Lisa Banu, Ph.D., MSW, RYT
Grief, Loss and Anxiety Consultant
If any of my ideal client scenarios resonate with you, we recognize each other already. Consider this service urgent emotional care between critical intervention and chronic maintenance. With a background in architecture, philosophy, social work, and yoga, I am uniquely qualified to accompany you as you rediscover your body, home, experience, and purpose. A philosophical-somatic approach involves noticing your current core values, sensations, and feelings: your body and mind through bottom-up and top-down practices. Work with me, a consultant to the self-curious, learn to ride life-changing experiences, and find yourself again: forward and further.
The High Achieving Anxious Intellectual
Perfection and validation haunt you. Straight A’s, promotions, awards. Accomplishments are never enough, no rest for the driven and scared. You exhaust yourself to point of isolation from people, things, and activities you love.
The Strong, Independent and Empty Professional
You sacrificed everything for the sake of your professional goals: recreation, hobbies, relationships. You’ve reached those goals. Yet somehow the promise of fulfillment is tainted with empty isolation. The cost was too high for that professional title, that financial target or that award.
The Disconnected Non-Belonging Global Nomad
Where are you from? The answer to this question is complex for you. By choice or by force you are not exactly home. Traveling in between cultures, races, nationalities you find yourself lost, as an uncomfortable hyphenated, fragmented global nomad. Plagued by fear of missing out.
The Overthinking Avoider of Success
Are you up at night looking for imaginary potholes in your planned path, unable to move forward, unable to rest? Voices predicting imminent failure confine you to inaction. You just can’t get started with a project. What if I do it wrong? What if I fail? Maybe you are fearing the question, “What if I succeed?”
The Restless Critical Creative
There is never enough time. It is never perfect. There are always more possibilities, more solutions, more to be done. The race to deadlines becomes an addiction to urgency, leaving you unable to unplug, unable to pause in presence. You just can’t seem to end a project. Deadlines are your greatest enemy, yet you cannot work without them. You offer your accomplishments with an apology…if only I had more time, materials, space. If only it were perfect, I could be too.
The Lost in Loss of Self, Love or Purpose
You have lost a loved one, a job, a relationship, a sense of purpose, a pattern of life. Lost in what could have been, what could be, wishing things would go back to the same or be different, you feel like you are missing emotional limbs, fractured and broken. You see your life whither from inattention and feel stuck.
The Suspicious of Therapy as Western Imposition
You work out your own problems believing that asking for help exposes weakness. After all, therapy, you imagine, would simply impose Western values of individuality over honor, community, and personal responsibility. How could any counselor understand your unique challenge of being caught between cultural expectations?
Contact
I am grateful for the curiosity that led you here, may I walk you back to yourself?
If you live or are visiting the Oak Island, North Carolina area and would like a beach walk session, contact me for details.
The Self-Curious Project 