Meet Cindi
This is Cindi (before she had gray hair) and Buddy (before he retired from his therapeutic horse counseling). Together, Cindi, Buddy, and an Equine Specialist were a team providing Equine Assisted Psychotherapy to adults, children and families.
In 2004, Cindi was trained in equine-assisted psychotherapy and is passionate about the way both animals and nature facilitate emotional and spiritual healing. Keith and Cindi live on a ranchette in the Central Valley of California. In 2010, Cindi was diagnosed with a rare bone disease that required three cervical spine surgeries and necessitated giving up her three beloved therapy horses. She spent a great deal of time in her own therapy dealing with physical losses related to her disease and the loss of her beloved horses. God surprised Cindi and her husband by opening a door in 2016 for their horse acreage to be turned into Wellspring Charitable Gardens. What was once pasture is now a market garden with a team of staff and volunteers. Together they plant, grow and harvest seasonal farm-to-table produce, educate the community about the value of nurturing healthy soil, soul, and body, and sell weekly produce boxes to local families, schools, and restaurants. One hundred percent of the proceeds are donated to Wellspring Counseling Ministries.
More About the Author
As long as Cindi can remember, people have told her that she was an “old-soul”— someone who demonstrated an understanding and seriousness about life unusual for her age. Her desire to understand people — where they came from, and how their life histories shaped them—drew her into the world of counseling, theology, and psychology.
When she was 15 years old, Cindi chose to follow Jesus Christ as her Savior and Lord. God used the words of Isaiah 58 and Isaiah 61 to call her into a counseling ministry within the fields of psychology and social work. As a result, she
studied Scripture, took classes in theology, and began her counseling career in the inner cities of Sacramento and Stockton, California.
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Cindi and her college sweetheart, Keith, married in 1984 with a desire to study abroad and become missionaries in Europe. Cindi received a Fulbright research scholarship to study at the University of Stuttgart and the University of Tübingen in Germany as part of her graduate studies in Social Work and Psychology. This allowed them both to study at German universities and become lay missionaries abroad. She and Keith are both fluent in German and enjoy foreign languages and culture.
Since then, she has integrated her work and family life to serve the needs of children and adults in schools, county mental health agencies, private practice, and non-profit missionary organizations here and abroad for nearly four decades. Throughout her career as a licensed psychotherapist, she has integrated a strong, biblical faith with her clinical training and experience. She took courses in Greek at a local Bible college and studied Hebrew at a local Jewish synagogue to inform her work as Founder and Director of Wellspring Counseling Ministries, which provides Christian counseling resources and referral services to the community. As a therapist, she specializes in working with faith-based couples healing from the wounds of sexual addiction as well as women and children healing from trauma,
loss, depression, and anxiety.
For fun, Cindi loves to bake, share, and eat German-style sourdough bread and has discovered the joy of making her own kombucha. Keith and Cindi enjoy being out in nature, conversing, reading, laughing, cooking, and eating har-
vest-fresh meals with friends and family at kitchen and garden tables. Cindi is most fulfilled when she succeeds at creating intimate spaces for people with or without faith to express honest questions, doubts, feelings, thoughts, and experiences about the complexities of life. Keith and Cindi have been married for 39 years, have an adult daughter,
numerous daughters and sons of their hearts, two cats, 20 chickens, an unknown number of gophers, racoons, lizards, snakes, insects, and even the occasional peacock or peacock hen.
