In 1998, I was about as far away from a true calling as I could be. I was working in the automotive industry as a corporate field manager for Ford Motor Company. I was lost, unconscious, anxious, and depressed.
When I began to meditate that year, my life began to change. Within a month, I was shedding tears that had been locked up inside. Within a year, I felt strong enough to leave the corporate job and embark on a journey of self-discovery by traveling.
I wanted to visit a part of the world where no one knew me. I wanted to discover myself not as a daughter, sister, student, employee, or citizen of society, but instead as a human being.
Who was I as a breathing, sentient organism alive on this planet?
I wanted to discover my humanness.
In December of 2000, I flew halfway around the world to the South Island of New Zealand.
While I was there and as my meditation deepened, a quiet voice began to speak from beneath the rubble of my anxiety, with whispers of purpose I had never felt before. In the early 2000s, I began to have visions of my future. Slowly, I began to sense that writing wasn’t just a pastime, but a thread woven into the fabric of my path.
Long after I left New Zealand, while working on a book, a friend and I began to write every weekday morning. Writing and meditating at the start of each day led to a profound and life-changing inner experience that is the foundation of all my work today.
This profound experience made it unmistakably clear—I had to study the mind and learn about the deeper powers of the human psyche. Three years later, I completed a degree in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. The experience at Pacifica not only launched my career as a psychotherapist, it provided the knowledge I was seeking and helped to affirm the deep insights I experienced in 2004.
One of the profound insights I learned is that there is an archetypal path for soul growth, a journey common across cultures. While everyone’s path is wholly unique, all of us will experience the same developmental stages when we travel inward.
Still, I had many hard moments on my inner journey, and I wish I had a mentor, a spiritual guide of some kind, to point out the pitfalls and encourage the path when it gets challenging. I wish I had a roadmap for the soul.
And, this is exactly why I built The Art of Going Within. It’s the roadmap and support I wish I had. It’s a structured container for the kind of inward journey that changed my life — one that holds you through the difficult passages and illuminates what is trying to emerge.
Over the years, I have guided hundreds of artists, healers, therapists, and seekers through this same terrain. This is a journey of entering into sacred intimacy with the creative life force—a living current that shapes both our personal evolution and the unfolding of the collective. It is a descent into the soul’s terrain, where your unique path begins to reveal itself—not only as a source of personal transformation, but as a gift that ripples outward as a blessing for the world.
The art of going within is not a detour from your life. It is the most direct path into it.
We serve those who know they have a calling, vision, artistic expression, purpose, or life path but don’t know what it is yet. We serve those who may know their calling but feel challenged in embodying it.
Through sessions and stand-alone courses, we facilitate psychospiritual unfolding by guiding the outer expression of the inner experience.
We believe that our mental health symptoms are very much a part of our unique evolution. We guide our clients in exploring and becoming conscious of those wounds as well as discovering the deeper purpose within that pain. There’s an archetypal relationship between pain and deeper purpose, and this is what we aim to uncover together.
Our clients become aware of themselves, heal, and access their deep creativity, with the ultimate goal of discovering their unique personal expression.
The Art of Going Within is a program of The Foundation for the Spiritual Practice of Creativity. We are a nonprofit dedicated to facilitating a new level of consciousness, an awareness that recognizes our inherent union with divinity, with Nature, and with the creative force that moves through all living things.
A combined practice of meditation and writing became the vehicle for Adriana’s inward journey, facilitating many of the deep insights you’ll encounter on this site.
Along the way, Adriana has studied and practiced Insight Meditation, Zen Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and the Christian Mystical tradition. In addition to these formal practices, Adriana had the remarkable opportunity to sail across the Pacific Ocean (from Hawaii to Canada) in the Summer of 2001.
This profound experience was the beginning of a love affair with Nature and opening to the miracle of our aliveness within the splendor of Creation. Adriana uses this sailing voyage as a metaphor for the adventure that unfolds when we look inward and actively participate in our unique lives.
