Does mindfulness and psychotherapy work together?
Mindfulness will greatly benefit your clients and the effectiveness of psychotherapy both in terms of depth and speed of results.
I have been working with a broad cross section of clients for 24 years and I believe two of the most under rated processes for therapy are deep relaxation and simple mindfulness.
Mindfulness and mental health
Simple mindfulness is applying the process in a relatively natural way to the ordinary every day activities of your client. Work duties, cooking, washing, walking the dog, playing with children, driving the car, gardening or showing, the list goes on.
Coaching your client, to start with, just one activity each day where they commit to focusing their full attention on what they are doing and experiencing. The focus has to be gentle and non-judgmental – we don’t want it to be another task where they can fail or become angry or frustrated with themselves.
If they are taking a walk, stay focused on feeling their feet on the ground with each step. The feeling of their legs moving, the sun on their face, the wind blowing against them, the sounds around them, the smells in the air etc. When their attention shifts to thoughts of any nature, gently return to experiencing the present situation.
Replace walking with any other daily activity and you have a simple yet powerful practice that will reduce anxiety, stress and obsessive thoughts of any kind and keep your client just a little more present for a part of their day.
If you would like to read more about mindfulness for beginners, go here.
Mindfulness Quick Links:
Mindfulness cognitive therapy
Your clients will feel more in control, self empowered, relaxed and happier with a quieter mind. Now your clients are in much better shape to respond to every aspect of psychotherapy, including replacing dysfunctional thinking.
My experience has shown me, especially with clients dealing with difficult and chronic issues, that doing deep relaxation even 15 minutes a day works synergistically with simple mindfulness.
It is also much easier to do than mindfulness meditation especially when that is used for chronic:
• Pain
• Anxiety
• Depression
• OCD
Deep relaxation is a powerful therapy in itself and has strong therapeutic affects on the above conditions. Practicing this will de-stress, calm, energise and improve mental energy and focus. Again, another powerfully positive, self empowering experience.
These effects support simple mindfulness practice, which supports the deep relaxation. It also acts as a preparation for doing mindfulness meditation when they are in better shape to master it and benefit from it.
You can incorporate deep relaxation as part of your mindfulness and psychotherapy sessions to improve psychotherapy and CBT. If you already do so, you will see an improvement in the depth and quality of state your client achieves in session with improved outcomes.
To make deep relaxation as easy and effective as possible for your clients, I have developed high quality guided relaxation sessions which use excellent brainwave entrainment at the alpha range (9-12Hz) that greatly aid the natural relaxation response.
Visit our Mp3’s and Cd’s page to see our selection of relaxation sessions.
Click here to get a free sample and to set up an affiliate program with us.