Teacher | Practitioner | Writer
Tim Westfeldt is a life coach, teacher, healer, and writer. He runs a private practice promoting Emotional Hygiene and individual self-growth in Jacksonville, OR.
In the first half of his life, he pursued various careers as a firefighter, merchant sailor, network engineer, and cartographer. He credits each of those professions with helping him learn something that he now puts into practice as an emotional hygienist and life coach.
What really sent him on the path of helping others though is training as an instructor in an old, dying, Chinese art called Gohn Dagow Kung Fu back in the 90s. Not a typical “martial art” form, Gohn Dagow encompasses mental, physical, and spiritual self-development and has quietly been around in some form in the Orient for four millennia.
Tim learned counseling and “teaching” from a traditional Chinese perspective, which involves greater individual responsibility for students, working with whatever a student needs to develop. To become qualified to teach Gohn Dagow requires many years of intensive, apprentice-style training. The training also provided a thorough education in Daoist and Zen Buddhist thought, plus years of hands-on mentorship with the everyday application of it.
Gohn Dagow spurred Tim’s interest in pursuing counseling as a profession. He earned a Master’s Degree in Applied Science in Mental Health Counseling from Southern Oregon University in 2004 and subsequently worked as a counselor in local government, private, and non-profit organizations with varying milieus including outpatient, residential, and addiction treatment.
Tim also studied with Ron Kurtz, the renowned originator of Hakomi Therapy, a body-centered psychotherapy emphasizing mindfulness, loving presence, and an emphasis on unconscious experience.
Tim’s current practice also incorporates rites of passage, which he considers an essential human developmental gateway for every individual. Besides rites of passage and emotional hygiene, Tim also helps clients/students with boundary management, developmental healing, depression, anxiety, eating disorder issues, addictions, trauma healing, fitness issues, life purpose development, and people-reading skills for relationships and work success.