About Leslie

Leslie Davenport has unique qualifications in the Body-Mind-Spirit field. San Francisco Chronicle’s dance critic Allan Ulrich reviewed Leslie as a professional dancer endowed with “A superior sense of balance…and powers of communication that set her apart from the herd.” As a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in practice for more than fifteen years, she understands the health impact of thoughts and emotions. And a passion for the mystery of the human spirit drew her to become an ordained interfaith minister in 1984. As a pioneer in the role of guided imagery in psychotherapy and integrative medicine, Leslie has braided her expertise with body-mind-spirit into a health-care revolution that recognizes the role of meaning and the spiritual dimensions of life as an integral part of health and healing.

In the late 1980’s Leslie was a founder of the Humanities Program at Marin General Hospital, which evolved into the Institute for Health and Healing in collaboration with California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. Her years of clinical experience culminated in the publication of Healing and Transformation through Self-Guided Imagery, through Celestial Arts/Random House. She has also served as Editorial Consultant to Aspen Publishers for their book, Holistic Health Promotion and Complementary Therapies: A Resource for Integrative Practice.

Leslie has more than ten years teaching experience at universities including Mills College, University of San Francisco, California State University Hayward, Holy Names University, and she served as core faculty with the Transpersonal Psychology Graduate Program at John F. Kennedy University.

An engaging speaker, she lectures in a broad range of setting that has included KRON Television, the National Wellness Conference, Uncovering the Heart of Higher Education Conference hosted by the California Institute of Integral Studies and the Fetzer Institute, to name just a few. She was honored in her home county with the Marin Breast Cancer Council’s “Honor Thy Healer” award in 2003.

Leslie is currently in practice at the Health & Healing Clinic at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco and Marin.  She is also clinical faculty with the Institute for Health & Healing’s Integrative Medicine Program, faculty with John F Kennedy University, and clinical supervisor for the California Institute of Integral Studies.