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Welcome
Life can present difficult challenges and everyone has moments when they feel like they are struggling. It is when we feel like our old solutions to problems aren’t working anymore that therapy can be most helpful.
Discovering new ways of living your life is a courageous and worthwhile endeavor. Depression, marital problems, social phobia, unhealthy habits and feelings of insecurity, are the concerns I have been helping my clients change for nearly thirty years.
Blending both traditional and contemporary approaches, I will be collaborative in developing a strategy for change that will be most helpful for you. I work with adults individually, in couples therapy or in group therapy. My focus with each client is to help them build on their strengths and to overcome the limiting beliefs and habits which interfere with experiencing greater satisfaction in life. To find out more about whether I might be a good match for you, contact me for a free telephone consultation.
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Reflections
Simple Mindfulness
You may have heard about “mindfulness" lately. There’s been quite a buzz since Jon Kabat-Zinn pioneered the application of this 2,500 year old mind-training practice to help patients that the medical establishment could not. Mindfulness can be defined as “awareness of the present moment with acceptance”.
Awareness means really paying attention rather than being on automatic pilot. Your partner just touched your arm, but was your full attention on the touch or were you also thinking about what you need to get at Home Depot?
The present moment means “what is happening right now”. When your partner touched you, were you noticing what the touch felt like or were you having thoughts triggered by the touch—“I wonder if she’s still upset with me” or “it would be nice to have more of that”? Often we are paying attention to the thoughts, feelings or memories associated with what is happening right now, which means that we are actually living more in the past or the future.
Acceptance is an attitude of non-judgment. A willingness to have things be as they are, without trying to change them. If the touch feels nice, can you surrender to that experience without trying to add something to it?
Few people aspire to be mindful all the time, but when you’ve had the experience of being more open and aware of the present moment, you realize how much of your life you’ve been missing. Simply having more moments of mindfulness in a day can dramatically alter one’s experience of being alive.
Click on this sentence to get a link to some simple mindfulness exercises from UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center.
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