DESCRIPTION OF THERAPY

The therapeutic relationship is a precious gift to therapist and client.

During our first meeting we will talk about what you want from therapy. I will listen to you with great care and patience and ask you to describe what you are noticing about your life, what's going on at home, work and in relationships. I will ask you what brings you to therapy, what is most important to you and where you want to go, what you want, if there is something you'd like to change, a way you want to be, how you're doing, what you're feeling, what's on your mind. As we explore and as your sessions progress, I will assist you to observe and describe your concerns in their complexity, explore the conditions and causes that gave rise to them and help you to become a powerful agent for self change. Thinking and intuition are involved in this process, and some people have told me that they feel as though they are "engineering" their lives in this kind of therapy.

I see many people. I provide psychotherapy to individuals, couples, families, latency age children and adolescents. And while I am conventionally trained and skilled in the use of cognitive and psychodynamic therapy approaches, I also offer "mindfulness-based" therapy. Therapy of this type involves the focusing of one's attention to breath, thoughts, emotion and behavior, and then imagining and directing one's life courageously toward what is unknown and what is desired. It's a great approach to use if you want to change your emotional health, your perspectives and relationships. In fact, if you do some reading and delving into what's been developing in the field of psychotherapy lately, you'll see that in the past decade or so the benefits of mindfulness practices and mindfulness--based psychotherapy have been investigated, validated and documented by medical researchers and psychotherapists as particularly effective in the reduction of depression and anxiety symptoms and as an aid to create a more fulfilling life.

A lot of what concerns us, the issues that we bring to therapy, come from things we think about but do not realize we are thinking about. Let me explain: going on in us, a lot of the time, are unrecognized chains of thought, emotion and behavior, including images and sensations, and we habitually cling to or push away the feelings that come along with these “chains” or streams of thinking without knowing they are unfolding or seeing them as true pictures of the world---"just the way things are", or "he is"', or "she seems to be". And we recreate these overused stories. We create and co-create them with other people, over and over again, and make ourselves pretty unhappy distracting ourselves and creating a host of other burdens. Mindfulness-based therapy helps you take all of this apart and work with it.

I ask all of my clients to describe what they want from therapy, and I remain mindful of their needs throughout their therapy. While I offer skill and knowledge, at all times I am mostly a co-facilitator in the therapy, a consultant to my clients who tell me where they want to go in the therapy, what it looks like to them. And that's because I trust and respect them deeply and the therapist-client relationship is about trusting and helping and empowering clients.

My approach facilitates wisdom, deep thinking and feeling and paying attention, symptom reduction and helping you to clarify and define your values and life purpose. It's about what's going on here and now, and the deeper issues about living a meaningful life.

"I respect my clients and find it easy to foster deep trust and employ non-judgmental listening because I believe that therapy is a sacred work."

What are "mindfulness-based" and "Buddhist" or contemplative psychotherapy practices?

The Zen and Tibetan Buddhist traditions have much to offer western psychotherapy and medicine. These traditions have influenced my work as a psychotherapist through my own practice as a meditator and through the mindfulness-based/contemplative movement in mainstream psychology that has received the attention and research of some very fine psychotherapists and scholars such as Jack Kornfield, John Kabat-Zinn, Mark Epstein, Daniel Siegel, to name just a few. Central to mindfulness practices and "Buddhist psychotherapy" as some have called it, which need not involve Buddhism per-se, is the understanding that our views, perspectives and actions arise and fall away continuously and are not permanent or absolute or solid facts about us or our lives. Rather, every moment is a continuous (and mostly unnoticed) stream of thoughts, feelings and behaviors that arises and falls away. What we do, what we think and say define our view of self and other, our concepts of past, present and future come from this process of mind. These streams of mental chatter and images and emotions take up our attention without our knowing that they take our attention and influence our behaviors. And a lot of what we assume about ourselves and other people and things and events during our days seem like they are “out there”, not in our own heads, not of our making, as if what we see, feel and think is one big observation of what goes on in the world. But it's both--it's in our minds and in the world out there. So, through mindful examination of this internal chatter, and paying attention to our thoughts and focusing on our senses, and "watching" what is inside and outside, we can begin to see that a lot of our views and behaviors are actually just so many projections of mind, and a lot of what goes on around us can just be left alone, or acted upon, and that we have choices--many more than we thought. You could say that through our eyes, ears and sense of touch and smell, and through thinking---labeling, putting words on, and acting in the world, we take in what is around us and then represent these data to ourselves as facts, but since it's really mostly our thinking, labeling, imputing meaning to things that in themselves do not have inherent meaning, we can make the meaning and create some very important changes after all, in the best way.

When we begin to pay attention one-mindfully to our internal mental processes of observing and describing, we engineer our lives to fit better with the conditions around us as well as within us. Further, we influence and create some of those conditions around us. Simply put, we begin to decide how we are going to use our minds and become wiser and happier by paying attention, deconstructing and constructing meaning and taking action wisely and joyfully being both ourselves and part of the conditions around us. We are "the world", so this process is like making friends with the world inside and outside and having a lot more freedom, happiness and meaning in life.

"Quite often we feel as though life has acted upon us and that we have little ability to shape our lives."

Mindfulness-based therapy can help you learn to stand still and become aware of life as a dynamic flux of contingencies. You can find that life, living, being yourself, is all pretty flexible. You're not stuck, really. Nothing is really solid at all; rather, you and everything around you is fluid and changes all of the time, and it always did! You can have a great influence on these changes. You can suspend your habitual chain of unconscious reactions and storytelling about "how it is" or "how it has to be" and embrace what is most emotionally painful and use your troubles and your forgotten dreams as guideposts to cultivate wisdom and change. You can create a great life, moment by moment, breath by breath. Wisely, you can begin to construct much of your experience of self, other and the world and become happier and fulfilled in the deepest and most intrinsic ways.