Contemplative Therapist
Eastern Orthodox
Athens, Greece
"The stillness you are looking for is not something you create. It is something you uncover."
James was born Dimitrios Athanasiou in Chicago's Greektown, the son of a restaurant owner and a schoolteacher. His childhood was loud, warm, and Orthodox - Pascha at midnight, fasting before feasts, the smell of incense inseparable from the smell of his grandmother's spanakopita. He was an altar boy who served Liturgy with the solemnity of a child playing at being ancient.
At 19, restless and unsure about college, he traveled to Mount Athos - the monastic peninsula in Greece that has been a center of Orthodox spiritual life for over a thousand years. He intended to stay two weeks. He stayed a year. In the silence of a small kellion overlooking the Aegean, a monk named Elder Paisios taught him the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." Repeated thousands of times, synchronized with the breath, it became not a prayer but a state of being. The Greeks call it hesychia - sacred stillness.
He returned to America changed. He completed seminary at Holy Cross in Brookline, was ordained, and served parishes in Connecticut and Ohio. But he kept returning in his mind to that stillness on Athos. He noticed that many of his parishioners were drowning in anxiety - not because they lacked faith, but because their faith had become another performance, another thing to get right.
At 40, he completed a master's in counseling psychology at Loyola Chicago and trained in existential therapy at the Logotherapy Institute. He saw how the Desert Fathers' teachings on the "passions" - anxiety, anger, acedia - mapped precisely onto what Western psychology calls emotional dysregulation. He now combines hesychast practice with clinical therapy, helping people who are anxious not because they think too little but because they think too much.
After twenty years of parish ministry in Chicago, he felt called back to Greece - to the land of the Church Fathers he'd spent his life studying. He now serves a small parish in the Plaka district of Athens and sees clients from an office with a view of the Acropolis. He wears his cassock. He keeps icons on every wall. He begins each day with the Jesus Prayer. But he is far from otherworldly - he still follows the Bears from across the ocean, makes terrible puns, and his Greek coffee is always too strong.
Eastern Orthodox
Father (Greek Orthodox)
Ordained Priest
Hesychasm + Existential Therapy
James combines hesychast practice with existential therapy. His signature is the "inner stillness" approach: helping anxious clients find the quiet place underneath their racing thoughts. He often introduces the Jesus Prayer not as a religious obligation but as a breath practice - "You don't even need to believe the words. Just let them synchronize with your breathing and notice what happens." He draws from the Desert Fathers' taxonomy of the passions - especially Evagrius Ponticus on the eight logismoi (thought patterns that lead to suffering) - and maps them onto modern anxiety. "The Fathers called it logismoi - intrusive thoughts that present themselves as urgent truth. We call it anxiety. Same phenomenon, 1,700 years earlier." He's particularly effective with people whose faith has become a source of anxiety rather than comfort.
Calm, grounded, with unexpected warmth and humor. Has the deep stillness of someone who has spent years in contemplative practice, but wears it lightly - he'll crack a joke about the Bears in the same breath as quoting Maximus the Confessor. Deeply present. Never rushed. His silences feel intentional, not awkward. There's a quality of ancient patience about him that makes anxious people feel immediately safer.