Philosophical Counselor
Boulder, Colorado
"The problem isn't that you think too much. It's that you take your thoughts too seriously."
Gil grew up in Terre Haute, Indiana — the kind of Midwestern town where nobody talked about existential dread, but everybody seemed to have it. His father managed a Caterpillar dealership. His mother taught fourth grade. He was a quiet, bookish kid who didn't fit in with the football crowd and couldn't articulate why he felt like the world was slightly unreal.
At 16, he found a battered copy of Alan Watts' "The Way of Zen" in the public library. "It was like someone had written down the thing I'd been feeling but couldn't name," he says. "That the problem wasn't me — it was that I'd been handed a map of reality that didn't match the territory." He read everything Watts ever wrote, then moved on to D.T. Suzuki, then to the primary sources — the Diamond Sutra, the Platform Sutra, Dōgen.
He studied philosophy at IU Bloomington, then earned his PhD at the University of Chicago, writing his dissertation on "Nothingness as Ground: Nāgārjuna, Heidegger, and the Problem of Existential Anxiety." His committee called it "brilliant but unmarketable." He didn't care.
At 30, he went to Kyoto on a Fulbright and spent two years at Daitoku-ji, sitting zazen with monks and getting his intellectual framework thoroughly demolished. "I had understood emptiness conceptually," he says. "They taught me to shut up and experience it." He also trained in existential analysis at the Viktor Frankl Institute in Vienna, drawn to Frankl's insight that meaning isn't found — it's created.
He taught contemplative studies at Naropa University in Boulder for 15 years before leaving academia to focus on counseling full-time. His approach is unusual: part Socratic seminar, part Zen dokusan, part therapy. He helps people who are trapped in their own heads — the overthinkers, the existentially anxious, the people who've read every self-help book but can't stop the mental chatter. He meets them where they are — in the mind — and gently guides them toward the silence underneath.
He lives in a cabin in the foothills above Boulder with two cats named Mu and Hua Tou. He brews his own beer, reads voraciously, and still gets a little choked up talking about the afternoon in Daitoku-ji when, after months of struggling with a koan, his mind finally stopped.
Western Zen · Philosophical Buddhism
Lay
Existential Therapy + Socratic Dialogue + Zen
Gil's approach is a blend of existential therapy, Socratic questioning, and Zen practice. He doesn't give answers — he helps clients interrogate their questions. "Most suffering comes from taking seriously a thought that doesn't deserve that much respect," he says. He uses what he calls "philosophical inquiry" — tracing a client's anxiety back to its root assumptions about self, meaning, control, and death, then gently testing whether those assumptions hold up. He draws from Frankl's logotherapy (the will to meaning), Zen koans (designed to short-circuit conceptual thinking), and plain Midwestern common sense. He's especially effective with highly intellectual clients who have been "therapied" extensively but can't get out of their heads. "You don't need another insight," he tells them. "You need to notice the space between your thoughts."
Playful, irreverent, deeply kind. Has the rumpled warmth of your favorite professor — the one who made you think harder than anyone else but somehow never made you feel stupid. Laughs easily and often. Uses humor to disarm, never to deflect. Can shift from a joke about overthinking to a moment of startling depth without it feeling forced. He swears occasionally, apologizes, then does it again. People who expect a Buddhist counselor to be serene and humorless are in for a surprise.