipline in meditation.
Embodied - Trauma leaves us disconnected from and at odds with our embodied experience; that is also where we discover our deepest gifts.
Experiential - Only our current experience of reality can be known as (and always already is) whole and complete.
Pragmatic - I orient to what works, holding beliefs and ideas loosely.
Metasystemic - I believe all teachings and streams of knowledge are valuable, and that none can be perfect or complete.
Integral - I have benefitted from and practice the integration of scientific and spiritual modes of knowing.
Buddhist - I’ve been deeply inspired and transformed by Buddhist practices. You can be of any or no religious persuasion.
Lineages
Authorized to teach Buddhist practices by Stephen Snyder in the lineage of Pa Awk Sayadow.
Graduate of Aletheia Integral Unfoldment’s Advanced Coaching Program levels 1, 2, and 3.
With gratitude for the teachings of Rob Burbea, Dr. Daniel P. Brown, Murray Kennedy, Michael Taft, Leigh Braisington, and many more.
Current student and evangalist of Planetary Dharma.
Testimonials
“After years of trying different meditation and therapy techniques, my Aletheia sessions with Nic are the only thing I’ve found that allows me to change old stuck patterns in significant ways. I’m continually surprised by how quickly Nic guides me into deep states where things I’ve wrestled with for years shift and unfold naturally. And most importantly, these shifts translate into real changes in my behavior and emotions in daily life.” - Matt B.
“My partner referred me to Nic as an Aletheia Coach, and I could not be more grateful. What an incredible gift. Nic is not only an accomplished meditator, but he is also a genuinely beautiful human being. I look forward to our meetings every week. We have worked through some pretty heartbreaking experiences and he is masterful at holding space, coaching me into the parts of myself that I had always pushed into the recesses of my consciousness. My heart has opened back up in all directions and I can only attribute that to the work and practice that I do with Nic. There are not enough words to describe the impact he has had on my life.” - Ali W.
“Nic and I met in an online Dharma group several years ago, when I was struggling with my path in life and my place in the world. Nic has taught so much about my emotions and my inner processes over the years, but I’ve noticed a profound shift in his presence since he began working with the Aletheia method. Nic graciously invited me to share in the joy and insight that stem from combining parts work with the Dharma. I cannot express how much it means to me to have a teacher and friend like Nic. Our sessions together are always non-judgmental, open, honest, and trusting. I have never felt so safe and appreciated for who I am. Most importantly, I’m learning to love myself and use that love to change my life for the better.” - Collin G.
Pricing
Sliding Scale: $150-$250 per hour-long session
Please consider paying at the highest rate that you can afford. Your generosity supports practitioners with limited finances. If this work calls to you and the rates are outside of your current ability to pay, let me know.