Who we serve

The Essex Center for Life Education currently serves individual adults and young adults,  through individual in person or online consultations addressing concerns in areas of their life such as:

Transitions

Have you come upon a life transition — a setback, an opportunity, or a new life stage — but are not as prepared as you had thought you would to be to navigate this transition? Could you use a helping hand to work through the challenges you now face to overcome consternation — perhaps feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, or even lost — to turn this experience around to achieve an outcome that brings peace, fulfillment, and even joy? 

Learning and work life

Are you, or is someone in your family, experiencing a problem with learning, studying, or work life? Could you use some support and guidance to assure a path forward for yourself, or the family member, working through obstacles to find the true goals, talents, and motivation that lead to meaningful success?

A better life

Do you genuinely seek and strive for happiness, good health, a satisfying livelihood, financial abundance, wonderful relationships, or a meaningful spiritual life with good values, but are finding that you are unable to make enough progress on your own? Are you considering seeking some help with your efforts, having discovered that churches, higher education, professional societies, or community organizations have not, in your experience, offered enough insight and help in these matters? 

A better outlook on life

Are you so distressed by a turn of events in your life or the life of someone close to you — or perhaps have a history of struggling — that it is hard to believe that your mental outlook or life's fortunes could take a turn for the better? Nonetheless, you are still willing to keep trying and to seek someone to join you from time to time on your journey, working together to find a path to fulfillment and life satisfaction?

Doing more

Is your life going well enough, but something is still missing? Do you wish to do more with your life? Is it possible that a catalyst exists — people who are supportive and knowledgeable — which might be able to help you propel yourself to the next level? What if this challenge provided immense reward and satisfaction to you because you moved toward something bigger than yourself, of greater value and significance to you or others than you have tried before?

The foundation services of the Essex Center for Life Education are consultations for Life's Journey Counseling, consultation, mentoring, and practical learning for living. These services, which underlie our work with adults of all ages, help participants to articulate and pursue positive goals.

Life education offers a practical, respectful helping service of sessions for individuals to support people to access their positive power to find and assert their true voice, which is their true "spirit," and take informed, considered actions to achieve their goals. Ultimately, we help participants to identify and pursue the engaging projects that they will find motivating, energizing, and fulfilling.

The Essex Center for Life Education currently offers:

• Individual consultations for adults experiencing life challenges and seeking positive growth to move forward to discern and fulfill their life's purpose and work.

• Individual consultations for young adults experiencing life challenges in the many transitions they may be facing: educational success and transitioning to the next, more independent stages of life.

All services envision education and growth as occurring both within the individual and within the context of a community of learners, whether that community is the dyad of the mentor and client, the family, an education setting, the employment setting, or supportive groups.

In addition, all services are informed by a five step progression of growth for living well and learning for life. These five steps — spirit, values, learning, stewardship, and voice — are listed below and more fully described under "Touchstones."

More information about our Methods and Services is provided below.

Conversation — attentive listening and respectful dialog —  is the heart of Life's Journey Counseling conversations. Beyond just addressing remediation of problems, we proactively work together to identify goals, projects, and steps to create a positive path forward to a destination that is worthwhile, engaging, and fulfilling. Having goals, even if those goals are revised as new insights arise from reflection or experience, helps maintain motivation through the work and challenges that are the reality of pursuing a better life. 

Sometimes negative feelings, low energy, habitual attitudes, and difficulty with flexible, proactive thinking can interfere with achieving a more optimistic, creative, and effective path forward. Positive energy tapping, derived from eastern meridian energy theory combined with western helping modalities, can address such obstacles so that people can re-connect to their own resourcefulness. Clients can readily learn this self-help technique in which they "tap" or press on a few, easily-learned points on their own head, upper body, and hand, while clearly stating what they need right now that is positive and helpful to deal with a particular problem and achieve a general or specific goal.

Our life's spirit-journey counseling with clients is based on five focus areas — sequenced as steps — to help individuals achieve their goals. This underlying paradigm informs the work of the mentor and coach and can be part of the dialog with the client to the extent they wish. These are:

SPIRIT — What spirit do you bring to life? 

VALUES — What principles and priorities guide your daily decisions, choices, and actions?

STUDY — What life skills are you learning and teaching yourself and others?

SERVICE — What service are you giving to, and receiving from, the community? 

VISION — What is your unique message for yourself — and for the rest of us?

These steps are described in more detail under "TOUCHSTONES."

Life's Journey Counseling is an educational collaboration designed to facilitate an individual's progress in developing and carrying out their personal life mission.

The need for clarity, support, and attention to this now in the world as we struggle to understand how to cope with national and international crises, and our own personal life disruptions or interruptions. Yet keeping in mind that personal, local, and global struggles, even crises, are actually a normal, customary part of "life on earth" through history, we are not the first to have our lives upended.

Life's Journey Education is very practical and efficient, paradoxically, because what we learn will "pull" us forward to something worthwhile, rather than finding ourselves trying to "push" ourselves forward to some external expectation or uninspired goal. Ultimately, we help participants to identify the engaging projects that they will find motivating, energizing, and fulfilling in the long run. We embrace the strategy that each of us can "do what we can, with what we have, from where we" are at this given moment in our life in the context of a clear-eyed understanding of the actual world in which we currently live.

Our consultation is an educational, not therapeutic, service. If addressing problem-solving strategies or reducing stress are steps necessary to take along the way — or even just to get started — we will work with each person in an individualized manner to learn and practice the thought skills that keep them on track to reach their goals. For those individuals whose challenges or levels of distress require working with a clinician, we will support them to connect to needed outside services, while remaining available to continue the educational process of life's work consultation and to continue their participation in the learning community.

By helping to clarify values and develop effective working strategies, each person can experience a sense of progress toward ongoing satisfaction. For example, we may suggest a review the stages of growth in one's own life. From that, an individual will become aware of how, from stage to stage, they have adapted to life's transitions. This review will reveal patterns that emerge to enable recognizing and affirming one's strengths and gifts — and impressive resilience. It is inevitable that an individual will also discern one or more areas of improvement or learning they want to accomplish to achieve their goals. 

This process will refine personal and professional decision-making, which will enable targeting goals, and the strategies to achieve them, more precisely. We will support each participants progress with positive, yet challenging, feedback, information, and options.

For anyone struggling with relationship, work life, or meaning-of-life questions — "what's next for me?" questions — these life's work consultations will boost their own efforts to address them. The addition of the self-help method of positive energy tapping will also help to clear away emotion and thought patterns that might be holding back progress. By clarifying one's thinking and increasing self-knowledge, each individual can then take the sound, assertive action necessary to achieve goals with confidence.

To further explore whether Life's Journey Counseling collaborative, educational consultations might be a step you wish to take, you may contact James by email to schedule a no-charge 30-minute initial telephone conversation. 

sun1jar@outlook.com

One-to-one and small group consultations and support to assist young adults (or adults of any age) in their transition from school and family home to independence, additional education, and livelihood. 

The road has gotten longer, more challenging, and, yes, more interesting, creative, and exciting moving into the adult phases of life. Today's generation of young adults is not the first in history to have to establish or advance themselves during multiple crises, facing obstacles and uncertainty in the path forward. However, at this time, we also have resources and options not available to past generations that can be accessed with a resilient, optimistic mindset.

Young adults are expected to know so much more, given the advances in technology, the explosion of access to knowledge, and competing in a global marketplace. This can actually have the effect of slowing down progress toward finding a viable, self-sustaining place in the adult world. Too many decisions, too much information, too many unknowns, too many or too few options, too many new types of employment settings and compensation packages.

"Life on earth" has never been easy for young adults and, even if it were functioning "normally," the current world of work, relationships, and livelihood presents new challenges — and new ways to engage with optimism, creativity, and effectiveness. Now is the time for the "mental game" of finding and celebrating the good, maintaining an attitude of gratitude, and accepting where we are yet always being restless for something better.

Young adults, on their own or within their own networks, often successfully navigate all or some of the aspects of the ever-changing landscape of relationships, work life, avocations, and financial security. But when such navigation is not working out well and frustration is growing — or early burnout seems imminent — the support from the Young Adult Mentoring Initiative may be welcomed.

Through individual or small group supportive sessions, combining dialog with such techniques as positive energy tapping, stress can be better managed, greater clarity obtained, and more effective strategies for progress implemented in a supportive, non-judgmental manner.

Consultations currently are in person or online. 

This service may be funded by the individual or by a concerned family member who feels at a loss about how to be helpful themselves. Thus consultations may start with such family members, or directly with the individual themselves. 

Referrals to other practitioners are made when warranted for 

expert career counseling, mental health services, or clinical needs.

Contact James at sun1jar@outlook.com for more information, for requesting a free 30-minute telephone consultation about whether to move forward with an initial in-person appointment, or for scheduling an initial consultation. 

By appointment only.