• 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 Master of 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 several fiction projects in the works, and 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 music gear.

    Out of a love of helping people, I founded and ran a small non-profit, the Artist Volunteer Center, from 2014 to 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 more to the mental health and wellness of the artists and communities I was working with than to the artwork they were making, and I 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 from the psychoanalytic approach but also saw its shortcomings, and was compelled not to work in a purely mind-oriented approach (let alone one with antiquated and at times problematic ideals at its core).

  • 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. I trained with Scott Kellogg in his Transformational Chairwork, and 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 in 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 was mentored for several years by Susan Feinbloom, a clairvoyant psychotherapist who holds the lineages of hypnotherapy, the Newton Institute, Berkeley Psychic Institute, and John Fulton of Aesclepion Healing Center.

    From Michael Meade I learned how to understand and help others access the wisdom inside the symbolic and the mythic, and have had the privilege of sitting in circle with him at his Mosaic Mentoring men's retreat.

    Through a deep inquiry into the indigenous ways and wisdom of Malidoma Somé I learned about initiation and rites of passage. I received a year of spiritual counsel from Otis Gaddis III with a focus on ancestral, collective, and trans-dimensional healing. I was a member of Francis Weller's Soulful Life cohort, a nine-month intensive that created a village mindset to explore working with grief in community to enrich all of our lives. I learned a wonderful trance-inducing meditation practice through a mentorship with somatic psychotherapist Lorella Ricci. I am currently receiving Resonant Healing Coaching from practitioner Josh Blaine.

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

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

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

    • I learned that we adults are just big kids, in need of the same love, care, and attention we needed 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 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. If I could sum up everything that my path has taught me it is this: creative intuition is a vital component of success in this age, and I will help you access the creativity you need to thrive.

Jason Maas, LMHC, LCPC, MFA

Co-Founder

Licensed Mental Health Counselor, New York (010586) | Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor, Maine (CC7104) Telehealth across New York and Maine; limited in-person availability in Maine 50--60 minute sessions | Sliding scale available based on financial need

Who I Work With

I offer somatic, depth-oriented psychotherapy for individuals and groups. I work most often with space holders and healers—therapists, counselors, teachers, bodyworkers, clergy, and the people everyone else leans on. I work with artists, writers, and musicians. I work with fathers, and with men doing their own work. And I work with highly sensitive people, empaths, and caregivers: the ones who feel everything in the room and have never been shown what to do with it.

What I Help With

People come to me with anxiety, grief and loss, trauma, burnout, and depression. With conflict in relationships and families. With creative block and the particular pressure artists put on themselves. With questions of purpose, meaning, and spiritual life, including religious and spiritual trauma—harm done inside a faith community, and the long work of separating inherited belief from what you actually hold to be true. With the exhaustion of holding space for everyone else. And with the slow work of undoing what unexamined masculinity has cost them and the people they love.

How I Work

My approach draws on Jungian and depth psychology, somatic therapy, Gestalt therapy, Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, mindfulness, transpersonal psychology, Transformational Chairwork and psychodrama, Nonviolent Communication (NVC), ancestral healing, and energy work, which I also teach in supervision to the clinicians I oversee. If any of that is jargon, I would love the chance to explain it—these concepts are accessible.

What a Session Looks Like with Me

Over the years I have cultivated my own integrated body-mind-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 helping people identify or reclaim their love for themselves and others, their sense of freedom, emotional fluidity, inherent uniqueness, and full imagination. I am passionate about healing the damage done by unconscious and wounded masculinity in order to restore trust, hope, and love for all of us.

It is important for me to help clients tangibly implement our work in their lives, so that the work is practical, applicable, and effects substantial change.

I have come to understand how much "mental health" is related to how we have been mistaught to repress or misdirect our emotions. We are taught that "being emotional" is dangerous, or annoying, or not productive. But what we think of as being emotional tends to refer to the stories we have about our emotions ("I'm anxious because I never get things perfect") or the behaviors that arise out of restricted emotions (getting angry at someone because we are avoiding shame or fear).

Emotions are the sensory experiences of being alive, and they are all pathways to love and freedom. You will feel what I am talking about—this is not an intellectualizing or spiritual bypassing technique. I am here to help you get tangible results as quickly as possible: to feel alive and connected to your work, to the people around you, and to the earth and the more-than-human world.

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 Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and help clients develop fluency in it. Together we will reimagine what is possible and draw out what is healthy and human—from our hearts, our lineage, and the earth—from underneath all of the devastating and disorienting conditioning and programming out there.

More about how I see the systems we live in as the primary explanation for what we call the individual's "mental illness."

Healing is to make whole. We are whole to begin with, and in some way always are, but over time this wholeness becomes seemingly fractured, covered over and disguised by harmful and insufficient ideas—from the familial to the overculture—along with 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 it 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 from 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.

There is no prison more confining than the one we don't know we are in, and these destructive systems create "invisible prisons" inside 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 sharing my intuition and weaving 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 the macrocosm, and to the various systems we live inside of. These tools—from meditations, to working with the energy body, to identifying and releasing negative beliefs, to developing keen somatic awareness—are all easy to learn and implement.

It's understandable to be skeptical of some of this language, or of these poetic and diffuse summaries of what the work can be like, and I appreciate and welcome it when that comes up. Trying to describe therapy always reminds me of the old line about music: talking about it is like dancing about architecture. It just needs to be experienced. So I welcome resistance with love and interest (it's courageous to disagree or be skeptical) and strive to connect, to understand everyone's wisdom, and first and foremost to meet people where they are. Working with countless clients from different backgrounds and getting similar results with these techniques does point to evidence of something—something 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 racial justice, LGBTQIA+, 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 :)