David's Story
Who Is David Fiala And How Did He Get Here?
I spent much of my early adulthood in emotional turmoil, searching for a way through pain that words couldn't fully describe. I didn't realize the answer was already inside me.
My father's death in 1981 triggered everything I had been carrying — and somehow became my resurrection. At his funeral, I experienced a grace I couldn't explain. I was finished with the life I had been living.
I began searching in earnest — working with people experiencing homelessness, spending time in monasteries, and eventually returning to school for degrees in Religious Studies and Clinical Social Work. I completed training at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing and years of personal therapy, exploring mindfulness, Eastern philosophy, and the works of Dr. David R. Hawkins — integrating it all into how I actually lived.
In 1991, I opened my private practice as a mind-body healer and social worker. For more than thirty years, I've worked with people navigating emotional pain, illness, fear, and grief — and witnessed what I can only call miraculous, when someone learns to release what they've been carrying.
This book is the result of that work: thirty years of client handouts and lived practice, distilled into a course taught to more than 1,200 counseling professionals.
I am not greater than you, nor less. The same love that lives in me lives in you. What I offer is simply a path back to what you already carry within.
David's Why
Why This Work. Why This Book. Why Now.
I had been setting out to find a way through my own pain, and when I found it, I could not keep it to myself. And in the sharing of it, my pain became a purpose.
For over thirty years, I watched clients carry burdens they did not know how to put down. Intelligent, capable, genuinely good people, struggling not because something was wrong with them, but because no one had ever given them a clear and honest path for working with their inner life.
That is why this book exists. That is why this work exists.
Everything I teach comes from a deep, heartfelt desire to relieve the suffering that people carry, offered from the highest level of awareness I can access within myself. It is not given from above. It is offered as one traveler to another, from someone who has walked the same road and knows, with certainty, that it leads somewhere worth going.
“Straight and narrow is the path. Waste no time.”
— Dr. David R. Hawkins
I took those words to heart decades ago. They have guided this work every moment of every year, and they are the spirit behind everything you will find here.
David's Approach
A Path, Not A Program
What I offer invites an ongoing practice of going inward, meeting what is there with honesty and compassion, and practicing the art of letting go, one moment at a time.
The framework I teach is grounded in a simple but profound truth: nothing and no one outside of you has the power to diminish what already lives within you. Not the pain, not the past, not the voices of self-doubt that have run the show for years. This work is a process of remembering and reconnecting with what has always been present beneath those experiences.
I draw on decades of clinical experience in social work, the healing arts, mindfulness, and the contemplative traditions. I bring all of it, humbly. My role is to share what I have learned and lived. The deeper truth, wisdom, and healing each person seeks already reside within them.
What to Expect
Sessions are unhurried. There is no pressure, no comparison, no agenda other than your own genuine wellbeing. You will be met exactly where you are.
I still experience fear, sadness, and anger. I still face challenges on any given day. The difference is this: with practice, I am less likely to mistake those feelings for who I am. I challenge myself to be a warrior every day. And I will ask the same of you.
Credentials & Background
David Fiala, MSSA, LISW-S
Licensed Independent Social Worker with Supervision Designation
License No. I.0008256, State of Ohio
Master of Science in Social Administration (MSSA), Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio
Graduate, Barbara Brennan School of Healing, 1993
Bachelor’s Degree in Religious Studies, John Carroll University, University Hts., Ohio
Private practice established 1991
More than 35 years of clinical experience
More than 1,200 continuing education hours taught to licensed counseling professionals
CE Webinar: Mindfulness and the Art of Letting Go. This course has been approved by the Ohio Counselor, Social Worker and Marriage and Family Therapist Board. CE Broker Tracking #: 20-1380610. This course is pending approval by the Florida Board of Clinical Social Work, Marriage & Family Therapy and Mental Health Counseling. CE Broker Tracking #: 20-1381138.
“You are not the pain you carry.
You are much greater than this.
It is finally time to realize you are the
love that lives quietly within you.”
— David Fiala