Jason Maas, LMHC, MFA

Co-founder

Listen to Jason on the This Is Fine! Podcast explain what Somatic psychotherapy is and how he weaves that into his approach.

What a session looks like with me

Over the years I have cultivated my own integrated mind-body-soul approach that is caring, inclusive, and holistic. Above all I am here for people to be deeply listened to with patience and gentleness. This approach is fundamentally rooted in the pursuit of helping people identify or reclaim their uniqueness, their sense of freedom, and their full imagination. I am passionate about healing the damage done by unconscious and wounded masculinity in order to reform trust, hope, and love for both women and men.

It is important for me to help clients tangibly implement our work into their lives so that this work is practical and applicable, and affects substantial change.

I have come to understand how much “mental health” is related to the nimbleness of the imagination. Hate, for instance is a failure of imagination. I love working with visual metaphors and words in order to help you get clearest about what you need and what are you drawn to.

Assisting clients to articulate their needs to themselves and others with honesty and compassion is a big part of my work. I teach the heart-centered practice of Non-Violent Communication, and help clients develop fluency around it. We will reimagine what is possible and draw out what is healthy and human from our hearts, our lineage, and the earth from all of the devastating and disorienting conditioning and programming out there.

I help make sense of the many intersecting systems that affect us in our troubled world. I have developed my own method from Jungian psychoanalysis, somatic work, mindfulness, gestalt, transpersonal, depth psychology, energy work and more (if this is jargon I would love to have the opportunity to explain these concepts—they are accessible!).

More about how I see the systems we live in as the primary explanation for what we claim is the individual’s “mental illness.”

Healing is to make whole. We are whole to begin with, and in someway always are, just through time this wholeness becomes seemingly fractured and covered over or disguised harmful and insufficient ideas—from the familial to the overculture—unprocessed traumas and unmet dreams. Our work reclaims the pieces and puts them back in their rightful place.

This is a process of identifying and releasing the toxicity of having been enculturated into a colonized world, and this is also an ancestral healing process. Colonization is a cultural (and ancestral) root of many negative beliefs which perpetuate addiction, hopelessness, and a chronic turning away from the self, from community, and our planet. This turning away also happens to (surprise!) fuel the current capitalistic, patriarchal, heteronormative paradigm (and is sending humanity to the brink of collapse). Yikes.

If you are in pain, you are paying attention. Shakespeare said “There is no prison more confining than the one we don’t know we are in,” and these destructive systems create “invisible prisons” inside of our minds (that we then call mental illness) which keep us from our fundamental nature–one of sovereignty, embodiment, play, community, pleasure, creativity, and living in right relationship with ancestry, each other, and our planet.

I am not a passive observer in the therapy process, I play an active part, being present and bearing witness while also helping to share my intuition and weave in the many tools I’ve discovered on my life path or received from my teachers and mentors. I have a passion for helping my clients integrate their ongoing relationships to the microcosm and macrocosm, and the various systems that we live inside of. These tools—from meditations to working with the energy body, to identifying negative beliefs and releasing them, to developing keen somatic awareness—are all easy to learn and implement.

It’s understandable to be skeptical of some of this language or these poetic or diffuse summaries of what work can be like and I appreciate and welcome if that comes up. And I get it, as trying to describe therapy reminds me of the Thelonius Monk quote: "Trying to explain music is like trying to dance architecture...." It just needs to be experienced.

That said, I welcome resistance with love and interest (it’s courageous to disagree or be skeptical) and strive to connect, understand everyone’s wisdom, and first and foremost meet people where they are at. From working with countless clients from different backgrounds and getting similar results with these techniques it does point to the evidence of something (that I think science will catch up to).

I'm a father of a daughter and am devoted to making a more just, equitable, and conscious world now and for future generations of human and more-than-human life. I am a racial justice and LGBTQIA+ partner and non-monogamy affirming, devoted to deconstructing systems of harm to humans and non-humans resulting from racial, heteronormative, and hierarchical power structures.

Okay, that is a lot! If you are still reading and want to learn more about me personally, read on :)

How my integrative approach wove together with the threads of many lineages

I arrived at the field of mental health through the arts, teaching art and training as a figurative artist at the Florence Academy of Art and later the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where I received my Masters in Fine Arts. My figurative training taught me to track the micro-movements in people’s faces and bodies, which laid the groundwork for my subsequent somatic psychotherapeutic training. My creative practice is a huge part of my life. I have been working on a fiction novel for the past ten years that weaves together some of what I’ve found while plumbing the depths of the collective unconscious for the hearts to reckon with our troubled world. I am a dedicated performing musician, devoted to the craft of singing and the guitar and driven to see what is possible living in the golden age of sound effects. My visual art practice has taken a backseat for some years as I devote my energy to my other identities but earlier work can be found here.

Out of the love of helping people I founded and ran the small non-profit the Artist Volunteer Center from 2014-2017 to help artists volunteer in socially-conscious causes by supporting their artwork through grants, residencies, and shows. This work allowed me to address systemic trauma in communities while supporting artists and artwork that did not fall into the conventional capitalistic gallery system. Throughout this time I was drawn most to the mental health and wellness of the artists and communities I was working with more than the artwork they were making, and felt called to become a therapist.

At Brooklyn College I did my clinical internship at a psychoanalytic institute and had a close relationship with my supervisor, the late great Len Weiner, an ego psychologist and master of working with resistance. I learned many tools with the psychoanalytic approach but also saw its shortcomings, and was compelled to not simply work in a mind-oriented approach (let alone one with antiquated and at times problematic ideals at its core).

My ongoing relationship with mentors

I see my role as a therapist in part as a mentor. In order to keep this process fully alive, I seek to continually be under the mentorship of someone (or something— as mentorships can be with places, plants, and the more than human world). Upon graduating from Brooklyn College with a Mental Health Counseling degree I worked under the mentorship and supervision of Daniel Cook, who holds the relational, somatic, and transpersonal lineages of Naropa University, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and the developmental somatic psychotherapy of Ruella Frank. Under the guidance of Karin Weidenmueller I developed my foundation in Gestalt and Somatic Experiencing and the lineage of Naropa University. I was trained by Scott Kellogg and his Transformational Chairwork—I bring this and other elements of psychodrama to my work. I received cultural sensitivity training from Dr. Jennifer Chen and somatic racial equity coaching from Ethan Kerr and I am committed to anti-racist and decolonizing work for others and my own internal work as a white-identified person. I’ve received mentorship from Luisa Harpriya Guigliano, yoga therapist and poet who founded the Dream Hive, where I completed an Interfaith Ministry certification training. I mentored for several years under Susan Feinbloom, who holds the lineages of hypnotherapy, the Newton Institute, Berkeley Psychic Institute, John Fulton of Aesclepion Healing Center, and works as a clairvoyant psychotherapist. From a mentorship with the work of Michael Meade I learned how to understand and help others access the wisdom inside of the symbolic and the mythic. Through a deep inquiry into the indigenous ways and wisdom of Malidoma Some I learned about initiation and rites of passage. I received a year of spiritual counsel by Otis Gaddis III with a focus on ancestral, collective, and trans-dimensional healing. I was a member of Francis Weller’s Soulful Life cohort which was a nine-month intensive that created a village mindset to explore working with grief in community to enrich all of our lives. I am currently focusing and receiving my mentorship energies from a deeply profound mentorship with Somatic Psychotherapist Lorella Ricci.

My connection to the arts and creativity

My first career was an elementary school art teacher and this taught me three foundational understandings to how I see the world and how I would go on to help people as a therapist:

1. I learned my purpose is to inspire people, and people are inspired when they are seen for who they really are.

2. I learned how to identify in my own body when an idea I am communicating is either clear or is unclear, and this awareness allows me to adjust to each person and transmit healing information in a way that is understandable and effective.

3. I learned that us adults are just big kids, in need of the same love, care, and attention that we did when our shirt sizes came in small, medium and extra-small.

   I was an art teacher for ten years working with students from Kindergarten to college, with the majority of that time spent working at the kindergarten to fifth grade level. There, I founded an art therapy program for autistic kindergarteners. I see my teaching experience as foundational to understanding the human mind as well as the nature of creativity. As an artist myself I understand the pressures that the world places on artists and that artists place on themselves. I can uniquely help artists but also those who don’t identify as artists: creative intuition is a vital component to success in this age and I will help you access the creativity you need to thrive.

To read my personal journey through the shadows and the light, click here.