I’m David Wheeler, Ph.D.—a psychology professor, conceptual photographer, underwater hockey player, and life coach who listens with the whole body. My life has been a long immersion in the question: What does it mean to be fully human, fully alive, and fully present?
For over 30 years, I’ve walked with students and clients through the layered terrain of identity, story, trauma, and transformation. My professional home is in the Department of Psychology and Health Sciences at Robert Morris University, where I’ve taught everything from Physiological Psychology to Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Psychology of Adjustment to Career Development. But beyond syllabi and statistics, I help people name what’s been unnamed in them—through education, through presence, through remembering who they are.
I also bring the sensitivity and intuitive presence of a licensed massage therapist. My work with the body—through breath, stillness, and therapeutic touch—deepens my understanding of trauma and healing. It informs how I listen, how I notice, and how I meet people in the places words can’t always reach.
In the classroom and in coaching sessions, I bring the same approach: embodied, relational, trauma-aware, and fiercely gentle. I believe in the slow alchemy of trust. That we can learn, not through performance, but through presence. That the deepest shifts often feel like returning home.
I listen in the spaces where tears flow—not from sorrow, but from the soul—because I bring a fiercely gentle attunement.
This is more than a name—it’s a way of being. To be “underwater” is often seen as a sign of overwhelm. But to me, it means quiet strength, fluidity, silence, and depth. In the stillness beneath the surface, we discover things we can’t see from the shore.
“There’s a kind of peace that only water knows.”
I created this space for seekers and survivors, storytellers and shapeshifters, educators and empaths. People who are tired of fixing and ready to feel. People who want to write their own story—not just with words, but with their whole life.
This isn’t a mask. It’s an invitation.
Watch: “Five Minute Window” — A one-minute introduction to how I listen. A glimpse beneath the surface.
Dear David,
The unique way you listen—how you paid attention without giving advice, instead you helped me to navigate back to the core elements I was exploring—led to a profound breakthrough.
For months, I had been trying to move a new project forward with a new website, but I was creatively stuck. During our gift session I realized: "I need to take down my old website before the new project can truly emerge!" I said that casually and immediately forgot about it—but you didn’t.
At the end of our session, you brought it back. You offered it as an invitation for my next step. I acted on it that very day. The old website is gone—and I feel so liberated.
What a profoundly potent space you offer.
With gratitude,
Marai