About Nikolaia Patterson

About Nikolaia Patterson

I believe we all have the capacity to heal, and there is a great gift in taking the things in our life that we have carried alone, and having them witnessed by a loving presence. 

I was born and grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and I have loved the land here from as early as I can remember. I did my undergraduate work at Columbia University, studying the history of colonialism and some of the ways that cultures and people have been impacted by it. I then did my first masters degree at Harvard Divinity School, studying theology across multiple religions and the role of spirituality in literature and art. From there, I spent ten years working in the video game industry - one of the strangest and most interesting worlds I have ever traveled in - before beginning to pursue counseling, and eventually returning to Boulder.

Here, I am deeply involved with the Hakomi method, which is at the root of how I work. Hakomi creates a loving space to mindfully explore the ways we learned how to be in relationship with ourselves and others, and with life. I find working in a Hakomi informed way to be expansive, kind, and life-affirming. 

There is a quote I love, attributed to Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist: “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.” To me this is a beautiful reminder that even when we are feeling our most lost, unhappy, or unwell, there are parts of our experience that still make sense, and still feel like health. In deserts, pollinators learn to travel between small islands of plants and flowers. Each ‘pollinator island,’ as they are called, becomes part of a chain of nourishment that can support an incredible amount of life. In our work, we will discover together those places where nourishment and aliveness are already present in you, and I will hold with you the unfolding that is possible from that web of support.