When our sense of being fully alive is lost through stress, injustice, trauma, or the monotony of our busy schedules, mindfulness invites us back into the body, back into the fullness of life.

Mindfulness is way of orienting to experience. It includes the cultivation of qualities like empathy, curiosity, and sensory awareness, and an understanding of our interdependence with other people, systems, and the natural world. Mindfulness is associated with emotional well-being, healing trauma, increasing motivation, improved health behaviors, coping, and better interpersonal relationships (Neff and Davidson, 2016).

WHAT IS MINDFULNESS-BASED PSYCHOTHERAPY?

Mindfulness-based psychotherapy utilizes our natural capacity for awareness and neuroplasticity. The type of attention we learn to cultivate can disrupt our habitual patterns of mind, generate healthy nervous system regulation, and impact brain function and structure. While areas of the brain corresponding to stress and trauma decrease in volume, areas associated with well-being grow.

Mindfulness-based psychotherapy includes both cognitive and somatic (body-based) practices, and involves “interoceptive awareness.” This internal awareness of sensory experience is fundamental to all mindfulness-based approaches.

Mindfulness-based psychotherapy also involves utilizing generative practices, where heart-qualities like self-compassion and generosity are cultivated to calm the inner-critic, and treat trauma, depression, and feelings of shame.

mindfulness for INDIVIDUAL & social transformation

Engaging mindfulness through a frame critical consciousness helps ensure its most mature expression. A practice focused on self-improvement or behavior expectations in children misses the mark completely.

Mindfulness is incomplete until it includes bringing the practice into the world, for the benefit of the greater whole and the natural world. Appropriately expressed, mindfulness utilizes a decolonial, anti-oppressive, liberatory praxis, helping to foster social and racial justice and ecological consciousness.

Learn more about my approach here.