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Calm Your Mind. Find Your Direction. Live With Clarity.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, stuck, lost, or disconnected, I help you regain mental clarity, emotional balance, and meaningful direction through one-on-one mentoring. I am a licensed mental health coach with seven years of experience. I also have over 20 years of personal practice in Zen Buddhism.
David Listen, Licensed Mental Health Counselor
You may be feeling…
- Constant mental noise, stress, or overthinking
- Unsure about your life or career direction
- Strained or confusing relationships
- Emotionally reactive or easily overwhelmed
- Disconnected from meaning, purpose, or motivation
- Like you know something needs to change, but you don’t know how
You don’t have to figure this out alone.
How I Help
Through one-to-one life coaching and mentoring, we work together in calm, practical sessions. We explore what’s happening in your life right now, helping you gain perspective, clarity, and actionable practices to apply between sessions. We review what changes, refine your approach, and build momentum. Real transformation happens through small, consistent shifts in how you think, respond, and live.
Career Direction & Life Transitions
Feel clear and confident about your next professional step. We work on career changes, leadership challenges, entrepreneurship, and major life transitions – clarifying direction, values, and decisions.
Mindset, Confidence & Inner Stability
Learn to work directly with fear, self-doubt, overthinking, and emotional reactivity. This is practical guidance for building confidence and clarity by understanding how your mind actually works.
Relationships & Communication
Create clearer, healthier relationships by working with your inner responses first. We focus on communication, boundaries, and emotional clarity in romantic, personal, and professional relationships.
About Me
I am a licensed mental health counselor and offer one-on-one mentoring for people seeking greater clarity, balance, and direction in their lives.
I spent 11 years as a fully ordained Zen monk and later served as director of a Zen retreat center in upstate New York. I continue to teach meditation and give public lectures. For more than two decades, I have worked one-on-one with people in a wide range of life situations.
Through long-term meditation practice, I’ve observed how emotions arise, how they move through us, and how we can relate to them with greater skill and awareness. I also hold a Master’s degree in Mental Health Counseling. Today, I offer practical life coaching for people navigating the challenges of modern life.
Testimonials
Sasha Petelin
David had helped me work through a particularly challenging phase of healing my trauma, after which we meet weekly for about eight months, and I found a lot of benefit in his counsel as a meditation teacher as well as in his presence of heart.
“Feeling seen and heard in our sessions has opened a clearer sense of relating to myself and others, and with his help in navigating the terrain of my practice I now continue with a newfound trust in myself and in life.
“I would recommend David to anyone looking for guidance in developing confidence in meditation and in themselves, and who doesn’t mind doing the hard work of encountering themselves more fully.
Jeffrey Lin
Dear David:
I would like to thank you for helping me overcome my anxiety and other issues that had caused a great amount of suffering in my body and mind. With your help over the past two years, I’ve been able to gradually find peace and re-learn how to live again.
During this time I’ve had a big change in my perspective on life, and due to your instruction I now have a more accurate understanding of mindfulness, and am more able to apply it to my daily life.