Michael Santi Keezing

Santi

I offer one-on-one life counseling and coaching sessions centered on meaning, healing, and purpose.

In these sessions, we’ll ask, what’s important to you? What matters now may be patterns of suffering you feel stuck in—anxiety, distraction, anger, grief, disempowerment, blockage, or uncertainty. What matters looking ahead may be life direction—whether towards personal, relationship, career, creative, political, or spiritual aims. I offer the support of deep listening, eliciting, dialogue, and re-framing as you discern, then move towards, what really matters to you.

My perspective is rooted in eight years as a monastic in the Thai forest tradition, a meditation-centered branch of Theravada Buddhism. This provided me with a unique field for personal development and service, including extensive experience in pastoral counseling. Prior to ordination, I worked for many years at Amherst College as a one-on-one writing mentor and coach. Before that I lived a varied adult life of writing, teaching, and plenty of miscellaneous jobs; travel and settling down; relationships, marriage, and singleness; fatherhood. All of these experiences bear on my approach to life counseling and coaching.

In addition to this work, I lead meditation gatherings, offer talks and public dialogue, and write on the intersections of Buddhism and post-Buddhism, modernity, personal and political life, conscious use of technology, and other themes. You’ll find links below to my writings in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, as well as to podcast episodes and other public appearances.

Santi means “peace.” It was given to me as a monastic name. I’m retaining it as an encouragement to myself and others to value and foster peace—a central value both in ancient Buddhist wisdom and in naturalistic, contemporary understandings of suffering and freedom.