Hello! I’m Lars, your philosophical guide!

A bit about me that I think is pertinent to the counseling arts:

I was born in Manhattan (NYC) and moved to New Mexico rather suddenly at a young age. My family and I lived three blocks south of the World Trade Center, and on September 11, 2001, those buildings were brutally destroyed resulting in massive loss of life and billowing smoke clouds of toxic dust engulfing lower Manhattan, including our apartment. Moving from the big city to the desert presented a lot of challenges, a lot of navigating the uncanny and the alien. Eventually music helped me find meaning again. At 14 I became passionate about the guitar and, at 18, ended up pursuing a BFA in guitar performance at California Institute of the Arts (graduating 2012). Right before moving to California, I went to University of New Mexico for a year and was there exposed to and greatly inspired by Existentialism and Greek philosophy, which I continued to study whenever possible during my music degree.

In my third year as a music major I discovered Jungian psychology and the astrology of Dane Rudhyar, and became enthralled by religious and occult studies. All of this dovetailed with a strange but poignant shift in my identity and life path. I spent much of my 20s studying and practicing astrology and tarot professionally (as well as presenting, teaching, and publishing several articles on the subjects), and delved deeply into eastern religions and western occult ideas.

I got myself rather lost in some fanciful new age ideas for a while, and then finally, after becoming disillusioned with a lot of what I was doing (and for too many reasons to list here) I managed to rediscover my love of Philosophy and ended up pursuing a masters in that in Tartu, Estonia (graduating 2025). While there I had the privilege to teach two courses I designed with input from faculty (an introduction to Buddhist philosophy, and a course on Heidegger and nihilism). This greatly helped me to sort out the wheat from the chaff of my previous studies and personal experiences. But more importantly, it has also set the stage for me to become a philosophical practitioner.

There is of course much and more I could tell you, but I mainly wanted to highlight some of the salient pieces of my life that I think are relevant to the work I do. Having been exposed, at a young age, to those nightmarish terrors unleashed upon lower Manhattan, and having been forced to move to and adapt to an initially alien landscape, I am no stranger to the most ominous corridors of the human experience, and have really had no choice but to leap into the spiraling paths of philosophy. If you, like me, find yourself unable to follow in the footsteps of a great many others and to hide from what is referred to as existential dread  (dread/terror/angst not tied to any simple object or path of thought), then we will have lots to fruitfully discuss and investigate together!