Lion's Breath Counseling

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United States
Boulder, CO
Lion's Breath Counseling

Have you had enough feeling afraid and staying small? Life doesn’t have to be this way. I can help Find out more at: www.lions-breath.com

April Pojman is a Licensed Professional Counselor in private practice in Boulder, CO. She specializes in body-centered wilderness therapy, helping people to feel their own aliveness and their connection to nature as a foundation for healing. She provides trauma-informed therapy for adults, couples and groups. April helps all types of people to work with difficult events from their past that may be blocking them from building the life they want to live through methods such as Hakomi somatic therapy, EMDR trauma resolution therapy and DBT life skills. Creative support for loneliness, grief and loss, anxiety, depression, divorce, loss of meaning, adoption, relationship challenges and more. April has a special passion for working with people who are facing cross-cultural transitions as immigrants, international aid workers, or study abroad students. She has lived outside of the US for about 10 years and feels strongly about helping people build cross-cultural understanding and move skillfully through culture-shock experiences.

01/20/2025

The First Promise

Sometimes you need to hide
from everything you’ve
promised to become,
so you can find the first promise:
the one you and the soft world
sang to each other

down beneath the tall bushes
along the old stream bed,
back when nobody knew
exactly where you were,
before the person
everyone needed you to be
learned to find you even there.

That place is just a memory now
but the sanctuary still waits—
in the quiet places under trees,
the spacious darkness
of a solitary night—
and if you learn again
how to hide, even from

the expectations you’ve
mistaken for your own,
you’ll find the world still knows
your secret harmony,
and some brave and
brokenhearted voice in you
never stopped singing.

~James Pearson
From: The Wilderness That Bears Your Name

Art: Andrea Jacobi

01/19/2023

“Let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars. Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies. Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears. Let us name the harsh light and soft darkness that surround us. Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug. Let’s lick the earth from our fingers. Let us look up and out and around. The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked, and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning.” -Pádraig Ó Tuama

01/05/2023

When I say ‘happy new year’,
I'm not for a moment,
expecting this to occur,
for that is not possible…
a year must be all things.

Happiness must come and go,
like the tides and the winds,
just as sadness,
and all the emotions in between.

When I say ‘happy new year’,
I'm really wishing you,
a baseline of peace,
of gratitude.

Because if you can sit with these things,
for the most part,
happiness will thrive,
when it does arrive,
and sadness will know its place in the mix.

If you can nourish these things,
daily,
you will also grow hope,
for it flourishes in such soil.

And hope is the key,
to this enigmatic state
of ‘happiness’ we seek.

When I say ‘happy new year’,
I’m really wishing you more happy days,
than sad days,
more joy than misery,
more laughter than tears…
and the wisdom to accept,
that they all belong.

Happy new year, my friends.
Happy new year.

Donna Ashworth
Life: https://amzn.eu/d/9Y6E6kz

Art by Leena Nio

12/20/2022

Tending to the observations that are kept in the rock of the throat, with mum

11/29/2022

I Know You Want to Lie by The Roadside
But The Wolves Are Coming, Sweetheart.

I’m here with you.
Our feet are bare at the beginning of a long walk.

I know the field looks empty now.
It’s not. The seeds are still growing.

Do not learn the lessons of heartbreak.
The wisdom of sorrow is a lie.

It will tell you wolves are a mercy,
that a bare field is acceptable.

If you need to rest let’s do it now.
Drink water, sleep, hold yourself.
Save your voice for when it’s time to scream.

I won’t lie to you, though.
The wolves are coming.

In your heart is a knife
but also a harvest.

When it’s time,
use one to protect
the other.

~Leslie J. Anderson
Art: Barrett Biggers

11/15/2022

unaccountably we are alone
forever alone
and it was meant to be
that way,
it was never meant
to be any other way–
and when the death struggle
begins
the last thing I wish to see
is
a ring of human faces
hovering over me–
better just my old friends,
the walls of my self,
let only them be there.

I have been alone but seldom
lonely.
I have satisfied my thirst
at the well
of my self
and that wine was good,
the best I ever had,
and tonight
sitting
staring into the dark
I now finally understand
the dark and the
light and everything
in between.

peace of mind and heart
arrives
when we accept what
is:
having been
born into this
strange life
we must accept
the wasted gamble of our
days
and take some satisfaction in
the pleasure of
leaving it all
behind.

cry not for me.

grieve not for me.

read
what I’ve written
then
forget it
all.

drink from the well
of your self
and begin
again.

~Mind and Heart
by Charles Bukowski

11/09/2022

Love sorrow.
She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing the street. For, think,
what if you should lose her?
Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forhead that she feel herself not so
utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment
by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember,
she is a child.
And amazing things can happen.
And you may see,
as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.

~Love Sorrow
By Mary Oliver

11/07/2022

Every life is a sound. The soft susurrus of jellyfish who have never known the shore. The sharp sizzle of deer fleeing through autumn corn. These sounds belong to the same unfinished poem as you and your fistful of years like copper coins. It wouldn’t be poetry without you.

11/03/2022

True listeners live in the heart.
They love the gossip of raindrops,
the breaking news of Spring peepers.
Say less than you mean.
Grace is the gift of subtraction.
The trembling crystal of a chickadee
proclaims the whole Godspell.
Tell as little as a willow by a pond
where the heron glides away
on the first breath of twilight.
And if you must speak, leave
a rippled stillness between yours words,
the kind of mirror where
that long-beaked huntress might pause
on one leg all the golden afternoon.
Be more like the moon between clouds,
until your silences say everything.

~Say Less
Fred LaMotte

Art MB Designs

10/25/2022

I feel so honored
by your company
in my pain

Thank you for coming
into this old house with me

I’d long thought I’d abandoned.

I want you to also see
the places in me
that are falling apart

that would be worthless
to try and repair.

To hide anything
from you
steals energy
from the places I’m growing into—

my becoming can no longer
afford that.

So come with me
into my alleyways

into my heart made of springtimes
and ghost towns

Of Gods and grapes
and half-reformed hellscapes

that still at times
haunt my heavens

As you observe my sunshine
notice also these shadows
that will not leave me

Beneath my tidied living room
is a cellar
where I store
all my rolled up wounds

The amount of dust here
is my collection
of neglected of hope
of receiving kind visitors

But I’m ready now
to invite you in
to all of me

because I’ve learned to stand
in the promise-less dark
that speaks of no rescue

and say to myself,

“I can love you here too.”

~Chelan Harkin

10/24/2022

Maybe it’s all utterly meaningless.
Maybe it’s all unutterably meaningful.
If you want to know which,
pay attention to
what it means to be truly human
in a world that half the time
we’re in love with
and half the time
scares the hell out of us…
The unexpected sound of your name on somebody’s lips.
The good dream.
The strange coincidence.
The moment that brings tears to your eyes.
The person who brings life to your life.
Even the smallest events hold the greatest clues.

~Found
By Frederick Buechner

Art: Ulla Thynell

10/21/2022

You have permission to heal...

Address

2325 19th Street
Boulder, CO
80304

Telephone

+13039972267

Website

http://www.lions-breath.com/

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