María-José García Anguiano
About Me
I am a licensed mental health counselor with more than twenty-seven years of clinical experience, including twenty-four years in outpatient psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and over sixteen years in private practice.
Alongside this work, I am a certified practitioner trained through Modern Mystery School International, offering Ensofic Reiki, healing and activation within the lineage of King Salomon.
I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography with a minor in Art History from the Maryland Institute College of Art, followed by a Master's degree in Expressive Therapies with a specialization in Art Therapy from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.
My training has continued throughout my career and includes Depth psychology, Transpersonal psychology, and contemplative approaches to self-inquiry. My work within the Modern Mystery School lineage extends this same inquiry into the energetic and spiritual dimensions of a person — the layer that psychology has long acknowledged and rarely had tools to reach directly. The two bodies of training inform one another. Both begin with the conviction that a person is more than their symptoms.
Growing up in different countries gave me an appreciation for diverse cultures and perspectives, helping me recognize that every person's life unfolds within a unique context. This continues to fuel my work with curiosity, humility, and respect.
In addition to practicing counseling and guidance, I am also a fine artist and pattern designer. Creativity, nature, and lifelong learning continue to nourish both my personal life and the work with those I serve.
My philosophy of Healing
Long before medicine separated the body from the soul, healing was understood as a return. In the temples of Asclepius, the sick came not for treatment but for incubation — a night spent in the sanctuary, waiting for the dream that would reveal what had fallen out of order. The cure was not administered. It was remembered.
The Hermetic texts of Alexandria carried a similar understanding, expressed as a principle: as above, so below. What is true in the greater order is true in the smaller one. A person is not a machine that breaks, but a pattern that can fall out of alignment with its source. Plotinus, writing in the third century, described the soul's task as a turning — not the acquisition of something new, but the removal of what obscures what is already there. He compared it to a sculptor who does not add to the stone, but cuts away until the figure stands revealed.
These ideas have outlasted the civilizations that produced them because they describe something structural. Illness, in the older understanding, is disorder. Healing is the restoration of order. And light — the oldest metaphor we have for consciousness — is what makes that restoration possible.
My work is grounded in this same understanding.
I do not believe healing is something one person does to another. The practitioner does not supply the light; the practitioner opens the door. What arrives is the person's own original design, still intact beneath whatever has accumulated over a lifetime — inherited patterns, old attachments, imprints left by experiences long since forgotten by the mind but not by the body.
The lineage I work within is precise about this. Each session has a structure and a purpose, refined across generations of practitioners who understood that reverence and rigor are not opposites. Nothing here is improvised.
What I have come to trust is that people are not fragile. They are obscured. And when the obscuring is lifted — sometimes gradually, sometimes all at once — what stands revealed is not a better version of the person, but the one that was always there.
That moment of recognition, when someone meets themselves without interference, is what I find most rewarding and honored to witness.