DREAMING ARTS: Dr. Willow Pearson

Layman meets with integrative psychotherapist, spiritual practitioner, and musician, Willow Pearson Trimbach, to talk about her early experiences of the significance of dreams; her concept of dreams as nested and ongoing; the importance of protecting the unconscious; the relationship of the natural states to the classically sacred dimensions of reality; the nature of the dreaming self and its relation to the waking self; her use of the concept of the caesura - a kind of bidirectional membrane - to indicate the nonseparateness of waking and dreaming life; and much more.  

Dr. Pearson is a licensed clinical psychologist. She is also a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and a nationally board-certified music therapist (MT-BC). In fall 2017, Dr. Pearson joined the full-time faculty in the Clinical Psychology Department at NDNU. In May 2018, Dr. Pearson became Director of Clinical Training. Previously, she taught doctoral students at Alliant International University in San Francisco, undergraduate and graduate students at Naropa University, and graduate students at John F. Kennedy University. Dr. Pearson’s 18 years of licensed clinical work includes experience in private practice, as well as at medical centers and hospitals (serving inpatients and outpatient clients), community clinics, and mental health centers. In these settings, she has worked with adults, children, adolescents, couples and groups. 

Her clinical background includes training in psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, integral, relational, humanistic, cognitive behavioral, expressive arts, somatic, existential, contemplative and transpersonal therapy, and brief approaches with children, adolescents, adults, couples, and groups. Across a range of clinical settings, Dr. Pearson has provided crisis intervention, assessment, brief therapy, group therapy, music therapy and depth psychotherapy, from an integral relational perspective. Dr. Pearson’s private psychotherapy practice is in Oakland, on the border of Emeryville, in the East Bay.  

Professional website https://drwillowpearson.com/ 

The Spiritual Psyche in Psychotherapy (book)