About Dawn
It is a sobering thought that the finest act of love you can perform is not an act of service, but an act of contemplation, of seeing. When you serve people, you help, support, comfort, and alleviate pain. When you see them in their inner beauty and goodness, you transform and create.
Dawn DeAno is a graduate of Naropa University in the Contemplative Psychotherapy and Buddhist Psychology program. She has a practice in Lafayette, Colorado, and also sees clients online through teletherapy.
Dawn works with individuals from 18 and older. She is passionate about being an ally or guide to others as they cultivate curiosity, courage, and compassion toward themselves, and learn to live their one precious life full of joy, resilience, choice, and freedom.
Dawn practices Contemplative Psychotherapy, an approach rooted in mindfulness and compassion that brings about transformation by focusing on present-moment experiences with an open, caring heart. This approach has proven to be effective for a variety of symptoms, including stress, anxiety, depression, feelings of isolation and uncertainty, self-aggression, and intrusive thoughts. In addition, Dawn works with a somatic-based trauma approach. This approach honors the body as a conduit for allowing emotional energies and the associated sensations to enrich us as feeling, sensitive human beings. Resting in the immediacy of sensation, our body’s first language, we find some relief from the constant thinking and mental unrest.
Dawn’s approach is to offer a safe, non-judgmental, compassionate, and creative space for clients to come into contact with all aspects of themselves: their wounded and patterned parts as well as their wisdom and wholeness. She invites clients to courageously pause, slow down, get curious, and offer compassion to their direct experience—beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Over time, this practice builds awareness and inner trust by embracing the totality of experience, both the delightful parts and the difficult parts. This act of kindness toward oneself is the gateway to radically reclaiming well-being—an integrated mind, body, and spirit capable of meeting all of life’s challenges.
Dawn’s approach is rooted in and informed by Contemplative Psychotherapy; Mindfulness-Based Therapy; Compassion Focused Therapy; Somatic-Based Trauma Therapy; Humanistic Psychotherapy; Relational Psychotherapy; Acceptance and Commitment Therapy; Internal Family Systems Therapy as well as her ongoing meditation practice.