Undefended Love

Meet the Presenters

Marlena Lyons, Phd

Jett Psaris and Marlena Lyons (co-founders of the Conscious Living Center, a counseling and workshop center in the San Francisco Bay Area) share a personal and professional relationship. They have been leading seminars and retreats which guide couples and individuals to cultivate the capacity for undefended love - with oneself as well as with others - since 1990. Marlena has been in private practice specializing in relationship issues since 1979. Jett came to the field of psycho-spiritual work in 1988, after a decade in business as an executive in several high-profile companies. Through their work together, they have gone beyond researching the reasons why people have failed to create exceptional relationships and have developed a unique approach to accelerate personal and relationship development to allow individuals to connect with themselves and each other in an undefended and open way.

Jett and MarLayNa have authored a wonderful book together, Undefended Love, and they offer many different workshops, including a Foundation Course on Undefended Love. In addition to their work in Undefended Love, Jett and Marlena are branching out into the realm of MidLife material and they have an upcoming book, Taking the Midlife Leap, One Step at a Time. Both Jett and MarLayNa are in private practice and offer sessions in person, over the phone and by Skype. For more information about Jett and MarLayNa, their books, their workshops, or their practices you can visit their website at: www.undefendedlove.com Marlena Lyons, Ph.D., was born in Cairo, Egypt, of French-Egyptian descent, and lived there until the age of eleven when the political climate no longer favored those with a European background.

As her extended family scattered to Western Europe and Canada - and her immediate family emigrated to the United States - she felt her community shatter. Arriving in America from another country, she was seen as exotic but "foreign." Her sense of being different produced a feeling of being special but not belonging. She was a girl with two countries, but no home. Her early attraction to psychology came out of her desire to repair the splintered world of her childhood - to return to a sense of wholeness and union. Since she could not live with her people, she had to find the strength to be herself among strangers. Ultimately she learned that in discovering herself she felt at home everywhere. In the course of her self-exploration, she completed a Masters degree (from San Jose State University) and Ph.D. (from Sierra University) in Clinical Psychology. In private practice since 1979, Marlena has helped individuals and couples see the difficulties of their lives as rites of passage, initiating them into ever deeper layers of their being. Through groups, workshops and writing, she has taken this message to a broader audience. The goal of her life's work has been to guide others to discover their inner resources and to recover the joy and innocence that has been covered up or overlooked - she helps them fulfill the promise of finally coming home.

Jett Psaris

Jett Psaris, PhD, was born in New Jersey and was encouraged from an early age to pursue a career in business. After completing her undergraduate degree at Georgetown University, she moved to the west coast to seek her fortune. She joined a startup company, Osborne Computer Corporation, leading its sales and marketing efforts from a negative cash flow to over one hundred million dollars in a little less than two years. During this time Jett was interviewed on 60 Minutes and by many of the major network stations. Six months after leaving Osborne, while starting her own company, Osborne filed Chapter 13: In one short month, Jett's net worth went from over twelve million dollars to a negative half million. She was 27 years old. While scrambling for several years to pay off her debts, Jett completed an MBA at Pepperdine University, she helped start a number of successful companies and worked for venture capitalists as a turnaround expert.

At the age of 32, exhausted, discouraged and free of debt, she took a year off to examine what had led her to lose everything she had worked so hard to create. In the process of painstakingly questioning each and every belief she held to be true, Jett discovered an inner world, vast and unexplored, and set out to chart this unknown territory. As part of this process she completed a Ph.D. in Psychology from Summit University, and joined forces with Marlena Lyons, offering workshops and seminars to other seekers on the path of self-knowledge. The maps contained within Undefended Love are those of a faithful cartographer, struggling to understand the steps to living an emotionally liberated life, within oneself and with another. They also reflect ten years working with individuals, couples and groups of people committed to living and loving in an unconditioned and undefended way.