Psychospiritual Institute is Committed to...
Inspiring and Supporting
Inspiring and supporting others in understanding psychospiritual wholeness and cultivating a deeper connection to Self through individual and group coaching, workshops, events and certified coaching programs
Training and Nurturing
Training and nurturing the next generation of Psychosynthesis Coaches and contributing to the continued development of this transpersonal and holistic framework
Building Community
Building a nourishing community to support one another in the personal work of psychosynthesis and in developing thriving coaching practices in globally
The Psychosynthesis Life Coach and Leadership Program is accredited by the Center for Credentialing and Education (CCE) in fulfillment of their training requirements to become a Board Certified Coach (BCC).
Training leads to Certification as a Psychosynthesis Life Coach (PLC). For those qualified, this training fulfills all coach training requirements to take the test to become a Board Certified Coach (BCC).
The Psychosynthesis Life Coach & Leadership program was one of the best things I have ever committed to and I am forever grateful to Val, Alyssa and their team of mentors and coaches for the opportunity to learn from and grow with like-spirited beings. If you are looking to find clarity in your purpose, experience a more fulfilling life and expand your tribe, I would recommend taking this program. It is definitely life-changing.
- N Renee McFadden, Psychosynthesis Life Coach
I have taken many programs and courses all over the globe and this Psychosynthesis Coaching Program is by far my favorite! From the moment we began I was delighted with the trainers masterful ways of speaking to the value of having a balanced understanding of psychology and spirituality in the context of our ever evolving world. The powerful exercises they introduced left many, if not all of us, in tears and with an even greater awareness of who we are. I am a brighter, more grounded and available human being because of my choice to say yes to this amazing program.
- Ash Ruiz, Psychosynthesis Life Coach
We are authors, creators, master coaches, deep ecologists, activists, doctors, artists, counselors, healers, entrepreneurs and educators with over 65 years of combined experience in psychosynthesis.
Val Silidker, MS, BCC
Co-founder, Director, Senior Instructor, Board Certified Coach
Val Silidker M.S., BCC (Board Certified Coach) is the co-founder and director of Psychospiritual Institute, as well as a lead trainer. She is a board certified coach and has been coaching individuals and facilitating groups for over 20 years, specializing in transpersonal psychology, deep ecology, eco-therapy, authentic connection work, and holistic business coaching, as well as mindset and leadership skills. Val is also an international speaker, author of “Call of the Ecological Self", and has been featured multiple times on Hay House Radio, NBC, and USA Today, as well as numerous publications.
Val works with change-makers, emerging leaders and mission-driven entrepreneurs to inspire the highest level of mindset, purpose and action in their lives. Over the past two decades, she has produced close to one hundred large-scale mindful-living events, retreats, and workshops, and gratefully inspired the transformation of thousands of people world-wide.
Val is passionate about psychological and spiritual maturity, personal and global leadership, nature and the human psyche, and rewilding our hearts. Her greater purpose is to remind us of who we are so we can show up more fully in our lives and contribute wholeheartedly to our world.
Alyssa Whitehouse, MBA, BCC
Co-founder, Executive Director of Business Operations, Board Certified Coach
Alyssa Heather Shannon-Whitehouse, MBA, BCC is co-founder and director of operations at Psychospiritual Institute. She is a Board Certified Coach (BCC) and Psychosynthesis Life Coach (PLC), with specialty certifications in health and wellness, dreamwork, recovery coaching, and creative arts. She has a bachelors in graphic design and a masters in business with over 24-years experience in branding and building soul-centered businesses.
As a highly sensitive and activist-natured mother, Alyssa has a passion for supporting parents and their children to have heart-centered, thriving relationships and works with families using her signature programs to support and nurture the parent-child connection. Additionally, she facilitates dreamwork groups exploring the realm of the unconscious and transpersonal, and integrating what is discovered into waking life.
In her free time, she enjoys trail running, hiking, swimming/scuba diving in the ocean, traveling, creating art, and simply watching the sunrise and gazing into the infinite universe.
Jon Schottland, MA, BCC
Senior Instructor, Board Certified Coach
Jon Schottland MA, LMHC, BCC is the founder and director of Synthesis Northeast and a senior trainer at Psychospiritual Institute. Jon was a senior trainer at the Synthesis Center in Amherst, MA for 15 years and previously taught in the graduate psychology programs at Sofia University and American International College for master’s and doctoral level students. He has provided extensive trainings for life coaches and corporate coaches across the U.S. and internationally. Jon holds an advanced degree in developmental psychology and is both a nationally Board Certified Coach (BCC) and Psychosynthesis Life Coach (PLC). He maintains a private practice where he specializes in working with teenagers and young adults. The focus of his work is cultivating deep presence and attention to promote healing, self expression, wholeness and optimal personal development.
Vienna Jasmin
Lead Instructor, Lead Mentor, Psychosynthesis Life Coach
Amy Spalding-Fecher, MA, BCC
Lead Instructor, Board Certified Coach
Amy Spalding-Fecher, MA, BCC, is a lead trainer at the Psychospiritual Institute and the Director and a lead trainer at Synthesis Northeast, a Psychosynthesis coach training program based in New England. In addition to Psychosynthesis life coaching and training, Amy is a passionate advocate for intuitive expression through art as a means of deep insight and connection to our essential Self. She has worked with individuals and groups in the process of personal and spiritual growth both locally and in South Africa, where she lived for 16 years. She weaves decades of meditation practice, dharma study, mindful self-compassion, and transformative art practices into her Psychosynthesis offerings. Originally trained as an architect, Amy continues to create supportive and inspiring space for her clients and students to grow closer to their own truth and authentic expression.
She believes that we are each unique souls seeking expression through our intentions and actions in the world. Her passion for Psychosynthesis stems from a deep belief that addressing the challenges we face in the world, including climate change and our relationship to the Earth’s resources, begins with our inner relationship to ourselves and to others.
When not teaching or coaching, Amy loves hiking, yoga, kayaking and being in nature. She has traveled extensively with her husband of 28 years and their two daughters, including seven months driving overland in an outfitted Land Cruiser from Cape Town to London.
Jessica Winans
Instructor, Student Mentor, Psychosynthesis Life Coach
Jessica is a Certified Psychosynthesis Life Coach, 200 YTT Yoga and Meditation Teacher, Intuitive Tarot Reader, Embodiment Instructor and Astrologer who uses multiple modalities to support women’s empowerment through her signature programs Ultravioletly Aligned and The Wild Woman. Jessica believes authenticity + vulnerability = strength and helps women heal their hearts, find their voices; and step into their authentic power through fostering a deeper connection to their intuition, bodies and dharma.
Jessica’s professional background prior to coaching was in journalism, web and social media management and content creation; and she is also passionate in using the skills she's learned over the years to support soulpreneurs, change-makers, nonprofits and small businesses in sharing their magnetic and sustainable offers with the world.
Genevieve Mackenzie
Instructor, Student Mentor, Psychosynthesis Life Coach
Genevieve Mackenzie, PLC is a transpersonal coach and founder of Self Like Co. Her work focuses on unromanticizing the self-love and spirituality messages and media we consume. She offers a down-to-earth view of what self-healing truly looks like. She has found that many people struggle to love themselves because they don’t actually know themselves. It’s like going on a first date and the person across from you asking if you love them. You have to begin to understand and appreciate someone before love comes along, and it’s the same thing with your relationship with yourself. Her work focuses on establishing self-appreciation through self-discovery and mindfulness-based self-compassion.
She believes the most spiritual thing you can do is work to develop the belief that you are doing your best and knowing that your best looks different every day. It is not about performing spirituality, instead, it is resting into it and coming home to yourself. She feels that one of the best gifts you can offer yourself is creating a compassionate home within your mind and body.
The proven modalities she uses in her work include positive psychology, psychosynthesis, mindfulness, and self-compassion. You don’t need to wait until you become a better version of yourself to begin loving yourself. You can like yourself right now for trying. Hold the self-love. Let’s just get to know you first!
Ariana Vallejo, CCH, PLC
Instructor, Student Mentor, Psychosynthesis Life Coach
Ariana Vallejo, CCH, PLC is Psychosynthesis Life Coach and Certified Clinical Herbalist, passionate about holistic wellness and essence liberation. She joyously serves her community with transformative presence, a soft place to land and powerful reflections. As a Persian-American woman, her life journey has revealed a deep calling to reclaim soulful expression, coming from a lineage of deep feminine repression. These longings are what brought her to the Psychospiritual Institute, where she found the synthesis to embody her gifts and services, out into the world. Founder of "Liberated Essence", she holds the work of guiding and supporting creative souls to reclaim their unique, embodied expression, with deep reverence and devotion. She lives and breathes this path, to serve in a way that proves to be vitally-transformative to all who experience it.
Ariana is a northern CA native, Earth tender, medicine drummer, tribal fusion dancer, conscious mama and devoted wife. Above all else, she is a firm believer that the collective at large receives potent healing when we revel in the richness of our being!
Erin Ryan
Student Services Manager
Erin Ryan is an intuitive energy healer, artist, embodiment coach, and is training to be a holistic sex coach / therapeutic yoni massage practitioner. Her mission is to help women remember their primal essence and power through both physical embodiment and energetic upgrades. Creating safety within, healing the heart and yoni, and establishing deeper intimacy with self and others along the way.
After an epiphany during university she chose to pack up all her things and travel the world. Through 4 years of living an international nomadic life and doing multiple Yoga teacher trainings in India and Byron Bay, Australia, she rediscovered herself. Erin found her love of ritual / practice, devotion to self-development, and a desire to support those in their path to sacred remembering.
She believes through accepting our darkness and loving all parts of ourselves we find liberation. Erin’s devotion is to unconditional freedom, sexual sovereignty, coexisting with our shadows, and experiencing life through an artist’s lens. She deeply desires a world where humans are empowered in their voice & activated by life while collectively raising the vibration of this realm together.
Dr. Didi Firman, Ed.D., LMHC, BCC
Guest Instructor
Dr. Firman has worked in the field of psychology and counseling for over thirty years and has traveled and taught nationally and internationally. Her specialties include: psychosynthesis, a spiritual psychology; coaching & counseling towards meaning and purpose in life; and speaking, teaching & consulting with a focus on personal and spiritual empowerment.
She is a licensed mental health counselor, psychotherapist, life coach and is co-founder of the Synthesis Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was a professor at American International College in the department of Graduate Psychology and Counseling. Her scholarly writing has appeared in Counseling in a Complex Society and Counseling With Confidence as well as in a variety of other venues.
Dr. Firman is often a keynote speaker, consultant and workshop presenter, as well as a guest instructor in the Psychosynthesis Life Coach and Leadership Certification Program at Psychospiritual Institute. She has also been a speaker/presenter at the Young President’s Organization, The Omega Institute for over twenty years, at Esalen, the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology, at many hospitals and colleges, at conferences in the United States and Italy, and many more.
She is the New York Times bestselling co-author of Chicken Soup for the Mother and Daughter Soul as well as Chicken Soup for the Soul, Celebrating Mothers and Daughters and Chicken Soup for the Father and Son Soul. She is also the author of Daughters and Mothers: Making it Work, and co-authored with Kevin Quirk, Brace for Impact: Miracle on the Hudson Survivors Share their Stories of Near Death and Hope for New Life. Coming on the anniversary of the miracle landing of flight 1549 on the Hudson River, the book celebrates the call to living lives of meaning and purpose that passengers and first responders have experienced after this near death experience. Her books have been translated into many languages.
Dr. Firman and her books have been featured on many TV and radio shows, including Oprah, Fox News, New Morning, Wisdom Television, Nightbeat, Eldervision, Time for Spirit and the CBS special Family 2 Family, among others. She works in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband of forty years. She has three grown children and four granddaughters. Didi is a practitioner of Iaido, a Japanese martial art, and holds a black belt. Her life is defined by an ongoing inclination to listen for the call of Self—and then to answer.
Thomas Yeomans, Ph.D.
Guest Instructor
Thomas Yeomans is the founder and director of the Concord Institute and co-founder of the Internals School, a post-graduate training institute. His background includes education at Harvard, Oxford, and the Universe of California as well as professional work in the fields of literature, education, and psychology. Since 1970 he has worked as a psychotherapist, teacher, and trainer of professional in Psychosynthesis and Spiritual Psychology throughout North America, Europe, and Russia.
He has published writing on Psychosynthesis and Spiritual Psychology, as well as three volumes of poetry and a children’s book. His most recent book is “Holly Fire: The Process of Soul Awakening”.
Currently he maintains a private practice in soul process guiding and mentoring, and he teaches training seminars at Psychospiritual Institute in Soul Process Work.
He is a painter and musician and lives with his wife, Anne, in a small farmhouse with a large garden on a hillside.
Kenneth Sørensen
Guest Instructor
Kenneth is the CEO of JiveYou, which offers an online identity profile assessment tool based on the insights of the Seven Types and Psychosynthesis. He is a guest instructor in the Psychosynthesis Life Coach and Leadership Certification Program at Psychospiritual Institute and he is also the author of six books. His most recent are The Soul of Psychosynthesis (2015), Integral Meditation (2016), and The Seven Types (2019).
Mark Horowitz
Guest Instructor
Mark Horowitz is a leadership and organizational development consultant, an experienced educator, and board certified coach. He trained in Humanistic Psychology with Abraham Maslow, Ph.D. and in Psychosynthesis with Roberto Assagioli, M.D. He has studied the field of human systems for over forty years as a licensed individual and family therapist and as a management consultant and coach for businesses in the United States, Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia. He has facilitated numerous leadership training programs and large-scale corporate change projects, and has served as coach to senior business leaders undertaking team and organizational development initiatives. He is a faculty member of the International School of Psychotherapy and Group Counseling in St. Petersburg, Russia, and has been an adjunct faculty member at John F. Kennedy University and Antioch San Francisco in California, and at Suffolk and Lesley Universities in Boston. Mark has taught Psychosynthesis at many centers around the world, including Psychospiritual Institute, the Psychosythesis Center in San Francisco, and the Institute of Psychosynthesis in London.
He is an amateur woodworker and a founding board member of The Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport, Maine. He is also the founder and president of The Uniterra Foundation, an international non-profit committed to the practical application of spiritual values to social change. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Abby Seixas.
I took this program completely online from Australia and it was hands down the BEST program I have ever taken... I cannot recommend this course highly enough.
-Anjani Amriit, Psychosynthesis Life Coach
The 9-month Psychosynthesis Coaching Training was truly an incredible experience. The curriculum, teachers, exercises, depth of knowledge shared and the way the program is structured and delivered were beyond my expectations. I had been looking for a Transpersonal Coaching Program for many years and I was extremely pleased to found this one.
-Claudia Urdaneta-Pacitti, Psychosynthesis Life Coach
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