Mindfulness is often seen as a cure-all approach, but as with other clinical approaches, counselors should carefully consider when and how they integrate this practice into sessions.
Tag: mindfulness
When you are in the present moment, you are not waiting for the next moment to be fulfilling or happy.
An integrative mind-body counseling approach often holds answers for clients who have suffered for years from chronic pain and exhausted traditional medical interventions with little to no relief.
Vaping has received a significant amount of negative publicity over the past several months, but counselors say that alone won’t motivate most users to stop.
In the early days, Caroline, a 14-year-old girl, started each session with a chin thrust indignantly at her counselor. She wanted to be seen as a warrior, and she offered answers that were blunt as a sledgehammer. And why should she drop her defenses? She had seen too many adults
One of the most uplifting and powerful things counselors can do for their clients is to become a “nonanxious presence.” The term, originally coined by Jewish Rabbi and family therapist Edwin Friedman, is used to describe an individual who provides a calm, cool, focused and collected environment that empowers others
A few years ago, while teaching a course in family therapy, a particularly bright and insightful student named Maria lingered after class one day and asked, “Isn’t differentiation of self similar to mindfulness?” I hadn’t quite thought of it like that before, but it certainly seemed plausible. “Let’s set aside
By the time the 43-year-old man, a victim of an industrial accident, limped into American Counseling Association member David Engstrom’s office, he’d been experiencing lower back pain for 10 years and taking OxyContin for six. The client, whose pain was written in the grimace on his face as he sat
As a professor of counseling, I am invested in helping students develop the necessary and sufficient skills to become effective psychotherapists. There is a plethora of evidence to support mindfulness as a tool for fostering these skills. Integrating mindfulness training can: Improve how counselors-in-training relate to self and others with
Chinese medicine has always acknowledged the link between the body and the mind. In Western medicine, from the time of the ancient Greeks through the Elizabethan era, the thinking was that four bodily humors (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood) influenced mood, physical health and even personality. Shakespeare built