Hi, I’m Dan Halpern.
I’m here to help you live in right relationship with yourself and your world, release outdated blocks and limitations to your thriving, and embody your highest potential and authenticity.
Dan Halpern, MA, LPC
I specialize in treating recent and childhood trauma, anxiety, self-esteem, relationship issues, existential crises, and integrating one’s spirituality into daily life. I work with individuals on a spiritual or contemplative path, as well as those for whom that’s not a central aspect of their life.
To me, spirituality supports living in greater connection with our essential nature and limitless potential, while also deeply rooting ourselves in a web of belonging with the human and more-than-human worlds. In other words, I don’t see spirituality as a way to transcend and escape this life, but to come into and live it more fully.
I'm a Licensed Professional Counselor in the state of Colorado (LPC.0020448). Among many therapeutic and contemplative practices, I integrate somatic trauma therapy, parts work, attachment healing, EMDR, animism, mysticism, meditation, and deep attunement to help individuals access the greatest expression of their true selves and navigate life in empowered, compassionate, and conscious flow.
In addition to being a counselor, I’m also a father, husband, poet, dancer, and musician.
My Background
I’m a descendant of Jewish ancestry from Eastern Europe, primarily Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, and more recently from 3 generations living in Boston, Massachusetts. I grew up on ancestral lands of the Wampanoag and Massachusett people in a town called Sharon, MA, and now live by the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado on traditional lands of the Arapaho, Ute, and Cheyenne. I am indebted to the lands on which I’ve walked, fallen, and rested, and to the tenders of these lands, as well as to my ancestors, family, friends, teachers, and to the nurturing forces that create, sustain, and renew life.
In addition to many different programs, studies, and trainings, my therapy and coaching is largely based on the direct healing experiences of myself and others. On my personal journey, I experienced an existential crisis in the form of a spiritual emergency as a young adult, something that was not understood or held as the initiatory experience it was by those around me. Through many years of grounding and seeking to understand life, reality, and our role in it all, I’ve developed a unique sensitivity and practical approach to the most profound potential of counseling and psychotherapeutic healing. Working with invaluable, trauma-informed, contemporary models of psychology and human development, I also incorporate insights, awareness, and perspectives from ancient and modern world wisdom traditions and schools of meditation, contemplation, and spiritual awakening. In this way, I hold a space for you to experience all of your life circumstances as your path for living a holistically generative and soul-nourishing healing and growth process for your whole self, for your whole life.
How I Work
I’ve found that merely talking about our lives and feeling our emotions, while often necessary steps on the healing path, doesn’t create the lasting changes we yearn for. To affect the deepest and most enduring shifts we want and need in our lives, I work directly with the nervous system and the felt-sense awareness of the body. This is the basis of somatic healing.
Working with embodied awareness
grounds you in the present moment,
helps you transmute the ways your past affects you on a cellular level,
grows your capacity to experience challenges and big emotions without losing control, and
directly connects you to your essential nature and sovereignty, supporting you to choose freely how you live today and into the future.
Integrating years of study and training in different therapeutic modalities, approaches, and aspects of healing, along with an expansive understanding of human potential, I meet you where you are in this moment and in the scope of your entire life. Working together, we’ll address your most immediate concerns and needs, while simultaneously contacting the deeper patterns of your personality that may need validating, shifting, or updating for you to live in alignment with your highest truth.
Wisdom Streams
My approach draws from the work of Peter Levine and Somatic Experiencing, Dick Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems and parts work, Gestalt and Existential Therapies, attachment healing, developmental psychology, addiction counseling, psychedelic therapy and experiences, and contemporary understandings of trauma taught by Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Maté. I’m also very influenced by Joanna Macy’s Deep Ecology teachings and The Work That Reconnects, the grief work and initiatory teachings of Francis Weller, and the sincerely compassionate and cutting view of modernity and living of Bayo Akomolafe, among many other contemporary teachers and luminaries. I’ve also studied and practiced in various traditions of mystical Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, and Hinduism, as well as animism, shamanism, The Gene Keys, and other forms of energy healing, including Reiki and ancestral healing.
Awakening Your Potential
Through my own healing journey, I’ve learned that although pain is an inevitable and necessary part of life, ongoing suffering and victimization doesn’t need to be. It’s possible to heal deep wounds, even wounds you may have been living with for decades. It’s possible to come into healthy and fulfilling relationships with yourself and others. And it’s possible to awaken inner strength and resources to let life’s challenges grow you into the wisest, most loving, and truest version of yourself.
Education
Master of Arts in Counseling, Regis University, 2019
Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies, Psychology, and Writing, Naropa University, 2014
Trainings
Trauma-Focused Psychedelic Therapy, Innate Path, 2025
EMDR (Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), Personal Transformation Institute, 2023
Somatic Soul-Based Trauma Training, Katie Asmus & Wilderness Therapy Institute, Student 2020-2021; Assistant 2021-2022
Integrative Somatic Parts Work Certificate, The Embody Lab, 2022
Spiritual study and practice with Zvi Ish-Shalom in the Kedumah / Primordial Light mystery school, practicing "wake down" work, in-depth somatic inquiry, and personal, relational, and spiritual healing and development, rooted in ancestral Kabbalistic teachings and contemporary revelations, 2014 - present
Certificate in Foundation Studies in Anthroposophic Social Therapy, Camphill Village Academy, 2010
Professional Experience
Therapist for adults, couples, and teens at People House’s Affordable Counseling Program
Group Facilitator for adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse at WINGS Foundation
Residential Counselor and Caregiver for adults with learning and developmental disabilities at Imagine! and Camphill Village USA
Crisis Line Operator with the Samaritans of Greater Boston
Hospice Volunteer with Family Hospice
Therapeutic Modalities
Somatic Trauma Therapy
Parts Work
Gestalt Therapy
Mindfulness-Based Therapy
EMDR
Multicultural Counseling
Feminist Therapy
Neurodivergent Affirming Therapy
Person-Centered Therapy
Nonviolent Communication
Motivational Interviewing
Bereavement Counseling
Crisis Intervention
Grief Work