Mindfulness and Therapy

There are many ways in which mindfulness complements traditional approaches to counselling and therapy. Counselling and therapy involve cultivating awareness and insight into your life and the issues you're facing, exploring your patterns of thinking, and your feelings and emotions, how these are affecting you, and learning to handle difficult thoughts and emotions.

Mindfulness helps facilitate these processes by slowing down your mind, and using this calmer, clearer mind to allow you to get in touch with you inner wisdom and gain fresh perspective and understanding about your self, your life, and the issues you're dealing with.

Mindfulness also teaches you to relate to difficult and painful thoughts and feelings in new ways. Instead of becoming overwhelmed and desperate to escape, you'll learn to you deal with problems, pain, and stress through awareness and understanding.

Incorporating mindfulness into psychotherapy is becoming more common as research continues to demonstrate the effectiveness of mindfulness in helping people who are experiencing a wide range issues. The main therapy approaches that incorporate mindfulness are Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT).

These approaches have been used to help people deal with stress, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, borderline personality disorder, chronic pain, high blood pressure and many other conditions. I incorporate elements from Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy into much of my counselling and therapy work.