Step into Bren Seed's office in the hills outside Charlottesville, Virginia, and you'll find a burnt orange couch, a paper lantern arcing over her art table and a set of tuning forks resting beside a cluster of candles. In the next room, a daybed tucked under the eaves wears a floral blanket, and it's where her clients lie back during ketamine-assisted psychotherapy sessions while music she chose just for them fills the room. Plants crowd nearly every windowsill, and a painting of the Buddha's eyes keeps watch over it all.
The main therapy room in Bren's office outside Charlottesville.
Bren is a licensed professional counselor, art therapist and Certified Grief Educator, and this year marks her twentieth year in private practice. She sits with people who are grieving, people integrating psychedelic and spiritual experiences, and other therapists, and she brings something to that work that I rarely see in our field: genuine delight. When I asked her why she does it, her first answer was "Because it is fun, is that strange to say?"
Bren is the very first woman featured here on Lucky Gecko, and I couldn't have asked for a better person to begin with. We first met through Journey Clinical, where I worked for more than four years, and this fall she became my first Brand in a Day client. What follows is her story, the remarkable work she does, and a look at how she's learning to show the world the whole of who she is.
Healing through flow, play and community
If there's one word that ties Bren's work together, it's flow. She describes it as the creative state where the mind becomes flexible, where play is possible and where we can move through pain instead of bracing against it, and nearly everything she offers is a doorway into it.
Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, with a soundtrack
Bren offers ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) to individuals, couples and small groups, in partnership with Journey Clinical. One of her favorite parts of the work is the music. "I love making KAP playlists and all types of playlists," she told me. "I often DJ the KAP session based on the music I love, what my clients have told me about their preferences and my intuition."
The daybed where Bren's clients rest during KAP sessions.
KAP for Friends
The offering that made my jaw drop the first time I heard about it is what we've come to call KAP for Friends. Bren noticed that clients often came out of a session saying some version of "I want everybody I know to do this." She also belongs to a circle of women who gather seasonally for retreats and have stayed connected for years through what they call golden threads, showing up for one another whenever life gets hard.
So she began to imagine KAP for groups of people who already love and trust each other, whether that's a circle of close friends, colleagues gathering for a retreat or two best friends who want to go through something meaningful together. Every participant still goes through the full clinical screening, and the circle gets something a group of strangers rarely does. "When you come with a group that's already formed, there's dynamics, there's history," Bren explained, "and they can keep integrating together and have that shared experience." As she put it, "We should be having therapeutic healing experiences in community with friends."
Grief, death and dying
Bren's deepest specialty is grief, and her work with loss reaches far beyond the therapy room. Each year she joins Death Fest, a gathering about death and dying held at a green burial cemetery north of Charlottesville, which has grown from about 100 attendees in its first year to 300 in its fourth. Last year she and her friend Marcy led a music and movement workshop about our relationship with death that ended, to everyone's delight, in a conga line. This year she and her friend Anna Grace ran the art tent, where festivalgoers added paint, feathers, fabric and collage paper to a community mandala that hung in the barn for the evening dinner.
The Ebb and Flow Meditation Club, Flowrobics and more
Bren's Meditation Club brings her guided visualizations, original art, coloring pages and playlists to members every week, and she's dreaming up Flowrobics, a joyful movement practice designed to help people loosen up, dance and stop taking themselves so seriously. She also speaks and leads workshops on flow state as a path to healing through KAP, art therapy, movement and dance.
Why she does it
Bren doesn't believe in telling anyone what to do. What she loves is dropping into what she calls a sacred space with another person, "listening deeply to their story and working on the mystery together, connecting the dots, finding that awe-ha moment." Her role, as she sees it, is to ask the questions and reflect back as a client discovers their own deep, inherent wisdom.
The message she most wants people to leave with is that they are not weird or defective, and they are not alone. "They are human and it is messy, painful and beautiful," she wrote. She sees the habits we struggle with as strategies our younger selves invented to keep us safe, and she has a lovely way of honoring them. "We can thank the genius kid self for trying so hard to keep us alive and say gently, 'thanks but no thanks,'" she explained. She is equally clear that a diagnosis can be a useful tool but never defines a person, and "I am not my diagnosis" is one of the truths she most hopes her clients carry with them.
Her approach grew out of a life that has been anything but conventional. In her twenties and thirties, she was an artsy bike-riding regular of the San Francisco and Portland scenes, performing in bands with names like Flesh Napkin and Whortex, throwing costume dance parties and making strange art. For years she kept that self carefully separate from her therapist self, and only recently has she begun to bring them together. A long commitment to Buddhist practice, including time with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and her own spiritual and psychedelic experiences shape her work too, though she holds them lightly so that clients can arrive exactly as they are.
Bren's art table, where therapy and creativity meet.
The world she hopes her practice contributes to is one where we meet ourselves and each other with love and compassion, where "we take serious issues seriously, but we don't take ourselves too seriously," and where healing isn't work but something we can reach "through gentle curious play in the creative space." When I asked her what she has never quite found the words to say about her work, she wrote, "What I truly want is to use this lifetime to channel the magic and mystery for the benefit of all beings."
Giving her website a sense of place
When Bren and I began her Brand in a Day, she was clear about what she didn't want. She didn't want anything self-serious, too woo-woo or focused on diagnosis. "I don't want stock photos," she wrote, "and I definitely don't want it to look like AI made it." What she did want was for visitors to feel "warmth, lightness, creative, even fun, joy, silliness," while trusting that her work is grounded in experience and that their pain will be taken seriously.
So we started with the most honest material we had. Bren sent me a treasure trove of photos and videos and answered my brand questions off the cuff, and I built the new site around her real office. The orange couch, the stained glass window, the tea station and the daybed under the eaves are now front and center, because a picture of the room you'll sit in tells you far more about what it will feel like to work with someone than any carefully written paragraph about their therapeutic approach. For a therapist offering something as intimate as KAP, that sense of place is everything.
The sunporch, one of the spaces that now gives Bren's website its sense of place.
The visual style came straight from Bren's own taste. She told me she loves the aesthetic of 1970s hippie how-to books, the kind full of hand-drawn images, plants and rustic interiors, so we leaned into that warm, Whole Earth Catalog spirit and paired it with her own hand-drawn meditation art. We also reorganized her offerings so that KAP, KAP for Friends, retreats and workshops lead the way, gave her grief work and resources a home of their own, and built a clear path into the Meditation Club.
"It was a letting go and just trusting you that you understood me and my vision," Bren said of the process. "In a lot of ways, I hadn't even thought of, for example, incorporating how I love 70s hippie how-to books." A few days after the refresh went live, a friend stumbled onto the new site before Bren had even told her about it and left her a message bursting with excitement.
Learning to show up as herself
Bren hasn't always been ready to put herself out there. About two years ago, she told an assistant she was working with, "I don't want to do social media. I hate it. I don't want to show my face." Since then, she has turned getting comfortable on camera into something like a practice. She takes photos and videos of herself, and she and two close friends dance to a song almost every day and send the videos to one another wherever they are.
It still isn't entirely comfortable, and she's honest about that. "The other night I kind of sat up in bed and was like, oh my gosh, I'm showing myself," she told me, laughing about those middle-of-the-night thoughts. What keeps her going is a clear sense of how she wants to show up. "I don't want to look polished," she said. "I want to be myself, and that might be messy."
The Buddha's eyes painting that keeps watch over Bren's office.
This is the paradox I find myself talking about with so many therapists. Personal branding isn't really about you, because the work is bigger than any one person and the goal is to help people find something that could change their lives. And yet it is about you, because you are the one carrying that work into the world, and your particular way of doing it is exactly what helps the right people recognize you. Bren put it better than I ever have. Therapists were trained to be a blank slate, she said, but "we are half of this relationship, and who we are matters to the client. We're embodying our work. We use ourselves as part of the tool."
The technology is still the trickiest part for her, from posting her first video on her new Instagram account to lining up a song so her dance moves land on the beat. That's a familiar challenge, and one we're tackling together. Her vision for social media is refreshingly simple: no rigid posting schedule and no talking alone to a camera, just videos from her morning walks, the vultures circling over the land, the dances with her friends and the everyday moments that let people into her world. As it turns out, Bren also loves a spotlight. "Give me some karaoke," she said.
What's next for Bren
Twenty years into her practice and turning fifty in a few months, Bren is ready for more variety in her days and more of the work that lights her up. She'll keep seeing one-on-one clients, and alongside them she's growing her KAP practice, gathering the first KAP for Friends group, bringing KAP to retreats that others host and deepening her work with people facing grief and the end of life. She's also expanding the Meditation Club with more playlists, coloring pages and conversations, and nurturing her dream of Flowrobics.
Most of all, she'd love to be invited in. Rather than building every event from scratch, Bren wants to bring what she does to gatherings that already exist, whether that's a retreat, a conference, a festival or a group of colleagues and friends. If you organize something where a little flow, art, movement or meaningful conversation about death and grief would be welcome, she's exactly the person to call.
How to work with Bren
Learn about KAP, KAP for Friends, retreats and workshops on her Work With Me page. Bren offers therapy to clients in Virginia and Oregon.
Join the Ebb and Flow Meditation Club for weekly meditations, art, coloring pages and playlists at ebbandflowtherapy.com/join-meditation-club.
Explore her free grief resources, including her meditation series for grief and her favorite books on death and dying, on her Grief Resources page.
Invite her to speak or lead a workshop through her contact page.
