About Me

I’m Jas Chauhan.

I’m a Vancouver-based Registered Clinical Counsellor and a gay, second-generation South Asian cisgender man.

My own life has brought me into questions of identity, belonging, culture, the body, shame, grief, change, and what it means to live with experiences that cannot always be neatly resolved or undone.

Those experiences do not make me an expert on anyone else’s life. They have, however, made me deeply interested in the complexity of being human and in creating spaces where people do not have to simplify themselves in order to be understood.

The Work of Being

Why I call it The Work of Being.

I know how significant it can be to feel alone in an experience, especially when the people around you do not fully understand what you are carrying. That is part of what drew me to counselling.

I chose the name The Work of Being because I think there is work involved in being a person. We are continually making sense of what has happened to us, negotiating who we are in relation to others, adapting to circumstances we did not choose, grieving what changes, and deciding how we want to meet the life in front of us.

Sometimes that work is about changing something.

Sometimes it is about understanding why we became the way we are.

Sometimes it is about grieving or accepting what cannot be made different.

What You Can Expect

What you can expect from me

I’m engaged.

I bring my full attention and care to our time together. You matter here.

I’m curious.

I want to understand your world as it is for you, not to judge or assume.

I’m collaborative.

We make sense of things together and move at a pace that feels right for you.

I’ll challenge you with care.

Sometimes being challenged can help us notice what has become difficult to see from inside a familiar pattern. I’ll invite new perspectives when it feels useful, and with care.

Perspective

The perspectives I bring with me

Being gay and growing up as a second-generation South Asian person has shaped my awareness of how identity, culture, family, belonging, masculinity, sexuality, and social expectations can intersect.

It has also made me attentive to the experience of moving between different worlds and to the ways people can learn to edit, protect, hide, or question parts of themselves in order to belong.

Your story is your own.

These experiences inform the questions I may notice and the sensitivity I bring to the work, but I do not assume that sharing an identity means sharing the same experience.

You also do not need to share my identities to work with me. What matters most is whether you feel that the way I understand people and practise therapy fits what you are looking for.

Training + Experience

My training + experience

My path to counselling has been shaped by different ways of understanding people — through science, research, clinical training, community work, and the experiences that have taught me what cannot always be captured by theory alone.

2026 Registered Clinical Counsellor (RCC) + Canadian Certified Counsellor (CCC) I hold both RCC and CCC professional counselling credentials.

I am a Registered Clinical Counsellor (RCC) with the BC Association of Clinical Counsellors and a Canadian Certified Counsellor (CCC) with the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association. I provide individual counselling to adults in British Columbia.

2026–present Suicide bereavement + grief · Crisis Centre of BC I support people affected by suicide loss through groups and bereavement programming.

My work with the Crisis Centre of BC has given me significant experience supporting people affected by suicide loss and grief.

I have facilitated an eight-week suicide grief support group as well as bereavement connection programs including Cup of Tea for the Soul and Take a Walk With Us.

This work continues to shape how I think about grief, traumatic loss, accompaniment, and the importance of making room for experiences that cannot simply be fixed.

2025–2026 Clinical training · Health Initiative for Men I developed my individual counselling practice within a community focused on gay, bisexual, queer, and gender-diverse health and well-being.

I completed my clinical training with Health Initiative for Men (HIM), where I provided individual counselling within a community focused on the health and well-being of gay, bisexual, queer, and gender-diverse people.

My clinical supervisor was a Registered Social Worker whose professional background included sex therapy and existential psychotherapy. My work at HIM gave me the opportunity to develop as a counsellor while working closely with questions of sexuality, identity, relationships, embodiment, and queer experience.

The experience also contributed to my growing interest in existential and phenomenological ways of understanding human experience.

2023–2026 Master of Counselling · City University of Seattle I completed my graduate training in counselling theory, ethics, clinical practice, and therapeutic work.

My Master of Counselling gave me a formal foundation in counselling theory, ethics, assessment, clinical practice, and different ways of understanding distress and change.

It also taught me that knowing a theory and sitting with an actual person are very different things. My training gave me a foundation, while clinical practice continually challenged me to stay responsive to the person in front of me.

2021–present Community + group work I have been drawn to the ways people can make meaning and feel less alone in community with others.

Alongside individual counselling, community and group spaces have been an important part of how I have learned about belonging, relationship, identity, and what can happen when people feel recognized by others.

2021–present Queer in Colour I facilitate a community space for queer people of colour.

I facilitate Queer in Colour, a community space where queer people of colour can connect around identity, culture, belonging, relationships, and community.

This work has reinforced for me how meaningful it can be to have spaces where people do not have to explain or simplify every part of themselves before being understood.

2025 Colouring In I co-facilitated a closed therapeutic group for queer people of colour.

I co-facilitated Colouring In, a closed therapeutic group for queer people of colour.

Working in a group setting gave me another perspective on how healing can happen through being witnessed, recognized, and understood by others. It deepened my interest in belonging, relational experience, identity, and the ways connection can help people feel less alone.

2021–2025 Research + analytics Before counselling, I spent several years working with research, data, patterns, and complex problems.

Before moving fully into counselling, much of my professional work involved research, analytics, and making sense of complex information.

That work strengthened my ability to notice patterns, think carefully about evidence, and stay curious rather than jump too quickly to conclusions.

Counselling has expanded that way of knowing by reminding me that people cannot be fully understood through data, categories, or theory alone. Lived experience, relationship, emotion, context, the body, and meaning matter too.

2016–2021 BA in Biology · University of British Columbia I began with a foundation in human biology, science, and complex systems.

Studying biology taught me to think about people as complex systems rather than isolated parts. I became especially interested in human biology and in how the nervous system, physiology, environment, and lived experience can influence one another.

That background still shows up in how I practise today. It contributes to my interest in embodiment, nervous-system responses, and somatic ways of understanding what people experience, while also reminding me that biology is only one part of a much larger human story.

What I have learned across these experiences continues to shape how I practise today.

I draw from different therapeutic perspectives depending on the person, what we are working with, and what seems most useful in the moment.

Learn more about My Approach →

If something about the way I think or practise resonates with you, we can start with a conversation.

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