Cynthia Eisho Morrow
ABOUT
Rev. Cynthia Eisho Morrow, MA, LMFT
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A depth-oriented psychotherapist of 30 years, I have been a close companion to many in their healing journey and search for who they truly are. A wilderness rites of passage guide of 20 years, I have served as midwife to many courageous people ready to die to what no longer serves, so that deeper gifts may be born. Practicing biodynamic craniosacral therapy, I listen for the tidal rhythms that flow through our bodies, that restore us, that created us.
These rhythms are no different from what breathes life in the natural world all around us. Now as an ordained Buddhist priest in the Japanese Tendai lineage, my vow is in the reclaiming of what is sacred, planting seeds of love and wisdom, and supporting our collective awakening and liberation from suffering. Read more
Entering into psychotherapy is a courageous act. It is no small thing to consider trusting someone (your therapist) with your vulnerability, your wounding, as well as your gifts that you might want help developing.
Many people come to therapy wanting to address their depression, anxiety, childhood trauma, relationship issues, addictions, life transitions, gender and sexual issues, etc. I see symptoms not as something to pathologize or get rid of, but as symbolic expressions from the deep psyche wanting to be understood and integrated in a healthy way. Read more
PSYCHOTHERAPY & CONSULTATION
EARTH-BASED PRACTICES
Seeing the world reflected in a single dew-drop on a new spring leaf. Sensing the deep calm after a raging storm that brings the rainbow. Waking to the song of coyotes howling in the star-filled night. Wilderness… wild, awe-inspiring, untamed and often uncomfortable. For many, nature has become a frightening place to be avoided. Yet spending time in the natural world invites us to turn towards a knowing deep in our bones… that we are an inseparable part of the great web of life. Living within walls, viewing much of our lives on screens, we are all participants in forgetting how dynamically related we are with all of life. Earth-based work is how we practice remembering. Read more
Sometimes people are looking for deep support for their inner life, and have already done a lot of psychotherapy. They want to grow spiritually and want guidance that is attuned to their own life path. Though psychotherapy can include spiritual dimensions, and spiritual work often includes psychological dimensions, they are different territories or views. People who seek me out for spiritual counseling may already have some sort of spiritual practice or belief system which expands their sense of themselves beyond their personal struggles, yet includes those very struggles. Support for deep inner work can be held within a container of spiritual counseling. Read more
SPIRITUAL COUNSELING & MENTORSHIP
BIODYNAMIC CRANIOSACRAL
Bringing the light of awareness and the warmth of compassion in contact with the density of holding patterns in the body is an integral part of healing. It is often the body, emotion, and feeling realms that store the most hidden and unresolved suffering, allowing the more functional parts of us to “carry on”. Within the context of psychotherapy or spiritual mentorship, we may decide together to use touch as an adjunct to our work. Biodynamic craniosacral therapy is a non-invasive, gentle, and effective form of bodywork which helps to resolve protective patterns that have become painful or self-limiting. My contact is safe, respectful, and clients are always fully clothed.
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EVENTS
The Great Ballcourt Initiation – Spring Fast
April 15-26, 2025
Eureka Valley, CA
Death is the ultimate agent of transformation—be it a physical death or “the little deaths” encountered throughout life. Indigenous cultures developed rituals to aid and guide people through these stages of change and renewal, utilizing the power of death to enhance and intensify these experiences. For the Mayan people this ceremony was played out on the Great Ballcourt. The court, and the ritual game played upon it, were an enactment of the great transformations: from life to death, from the middleworld to the underworld, from humanity to divinity.
Rooting and Rising—A Journey Back Home
Spring 2025 – Winter 2026
Online Only
Rooting and Rising is a pilgrimage back Home, a deep dive into your essence. Our online year long journeys are guided by time tested ancestral practices that will nudge you, if not jolt you, to re-member and reclaim the Wisdom of Earth Cycles that pulsates within you and weaves through the very fabric of Nature.
This is a call to gather and co-create a brave space where you can deeply connect with who-you-are at the different phases of your inner Moons and Seasons. In this year long immersive experience, guided by skilled and loving mature practitioners, we invite you to reveal your vision, embrace your gifts, tend to your grief and discover the potential awaiting to be seen and met in your body, in Pachamama’s body and in the body of our Communities.
Peace of Wild Things—Monthly Meditation on the Earth
1st Saturday per month, 9:30 – 11.30 am, May-October, 2025
Ragle Ranch Park, Veteran’s Memorial Grove
Sebastopol, Sonoma County, CA
Join us on the earth, to sit and find peace amidst the ten thousand joys and sorrows of our lives. Our world is full of chaos, unpredictability, despair, beauty and love. Join us in the gentle shelter of the Veteran’s Memorial Grove, where warriors are honored. Where we can sit and be present with even our most ordinary battles – within and without. Where we can cultivate stillness and compassion. Where we can pray for peace.
Each session will include two seated meditations, some mindful walking on the land, a short Dharma teaching, and group discussion.
Wild Twin—Rewilding the Soul into Wholeness
June 22, 2025, 9am – 5pm
Sugarloaf Ridge State Park, CA
Join us for a day walk in wild nature that is shaped and inspired by Martin Shaw’s book, Courting the Wild Twin.
Entering into wilderness, we have an opportunity to reconnect with a vital part of ourselves that has not been tamed by society, has not been conditioned to “be good”. Inside each of us is a wild twin, calling to us to remember what we have disowned for the sake of belonging. On this day walk, we invite you to explore your authenticity and sense of aliveness, away from the constraints of the civilized world. This will be an opportunity to reflect on the untamed parts of yourself that you might have forgotten, exiled or left behind. We will be relating with the land as a storyteller and teacher, who might help you locate your wild twin, inspiring you to court it back home to your heart with authenticity and wholeness.
Wisdom of Our Ancestors
September 28, 2025, 9am – 5pm
Sugarloaf Ridge State Park, CA
With Ancestor Appreciation Day now officially celebrated on September 27th, we offer this day on the land (one day later) to honor our ancestors and the wisdom we carry forth because of their trials, joys, and sacrifices. On this day, we might reflect upon ancestors in our direct family line, our ancient bloodlines, or our spiritual lineages. Whose shoulders do we stand upon? What are the burdens and what are the blessings that have been passed down into our own lives? What is ours to heal, or transform? What is ours to bring forth into our world as it is now? What will we pass on to the next? On this day, you might receive messages from the land about your present-day life. Perhaps your ancestors will have messages to share with you.
Let Go into the Mystery – The East Shield of Living and Dying
October 11-19, 2025
Eureka Valley, CA
Throughout time and cultures, people have crossed borders of their ordinary lives seeking contact with the Mystery. An experience of Oneness, it is beyond any fixed identity. Called by many names, known in a myriad of ways, yet it is ungraspable. In the wide-open view of this Mystery, living and dying are fundamentally interdependent. So too is our recognition of being wholly and completely interconnected with it all. What might it mean for you to explore this East Shield? To “Let Go into the Mystery”?
CA Women’s Vision Fast
November 4-15, 2025
Anza Borrego, CA
Like the waxing and waning of the moon, our inner essence is reflected in the creative forces of nature, in the continual movement of light and dark. Throughout the stages of our lives, we flow between the stages of birth, death and re-birth. You know in your bones the ancient practice of rites of passage. This is a time to go out alone, be held by the earth and the spacious desert. For four days and four nights, there is space to remember your wholeness, sink into your dreams, and release what no longer serves.
MUSINGS
Tadaima!
(Japanese for “I’m home now!”)
Cynthia Eisho Morrow
September 2023
It’s April 24th, 2023, and I’m nervously sitting in a chair at a barber shop just south of Kyoto Station in Japan. An adorable, young Japanese woman takes the electric razor up against the side of my head… bzzzzz…. bzzzzz…. I watch as thick, long clumps of curly tresses fall to the floor. Gazing in the mirror, I start to dissociate. “Be here for this!!”, I tell myself, drawing my attention back to my midline. My breath deepens as I observe in the mirror this radical act. After about 10 minutes, she beams at my newly bald head and proclaims, “Kawaii!”, which means, “Cute!”. The next day, I arrive at the monastery gates high on a mountain for my 60-day initiation to become a Tendai priest.
Mottainai
Life is Precious—Don’t Waste It!
by Cynthia Eisho Morrow
January 2022
As a way to connect with my Japanese bloodline, I’ve been slowly learning my mother’s native tongue. Ten years of studying Japanese language has been sometimes tedious, mostly fun and engaging, and occasionally revelatory. One of the revelatory expressions that has rocked my world is mottainai.
Mottainai (もったいない or 勿体無い, pronounced mot-tie-nye) is a common expression in any Japanese household. Often associated with food, which is how I first heard it, mottainai conveys a sense of regret in wasting something needlessly. In many eras in Japan, food has been a precious resource, at times quite scarce. People have had to be mindful with food, to not let it go bad, not throw it away. Even a single grain of rice is worth preserving and consuming with appreciation for its capacity to nourish. By today’s American standards, where we have such enormous food waste, this can be a radical idea. According to one statistic, in 2021 we Americans wasted 108 billion pounds of food, or 40% of all food. Not wasting food is a mindfulness practice, in and of itself.
Vision Fasting with a World on Fire
by Cynthia Eisho Morrow
September 2020
Sitting on a mountain perch at 8000 feet, I have come to the Inyos to fast. Longing to see my brilliant, beloved Sierras to the west, today, they are not visible at all. The smoke from the relentless fires of the American West has totally obscured them. Heavy-hearted with climate grief, I gaze out and see only a grey-blue sea of sky-cloud-smoke—endless, seamless, where once there were mountains.
There is a dying. The adult life as I’ve known it thus far is dying, has to die. Not unlike those mountains. The Sierras have been there my entire life, witnessing my entire life. Now, gone. They are cloud, smoke, mirage, illusion, empty. My old life is composting, and yes there are seeds planted in that rich soil. What will emerge?
CONTACT
Rev. Cynthia Eisho Morrow, LMFT
Phone: 415-221-6373
Email: eisho@cynthiamorrow.com
Office: 818 Cherry St.
Santa Rosa, CA 95404
Please note, I am currently not taking new clients for psychotherapy. However, if you are interested in the possibility of doing some spiritual counseling or mentorship, feel free to call or email me. We can discuss availability, fees, and whether we might be a good fit. I offer sessions in person in my Santa Rosa office, over video, or by phone.