“For me, to be a saint means to be myself.”
-Thomas Merton
Are you feeling stuck in cyclical patterns that no longer serve you?
Do you feel creatively blocked?
Have you benefitted from therapy, but aren’t breaking through?
Do you long for more beauty, joy, and magic, but fear it’s not for you?
Are you ready to know yourself?
Fierce Sincerity can help.
I can help.
Welcome. I think I know why you’re here.
Because you’ve always known there was more to life than a shiny identity, a bullet-proof career, the perfect nuclear family or the right material comforts.
Perhaps you were the sensitive one in your family system, the one who always seemed to experience the world a little differently. Maybe your sensitivities became something of a family punchline? Or maybe you were pathologized for them. But chances are, while you longed for the guidance of a wise elder to make sense of the world, you were largely on your own.
Over time perhaps, this orphaned feeling would draw you towards other outsiders and the margins of culture. Maybe that was you I saw playing bass in an experimental noise band. Or collecting field recordings of birdsong. Or in the dark corner of a cafe with your nose in a book of Rilke’s poems. Maybe that was you steeling yourself outside your first AA meeting. Or maybe that was you, mysteriously drawn to sit at the bedsides of the dying.
For the sensitive ones, enduring the modernity can entail much heartbreak and loneliness. In a culture that’s largely forgotten the time-tested rituals of its ancestors, you may have patch-worked together some of your own outsider rites. But still, you hunger for something deeper.
Can we call it by its name?
This has been a spiritual hunger all along.
I’m not talking about religion. Don’t mistake the compliance required to join a mega-church as anything approaching the real and dangerous work of Spirit. The same goes for the woo-isms found on the other side of the pendulum: adorned in paraphernalia, awash in appropriation, and ready to launch a healing brand after one trip to the Amazon. This is not what our hearts truly long for.
Fierce Sincerity is a practice that goes to the root. It’s an undomesticated commitment to what’s most true in you. Not what’s performative, nor bent on signaling its virtue, nor seeking a particular kind of sanction from the tower. But ground up, earth level realness that’s in agreement with its gifts, at peace with its limits, and at home in the mystery. At home in this complicated world.
What I know is that there are jewels encoded in your heartbreak. There are initiations that long to lay claim to you. The painful material of your life is not an example of your having been misplaced by the Gods, it is the unique school of your life. There is a fierce and true path that draws us into the depths when we say yes, and towards the kind of spiritual maturity the world needs now. My role is to guide you on that path.
An initiation awaits you.
My role is to guide you through it.
Fierce Sincerity is informed by my own spiral path, by a decade-long study of shamanic healing, my apprenticeship with sacred medicine carriers, over 20 years of yogic and contemplative practice, a passion for Jungian depth psychology, care for they dying, and a decades long discipline engaging with soil, wild spaces, and plants. A lifelong student of myth and the old stories, I also spent four years studying the human psyche in Paul Levy’s Awaken in the Dream group. I am an ongoing student of the Internal Family Systems therapeutic model for coaches and non-clinicians.
Fierce Sincerity is as deeply shaped by my artistic and musical practices as by my therapeutic work. As a painter, drummer, and singer in the independent art and punk scenes of the 90’s Bay Area, I’ve remained connected to these vibrant circles ever since. They taught me the irreplaceable and transformative power of creativity and community. Today, I think of my paintings and songs as a devotional practice, in service to beauty and to the animistic thread that runs through all things.
I believe we are animistic by nature, and that much of what ails us in the West is a byproduct of our dislocation from one another, from the path of initiation, the pursuit of purpose, and the sacred aliveness of the natural world. Fierce Sincerity seeks to midwife your reconnection with all of these things.
Our deepest fears are dragons guarding our deepest treasure.
—Rainier Maria Rilke
My name is Julianna Bright. Here’s a little more on my story…
You could say that I was the sensitive one in my family system. All lit up nerve-endings if we’re honest, as quick to sob over a fallen bird as to send the whole of my allowance to the World Wildlife Fund. What was this acute dissonance all around me that no one else seemed to be bothered by? Why were we here? I couldn’t stop asking the questions, and I moved through the world with an expressible hunger, searching for substance.
Churches were all around me where I grew up, and I looked in earnest there. I loved what I saw in the character of Christ, even as a very young child. But the radical nature of his teachings was lost on the conservative, tribal church body as far as I could tell, and so I couldn’t stick around. I put myself through university, and there was knowledge to be gained here to be sure. But where was the wisdom? I searched at the margins of culture, hanging my paintings on rogue gallery walls, sweating through my clothes behind the drums in punk bands. But even this beloved community could feel more attached to its codes and coolness than its freedom. In my late twenties, my spiritual pursuits picked up. I fasted and poured over ancient, esoteric texts. I sat in silent meditation for weeks on end. I pursued the mentorship of both wise and flawed teachers. And before the birth of my daughter, I imagined I’d landed somewhere fairly solid. I was painting all the time, landing my first big illustration gigs, and gallery representation. The band I sang and played drums in with my partner made a beautiful record and there was buzz circling around us. Our home was the site of inspiring salons and gatherings. Everything seemed to be working!
And then I became a mother … and was absolutely taken down to the studs. All of the delicate material of my childhood that I’d attempted to transcend in my search for wisdom, came rushing back. Ghosts were suddenly everywhere. The trauma I’d tried so assiduously to outrun was still in my body it turned out, seemingly awakened by my daughter’s cry. I became very ill and as I attempted to fight the illness back with more meditation, more austerities, things got worse. Until there was nothing to do, but stop fighting.
But something happened in my dark night of the soul. Something happened in that howling, delicate place with no more illusions to prop up my story. Spirit moved in. Spirit moved in to show me where I was divided from myself. And Spirit moved in to show me how I might knit myself back together. This has been the deep work of the second half of my life. And it is the work that informs the care, compassion, and fierce sincerity I bring to my work with clients.
The best way to find out if this work is for you is for us to chat. Schedule a free Zoom introduction by clicking the button below.
