On Her Journey:
Dominican-American Josie Rosario was raised in the Bronx, in a community where therapy or mental health was rarely — if ever — discussed. Regardless, she felt a deep calling to help and serve her community and embarked on a journey to become a licensed therapist. Early in her career, Rosario, who admits to always feeling connected to spirit, started to notice she was receiving spiritual downloads during her sessions with clients. In other words, she would see or sense things the client was going through without them necessarily telling her. But for years, she felt hesitant to embrace this side of herself and also knew it wasn't something she could work with in clinical sessions. After embarking on her own journey and having her spiritual awakening, everything suddenly started to click.
"The other piece of this was in working with my clients, [I realized] talk therapy is so white. It's like, 'Tell me what's in your consciousness — your awareness.' We're not even accustomed to that in our cultures, so it's very one-sided, and I'm a relational therapist. That's my specialty, so I'm very relational in the work," Rosario said. "And so I could tell that my clients were stuck. I could tell that there was stuff that was just out of their awareness and they just couldn't tap into it. And how if you don't even know that it's there? I'm getting [the spiritual downloads], but they don't have the awareness for it. So what am I going to do with that? I felt stuck. I felt boxed in. And so once I started to put the pieces together, that this wasn't just a hunch or just my gut, I was actually getting information from their spirit guides, I was like, 'I have to pause and start over.' So I started sharing with my clients that I'm intuitive and explaining what that means."
Toward the end of 2020, Rosario started slowly integrating spirituality into her work but decided to pause in order to come back with more intentionality and resources. During the spring of 2021, she took a brief sabbatical from therapy sessions and was only offering energetic readings until September, when she started working specifically under a coaching model with clients instead of from a clinical setting.
What She Does:
"I'm moving to the coaching model. I'm still a licensed therapist, but I'm moving to the coaching model because I don't want to deal with the red tape and I can do a little bit more," she said. "If we enter into a coaching situation, even though I'm a licensed therapist, you're not working with me as a licensed therapist, you're working with me as a coach, and in my coaching contract, that's very clear. That doesn't mean that I stop using therapy modalities. That doesn't mean that work goes out the window. That just means the capacity that we're working is not a therapy client."
In terms of how these coaching sessions look, Rosario said every first session begins with an energetic and spiritual reading in order to get clear. This allows both her and the client to see what's there and what needs to be worked on. Her specialty is helping people see those shadows. "If you come to me, it's because you don't know what your purpose is and the patterns you keep struggling with in life are keeping you from your purpose. Session one, we're going to talk about your purpose and then literally create a plan around what are the things that are keeping you off track," she said.
In terms of why she thinks this merging of psychology and ancient spiritual practices is important, she believes it's all about reaching our liberation. "For such a long time, these practices have been shunned. The stuff that I talk about, some people want to call it 'new age,' but these are ancient Indigenous practices. I'm reclaiming the word 'bruja.' Let's talk about it. The only reason why we grew up thinking brujeria is bad is because a white person told us that it was bad. Our colonizers told us it was bad, and here we are believing the Kool-Aid."
Where to Find Her:
@josierosarionyc
