Mindfulness-based Psychotherapy offers a very exciting way of working with emotional suffering at the core level. In Mindfulness Meditation Therapy you place the emotional complex of anxiety, depression or trauma at the center of your awareness and investigate the inner structure of your emotion using mindfulness. Mindfulness is a form of awareness in which you observe what arises as it arises. It is the art of listening and being fully present for your thoughts and emotions, without becoming lost in habitual reactivity. This is essential for transformation, because reactivity of any kind has the effect of distracting awareness away from the emotion, causing the emotion to become repressed. Simply put, reactivity sustains ignorance, which prevents change; mindfulness restores present awareness, which facilitates change.

The first phase of MMT is called RECOGNITION and this is where you learn to recognize the individual habitual reactions that keep the emotional suffering alive. Nothing can change until you learn to recognize your reactivity and take responsibility. Then you will have a degree of choice and can begin to move away from being the perpetual victim of your own habits. Mindfulness allows you to tune-in to the activities of your mind at a very subtle level so that you can see reactions as they arise and before they become activated. This allows you to begin to approach the inner core emotional energy that was hidden from you by your habitual patterns of reactivity.

The second phase of MMT is called RELATIONSHIP. Learning to see our reactivity is the first step, but then we must follow this with the correct response, which is to create a caring and receptive space around our emotional reactivity and observe the impulses to react without becoming caught up in the contents of the mind. We create a therapeutic space in which the emotional complex can exist. When we can hold the emotion within this safe and accepting space, then it will respond by changing. This is often referred to as "sitting" with the emotion, in the same way that you would sit with a friend in pain. The emphasis is on listening and being fully present, without any attempt to think about the emotion, analyze it or trying to fix it. Developing a relationship based on true presence has a powerful healing effect by itself, and is often sufficient to resolve much emotional suffering.

The next phase of MMT is INVESTIGATION. All emotions have an internal structure in the form of subtle feelings and internal experiential imagery. Mindfulness allows us to tune-in to the subtle inner structure of emotions and uncover this inner structure. One of the fundamental principles of MMT is that transformation is directly proportional to the direct awareness of the inner structure of emotions: What you don't see controls you; what you do see changes you. The more you see, the more things change. The fundamental structure of emotional complexes is in the form of experiential imagery: The mind thinks in pictures, not words and the structure of that imagery encodes emotional energy. Think of a person who is afraid of spiders. His phobia will be structured around intense inner imagery: His inner spider will be very large, very close and have vivid coloring. Those details encode his fear. Once the client uncovers this inner detailed structure of his experiential imagery, then he has something very tangible to work with, because imagery and emotion are directly connected - change one and you change the other.

The fourth phase of MMT is RESOLUTION THROUGH EXPERIENTIAL IMAGERY. Again, through careful attention to details, made possible with mindfulness, the client begins to discover what needs to change internally in the imagery. It is not what we do that matters, but uncovering those changes that feel right. This is allowing the psyche to heal itself in its own way, using its own natural language - imagery.

MINDFULNESS MEDITATION THERAPY Effective and Affordable Psychotherapy: The Direct Path to Healing and Transformation.

-Learn to change patterns of negative habitual reactivity. -Resolves core emotional suffering. -Learn life skills for working with your emotions. -Learn how to manage emotional stress. -Manage difficult life transitions. -Overcome grief, loss and trauma. -Improve your personal relationships. Learn how to manage conflict. -Learn how to build self-confidence and inner strength.

Call for a free consultation, or email your questions. (970) 492-5198. pdmstrong@mac.com