Today we’d like to introduce you to James O’Neill.
James, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I was born into a blended family with an older sister, Kathleen, who had special needs. That shaped a lot. My family was deeply involved in disability rights work and Special Olympics, and service was the air we breathed: Scouts, 4-H, volunteering as a default mode of being in the world. In college I studied Buddhism and world religions intensely and spent time abroad in Thailand. When 9/11 happened, joining the Peace Corps felt like the next obvious step. Many of my friends headed toward the war effort. I went to a majority-Muslim country to serve my country. Bangladesh, which has its distinctions, none of which I’m going to dress up.
While I was there, I had a near-death experience on a ferry. I heard a voice from the other side, what I now understand as a spiritually transformative experience, and it saved my life. That moment opened the gap between psychology and the soul for me long before I had any language for it. It would shape everything that came after.
Coming home only sharpened the impulse to help. I considered medicine, but as a history and philosophy student, the prerequisite road would have been long. A close friend in a counseling program in New York thought I’d be good at it. I had never considered it. But I was already working at a special education school, watching counselors do real good for families, and Johns Hopkins happened to be launching a new program that summer. Things lined up.
I trained as a school counselor, and then the 2008 economy collapsed and the districts froze hiring. A mentor had insisted I take all the classes for a clinical license, just in case. That’s how I got hired by Sheppard Pratt and ended up a therapist in public schools.
Somewhere in the CEU process I took a mindfulness class, and I remembered how powerful meditation could be. Years of secondary trauma and compassion fatigue started moving, and I knew I wanted to teach it. That led me deeper: intensive Vipassana training, then hypnosis, inner-child work, and past-life regression. Territory most clinicians don’t go near.
The stress of the work eventually contributed to my divorce. After that, I wanted to be close to my kids, so I started a practice nearby. The ferry experience had never left me, and the deeper I went into clinical work, the clearer it became that the soul-level material I’d glimpsed years before wasn’t going to stay in the background. That’s part of why I’m now finishing a PhD in metaphysical counseling and studying the lineage of thinkers who took that gap seriously without abandoning rigor: Mitch Horowitz, Maxwell Maltz, Neville Goddard, William James.
A month or so ago I started a Substack called Dark Night Alchemy. I wanted to fully express what I actually find helpful, not the polished, performative wellness version, but the real one.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
No. It hasn’t been smooth, and pretending otherwise wouldn’t do anyone any good.
Coming home from Bangladesh changed me in ways I didn’t have language for. I carried the ferry experience quietly for years before I had the framework to make sense of it.
The clinical work in the schools mattered, but secondary trauma and compassion fatigue are real, and they accumulate. They eventually contributed to the end of my marriage. The divorce was its own reckoning. Becoming a single dad rebuilt my whole sense of what mattered, and I moved my practice closer to my kids because I wanted to actually be there.
The hardest chapter has been more recent. I went through some health challenges I haven’t talked about publicly, and the insurance situation around them left me financially exposed in ways I didn’t see coming. There were stretches where I seriously considered whether to keep my practice open at all. The Substack I started, Dark Night Alchemy, takes its name from that reality. I’ve been writing from inside the dark, not from the other side of it.
What I will say is that I am coming out of it. Not in the made-it-to-the-summit sense. More like I’m finding my footing again, and the work I do now has a sharpness to it that wouldn’t have been possible before. It’s part of why I love helping people get unstuck. I know what stuck feels like. I know how hard it is to believe there’s still a path forward when nothing is showing you one. And I know what it’s like to start seeing joy again when you thought it was gone for good.
We’ve been impressed with Journey Mindfulness, LLC, jamesoneillguide.com, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
I run a private practice as James O’Neill, based in Columbia, Maryland. My work lives at jamesoneillguide.com. The name reflects how I see the role: a guide beside you, not above you. The practice operates legally as Journey Mindfulness, LLC, but the work has grown into something larger than that name now carries.
What I specialize in is deep inner work and the integration of that work into everyday life. Most people who find me have already done the surface-level stuff. They’ve read the books. They’ve journaled. They’ve tried CBT or affirmations or cognitive reframes. Some of that helped. Most of it didn’t take them as deep as they actually needed to go. My work picks up where those approaches reach their ceiling.
I bring the clinical training of a licensed psychotherapist together with years of study in meditation, hypnosis, inner-child work, past-life regression, and the metaphysical lineage I’m finishing my PhD in. The synthesis matters. Most clinicians won’t touch the soul-level material. Most spiritual teachers can’t hold a clinical container. I sit in the gap between, on purpose.
What sets me apart, if anything does, is that I’m not afraid to go where the work actually has to go. I’ve been there myself. I’ve walked through pain, trauma, and dark nights I didn’t think I’d come out of, and I’ve also experienced real change on the other side of that. Not the polished version. The real one. That’s the ground I work from with my clients. Not theory. Lived material.
What I offer is a mirror, not a map. An honest reflection of what’s actually happening, paired with the work it takes to do something about it. The reader chooses what to do with the reflection.
What I’m most proud of is watching clients change their lives in ways they could never have imagined when they first walked in. That is deeply meaningful to me. It’s why I do this.
If there’s one thing I’d want your readers to know: they matter. Whatever they’re carrying right now, however dark the chapter feels, there are people like me who can sit with them through it. They are not alone.
What would you say have been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
The most important lesson, and one I’m still learning, is being honest with myself about what I truly want to experience in life. That sounds simple. It isn’t. A lot of us spend years running other people’s scripts, or our own scripts written in moments we’d outgrown years ago. Naming what I actually wanted, with no filter and no apology, was the work that made everything else possible.
Another important lesson is that there are people willing to help you if you ask. That’s not easy for guys to do. It wasn’t easy for me. I was so oriented toward helping others that I neglected myself for a long time. Learning to love myself was a real challenge. Learning to receive was harder than I expected.
Underneath both of those, I had to learn to meet myself with kindness and compassion instead of the cold, hard voice of my inner critic. Loosening that grip changed the texture of my whole life.
I also had to learn to take risks. To accept feedback, but only from people I knew in my heart had my best interest at heart, not just anyone with an opinion. And to make what one of my teachers called glorious mistakes. If you’re going to actually do anything meaningful in the world, you will get things wrong. You will let people down, and you will let yourself down. That’s the cost. Pay it and keep walking.
And the small moments matter more than you realize. The phone call you almost didn’t make. The conversation that turned into something. The kindness you give someone on the worst day they haven’t told you about. Those are the moments that build a life.
Pricing:
- Individual sessions $225
- Depth Work $2500/month
- Quantum Healing Hypnosis $495
- MBSR Online $197
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jamesoneillguide.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jamesoneillguide/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jamesoneillguide/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-o-neill-lcpc-14492914/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@jamesoneillguide
