About Me
(Rev.) Deb Hansen, M.A., M.Div.
Work
After an unanticipated career with IBM, I’ve been companioning individuals doing inner work for over fifteen years. I continue to use skills and approaches from career coaching with a large outplacement firm and my life and leadership coaching practice. My experience in spiritual care as a hospital chaplain and as a spiritual companion took my work to a deeper level. I’ve also worked as a volunteer in other hospital, hospice, and a variety of organizational settings. As a hospice volunteer, I’ve offered Reiki in addition to spiritual support to patients and family members.
Soul work best describes the work I do with people today. It can be deep, healing, and life-changing—and reflects the on-going and uncomfortable transformation happening in the world today. My education included a coach training program, study of the world’s wisdom traditions with Interfaith ordination at The Chaplaincy Institute, and a Masters in Divinity focused on justice from Starr King. I loved the coursework I did at many of the schools of the Graduate Theological Union that included earth ethics as justice. For the past seven years, I’ve been steeping in the emerging potential of the collective healing movement, particularly the work of Thomas Huebl.
The work I do with people continues to be my most important teacher.
Life
I often describe myself as a life-long border-crosser when it comes to culture, language, religion, ethnicity, and worldview. From the U.S./Mexico border and beyond, to the spiritual “borders” of the world’s wisdom traditions, to the lines we create in the sand with our personal and cultural biases and experience, I am drawn to building bridges of understanding between peoples and healing divides. I see the world as a web of relationships and the process of individual and collective transformation as life endlessly renewing itself.
Having been part of a multi-faith delegation to Palestine – Israel in the fall of 2024, I find myself increasingly drawn to the work of peace, relationship, repair, and reconciliation.
I am also a first-time author. Borderlands: Stories from an El Paso Shelter is a memoir of my first three winters working in a network of shelters at the U.S./Mexico border. I’ve now spent a total of five winters there offering hospitality and practical support to people seeking refuge from violence, poverty, and political and climate instability.
My path has been like a labyrinth, a path of twists and turns – purposeful only in hindsight. I imagined myself teaching French in higher education, but it was a difficult job market at the time. I never saw myself in the business world, so it was a surprise to find myself in the corporate world. I did creative work with IBM for many years in marketing, product management, and communications. It included a stint in Paris at IBM’s Headquarters for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. After leaving the business world and training and practicing as a coach, my work with people was deepening into spiritual territory. The path eventually led me to a creative Interfaith seminary and hospital chaplaincy in Detroit. I wish I had gotten into this remarkable work earlier in life.
I have a deep reverence for the land and waters of northern Michigan and to the seasons and cycles of the earth calendar. I became more involved in the African American and other activist communities in Detroit, as well as the communities of Indigenous peoples of the north country. I have a strong connection to life in northern Michigan where I spend half the year before returning to El Paso, Texas for my seasonal work at the border.
