Jon Terrell, M.A.

Jon Terrell, M.A.

Jon Terrell is an expert in emotional healing. He helps people transform grief, anger, and other difficult emotions.

As people heal their past emotional pain, they naturally love more fully for deeper, more trusting relationships in all areas of their lives.

Jon leads retreats to help people live into their full aliveness and joy. Over the past 25 years, hundreds of people seeking relief from emotional pain have benefited from his work.

Jon also has a private practice offering counseling, body-oriented work, and advanced meditation training.

About Jon's Work

Many of us hold old emotional wounds that affect our lives and relationships. As these heal, we can open up to the joy, love, and light available in each moment.

Life can bring us deep losses that are difficult to cope without the help of others:

  • The death of a loved one
  • The ending of a significant relationship
  • The loss of one's career or abilities

A gifted intuitive, Jon supports healing and awakening at all levels: body, mind, and spirit. Jon is an ordained minister, psychotherapist, energy healer, meditation teacher, and retreat leader.

As a seasoned professional, he offers a different approach to healing and awakening that integrates years of professional training with direct personal healing and awakening experiences.

Early Experiences with Inner Light and Awakening

Jon's childhood transcendental experiences began a lifelong journey of discovery into Inner Light, emotional healing, and embodied spirituality.

When Jon was 5, he had a powerful experience of Inner Light for the first time. He was playing with a wooden ruler when the sun's light reflected off the ruler into his eyes. Flashes of light soon carried him into a joyful and healing inner world. He began spending time each day exploring this realm.

Years later, in his late teens and twenties, he learned that what he experienced was similar to the accounts of spiritual teachers, shamans, and spiritual healers. 

He also realized that some modern psychological techniques, such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), work similarly to what he spontaneously developed to help him heal as a child.  

Agni Yoga Meditation and Energy Healing

While an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Jon was part of a small study group exploring spiritual and psychological teachings worldwide. Organized by Ralph Abraham, professor of mathematics at UCSC, members sought out the best teachers and teachings to help awaken consciousness.

Upon the recommendation of  psychologist, writer, and researcher Ralph Metzner,  Jon and some other group members found the School of Actualism in Valley Center, California.

In 1970, Jon entered this training program. It helped him understand and further explore the inner light of his early experiences, sometimes called Agni Yoga or Inner Light-Fire Meditation

For the next 18 years, Jon developed progressively deeper expertise in Inner Light meditation and energy healing. Gradually, he developed extended perception, the ability to see beyond what we ordinarily perceive.

During this period, Jon was ordained by the school as an interfaith minister and certified by them as an advanced meditation teacher. He became the director of their energy healing program and trained numerous bodyworkers. 

As the school grew, Jon taught hundreds of students in California, Texas, and New York. He trained teachers and lectured at wellness conferences. He designed training manuals, supervised staff, and implemented new programs for the school.

Jon had numerous profound awakening and healing experiences during this period. For Jon's account of one powerful awakening experience resulting from energy healing, click here.

Jon directed Actualism’s Healing Bodywork program for 14 years, and managed 7 training centers throughout the country.

After the founder’s death in 1984, he was elected President of Actualism.

As part of the school, Jon directed one of the first integral, holistic health centers in the United States. It brought together Eastern and Western medicine, including acupuncture, massage, psychotherapy, and meditation.

He also organized a series of conferences in Escondido, California, on “Healing Energy,” bringing together leaders in medicine and psychotherapy to offer a holistic healthcare model.

Jon studied with John Upledger, D.O, founder of the Upledger Institute, learning CranioSacral Therapy. He trained with John Thie, founder of Touch for Health. He received numerous trainings such as Reiki, therapeutic touch, and Core Energetics.

Academic Credentials 

Jon's academic education includes traditional psychology, psychotherapy, and spiritual psychology.

He holds a bachelors in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has a Masters in Transpersonal Psychology from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, now called Sofia University.

As part of this training, he studied Guided Imagery at the Huntington Therapy Institute in Huntington, NY.

Jon completed advanced graduate training in Marriage and Family Therapy and Mental Health Counseling at Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts, receiving a Certificate in Advanced Graduate Studies (CAGS).  The training included a 600-hour internship working with individual clients in  Greenfield and Orange, Massachusetts counseling centers in.

He has received training in Psychosynthesis, Holotropic Breathwork, Jungian psychology, grief counseling, and Gestalt Therapy.

Process Approach

Since 1998, Jon has integrated Process Therapy into his work. Jon studied with Carol Jud at the Institute for Process Therapy in New Haven. He completed a six-month internship under the direction of  the Rev. Lawrence Stibbards and Joy Davey, Ph.D  at Shalom Mountain Retreat and Study Center in the Catskill Mountains of New York State.

At this center, he received hundreds of hours of additional training in sexuality, attachment theory, core energetics, Jungian psychology, couples counseling, and spiritual psychology.

Jon was a staff leader and faculty member at Shalom Mountain Retreat Center from 2002-2018, where he led retreats.

Approach To Healing

Jon refined his therapeutic focus at Shalom Mountain. It is to help people become more genuinely human and whole. His work is about opening to the love light within each person.

To that end, he moves beyond the traditional therapeutic power model of therapist/client to relate human to human. Clients are encouraged to take up their full power by working through past pain where they have been stuck and powerless and engaging fully in the world in the present moment.

Videos With Jon Terrell

A Video Interview with Jon Terrell: The Subject Tonight Is Love

Jon Terrell, the Star Experience, on the Genie Show

Where To Find Jon Terrell

For the past 14 years, Jon has been a Core Faculty Member at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. He leads meditation classes and workshops.

Jon leads 3-5 day retreats focusing on healing emotional pain in Florida, California, and Massachusetts. He also offers one retreat each year teaching Inner Light-Fire meditation.

Jon Terrell also offers distance energy healing and counseling using the telephone, FaceTime, and Skype.

To ask Jon Terrell a question or for more information, use the form below.

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"I can't say enough about my recent experience at Jon Terrell's retreat.

Under Jon's professional, loving, and patient guidance I was finally able to tap into painful emotions that I'd been unable to reach in 27 years of psychotherapy.

Previous to the retreat, I was unable to properly breathe. As long as I could remember, I had been holding my breath. Every time I stopped to pay attention, I realized that I wasn't breathing. Taking a deep breath was even more difficult, because the breath actually stopped painfully at my mid-section, making it impossible for me to take a full, deep breath.

In the course of my session with Jon, during which he constructed a safe and nurturing environment, I was able to let go of deep and unhealthy emotions; in fact, they came pouring out of me. From that moment on, I have been able to breathe deeply without pain.

From that moment on, I find that I breathe normally throughout my day. There is a physical feeling of openness inside of me that I have never known. I have a real sense of freedom and wholeness that I thought was impossible for me to experience at the age of 52. I will be forever grateful to Jon."

Gymee Sills, Windsor, CT


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