Mindfulness is returning our awareness to the present moment nonjudgmentally. In the words of Ram Dass, ”Be Here Now.” It’s a very simple concept that’s very challenging to practice when the brain’s chatter is pulling us towards the past, the future, in every other direction away from the here-and-now. Establishing mindfulness during therapy serves to focus the attention inward and separate the cognitive chatter from the deeper regions of the brain where nonverbal emotional and physical experiences are housed.

Mindfulness can help with anxiety, mood, sleep, physical pain, immunity, concentration, and many other ailments. There’s a plethora of different mindfulness methods and techniques to try out and see what resonates for you. I incorporate mindfulness throughout the therapy process to help regulate your nervous system and maintain focus on your inner experience.

Brainspotting is a mindful approach developed by David Grand based on the idea that where you look affects how you feel. So if something is bothering you, you might feel better or worse, depending on where you gaze with your eyes. The brain is constantly processing signals from our senses and reflexively directing where to look. Brainspotting allows the brain to heal from within and can help with anxiety, depression, sleep, pain, trauma, and a host of other issues. Mindfully connecting your inner experience to accurate “brainspots” in the visual field promotes deep subcortical processing and trauma release.

IFS is a beautiful therapy approach based on the idea that all of us have an internal emotional family comprised of our Self and our Parts. The Parts have evolved over time to protect us, to manage us, and to help us cope with our environments. The Self is at the core and it is the center of your wisdom and wellness. Sometimes the parts don’t get along with one another, creating an internal battle and barriers to the Self, which makes us confused, misaligned, anxious, or depressed. I use IFS to help you organize and resolve conflicts among the fragmented Parts so you could reconnect to the Self, which is compassionate, calm, creative, courageous, confident, curious, and clear.

Yoga-based psychotherapy integrates the body & mind through mindfulness, breathwork, guided meditations, accessible physical postures, and off-the-mat yoga principles. Yoga is all about balancing life's dualities-- merging strength with flexibility, calmness with alertness, doing with being, aligning the external with the internal world. By combining yoga practices with therapeutic techniques, you can deepen your self-awareness and become more embodied, calm, and focused.

CBT is an evidence-based modality that focuses on the connection between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The premise of CBT is that thoughts influence feelings, so if we can change our thoughts, then we can change our feelings too. When our brain produces too many unhelpful thoughts, we can fall into depression or anxiety. The thoughts may feel true, but when we examine them under the microscope, we can see that they are actually quite distorted.

CBT has many tools for editing unhelpful thoughts and jumpstarting new behaviors. Since CBT targets primarily the conscious regions of the brain and often does not reach the deeper unconscious layers, I use it in conjunction with other approaches that focus more on deeper brain healing. Learning CBT skills is like learning the therapy alphabet --they are foundational for daily life management and building capacity for deeper emotional work.

DBT is an evidence-based treatment that is a blend of eastern philosophy and western psychology. DBT is designed to help you manage emotions and relationships by building capacity for mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. One of the main tenets of DBT is the idea of dialectics, which is a process for reconciling two opposites and finding some kind of synthesis or middle ground solution. What I like about DBT is its extensive repertoire of skills and tools. Like CBT, the DBT skills are foundational for increasing emotional strength and can go a long way on their own. They are a prerequisite for working through more activating material without getting overwhelmed. I make an effort to incorporate DBT skills organically into the conversations and support you with reinforcing the skills in the sessions and for homework.

ISTDP is an evidence-based psychodynamic approach aimed to accelerate resolution of unconscious emotional conflicts that perpetuate psychological and physical symptoms. Central to ISTDP is wholehearted collaboration, where we join forces to help you let go of blocks that stand in the way of healing and invite healthier ways of relating with yourself and the world. The work of ISTDP is intense in that it compels you to confront unconscious emotions and material that may be easier to avoid in an effort to help you face your demons and begin to heal sooner rather than later. ISTDP is more intense than other approaches and not for everyone. When using ISTDP, we make sure to stay within your window of tolerance and dial down the intensity as needed.

EFT is a holistic healing technique that harnesses the power of acupressure, which is like acupuncture without the needles. It works by systematically tapping on pressure points on the body that correspond to many parasympathetic nerve endings (which help you relax). The combination of tapping while mindfully processing distressing material helps integrate emotions and thoughts with the body to reduce distress about the problem at hand. Even without the processing, just the tapping on its own can be beneficial. EFT has been shown to be helpful for anxiety, irritability, difficult emotions, physical pain, insomnia, phobias, and trauma activation. This is a great tool to practice in the sessions and reinforce at home.

When words are not enough to convey your experience, we can turn to the arts. Visual arts, poetry, music, drama, and movement are the language of emotions and are useful for integrating the right and left brain, the brain and body, and the conscious and unconscious. How we create art mirrors how we create our daily lives. The creative process provides an opportunity to practice mindfulness, problem-solving, decision-making, flexibility, adaptability, accountability, confidence, self-care and to overcome harshness, perfectionism, impulsivity, excessive criticism and other unhelpful patterns right in the moment. Being a lifelong student of the visual arts and having training in art therapy, I welcome incorporating creative modalities of your choice into therapy.