You may have a meditation practice – but somehow it feels dry. The gap between what you understand on the cushion and how you actually live feels unbridged.
Or perhaps you have had experiences – through meditation, grief, illness or plant medicine – that have upset something in your inner balance, and you haven’t found the right space to explore them.
Maybe you feel an inner calling toward something deeper – toward meaning, toward depth, toward a more conscious relationship with your own life. And you want to explore that with someone who can help you understand and ground your experience.
You may want to begin your meditation journey and have guidance from someone who understands the challenges, as well as the profound insights.
Spiritual mentoring is a sustained, private relationship – a space to sit with genuine inquiry, explore what is arising in your life and practice, and develop a clearer, more grounded relationship with your own inner experience.
The work is entirely responsive to you. Sessions might involve meditation guidance, working with specific experiences or states, exploring the emotional and psychological dimensions of spiritual life, or simply the practice of honest, supported inner inquiry.
Spiritual practice is not an escape from life, but a means to develop a healthier and more meaningful relationship with yourself and how you relate to life
My own practice within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition spans 25 years. I began by studying books on my own in a library and gradually, over decades of inspired and evolving practice, it became the ground of my life.
Since 2018, my main teacher and mentor has been Rob Preece – one of the most respected voices in the integration of Tibetan Buddhist practice and Western psychology. A practitioner since 1973, he spent several years in retreat in the Himalayas and has worked as a psychotherapist and spiritual mentor since 1987. He is the author of three deeply influential books – The Wisdom of Imperfection, The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra and Feeling Wisdom – each exploring the meeting point between contemplative practice and the psychological realities of Western life.
His teaching has shaped, more than anything else, my understanding of what genuine integration means – how meditation moves from something you do on a cushion, with your eyes closed, to something that genuinely supports you throughout your days.
My own unique depth of understanding of this territory also comes from lived experience. I have navigated severe physical trauma, chronic pain and the complete dismantling of the life I had built – and found, within that, a depth of understanding I could not have reached any other way.
Sessions are private, one-to-one and conducted online. Each session is entirely responsive to what is arising for you – your practice, your questions, your experience.
It might involve meditation guidance, exploration of specific experiences or states, working with the emotional and psychological dimensions of inner life, or simply the sustained practice of sitting with honest inquiry in a held and supportive space.
The first step is a free 20-minute discovery call to explore whether working together feels right.
Following that, sessions cost £120 each.
I work with clients across the UK, USA and internationally, all online.
“Olivia is a genuine and sharing guide. There’s an honesty and simplicity to her approach. Reality really isn’t what we think it is. Meditation can help us experience the nature of ourselves and the universe. Olivia helped me meditate more effectively.”
– Andrew, Australia
“I gained a lot of insight from working with Olivia. Positive self talk can work as long as we are consistent. Also allowing for there to be hard times and not trying to avoid those feeling but instead letting them pass through. The key is to not wallow in the bad and try and celebrate the good whenever possible. Very helpful and brought great awareness.”
– Katy, USA
“A powerful process giving space for deeper connection with the body to allow feelings and emotions to emerge, be welcomed and be acknowledged. In a frenetic paced world, giving pause for embodiment. Thank you”
– Diedre, USA
What is spiritual mentoring - and how is it different from therapy?
Spiritual mentoring and therapy overlap in some ways and diverge in others. Both involve a sustained, private, one-to-one relationship focused on inner life. Both take your experience seriously. But the orientation is different.
Therapy tends to be focused on healing – working with what has caused difficulty, reducing suffering, restoring wellbeing. Spiritual mentoring holds all of that, but it also holds something further: the question of meaning, of depth, of what it is to live a conscious and examined life.
People come to spiritual mentoring when they feel a sense that there is something more – not vaguely, but as a genuine pull. They may be navigating significant spiritual experiences they don’t have a framework for. They may have a meditation practice that needs guidance to deepen. They may be at a point of transition where the questions they are asking cannot be answered by practical means alone.
The mentoring I offer is grounded – it is not about belief systems or dogma, and it does not require any particular religious orientation. It is rooted in 25 years of serious Tibetan Buddhist practice, direct mentoring from my teacher Rob Preece, and a deep engagement with the inner life, offered to people of any background or tradition who are ready to explore seriously.
Do I need to be religious or Buddhist to work with you?
No. Many of the people I work with have no particular religious affiliation and are not Buddhists. What they share is a sense that their inner life matters – that there is something worth exploring beneath the surface of daily experience – and a readiness to do that with support.
My own practice is Tibetan Buddhism, and that tradition informs how I understand the mind and how I work with awareness. But I do not teach it as a religion, and I do not ask anyone to adopt beliefs they don’t hold.
What I offer is a space for serious, grounded exploration of inner experience – whatever form that takes for you.
I've had experiences I can't explain - spiritual or otherwise. Can you help me work with those?
Yes. This is something I work with quite specifically, and it is an area where good support can be genuinely hard to find.
Significant inner experiences – whether they arise through meditation, grief, illness, plant medicine, or simply life itself – can be disorientating, overwhelming or difficult to integrate. They may not fit the frameworks that conventional therapy offers. They may be hard to talk about without feeling dismissed or pathologised.
I approach these experiences with genuine respect. My background in both contemplative practice and trauma-informed therapeutic approaches means I can hold them carefully – neither inflating their significance nor minimising it, but helping you find a grounded and honest relationship with what has arisen.
If you have had experiences of this kind and are looking for support in understanding and integrating them, I would encourage you to get in touch.
How does Tibetan Buddhist practice relate to psychology and mental health?
This is one of the most interesting and important questions in contemporary contemplative practice — and it is central to the work I offer.
The Tibetan Buddhist tradition contains one of the most sophisticated maps of the mind that exists anywhere in the world. It has been exploring the nature of consciousness, emotion, perception and mental suffering for over a thousand years — and its insights into how the mind creates suffering, and how that suffering can be transformed, are remarkably consistent with what Western psychology has discovered through very different means.
My teacher Rob Preece has spent decades exploring precisely this intersection — how the insights of Vajrayana practice and Western psychological understanding illuminate and deepen each other. His books, particularly The Wisdom of Imperfection and Feeling Wisdom, are among the most intelligent explorations of this territory available.
In practice, this means that the work I offer does not treat psychological difficulty and spiritual practice as separate domains. Anxiety, trauma, grief, emotional intensity arising through practice — these are not obstacles to the path, nor are they purely psychological problems to be treated separately. They are, in the Vajrayana understanding, expressions of the same energies that, when worked with skilfully, become the fuel for genuine transformation.
This integrated approach — grounded in authentic Tibetan Buddhist understanding and informed by psychological awareness — is what allows the work to address the whole person rather than either the spiritual or the psychological dimension alone.
Complete the short form below and Olivia will be in touch to arrange a suitable time for your free 20-minute discovery call.
