Approach · mindfulness
Mindfulness-based therapy
Attention is the one thing you have in every situation, and for many people it has not been under their own management for years. It goes where the fear sends it, or the rehearsal of yesterday's conversation, or the list. Mindfulness in therapy is not about becoming calm and it is certainly not about emptying your mind. It is a practical apprenticeship in noticing where your attention has gone, and being able to bring it back.
Telehealth only, by secure video or audio, for people physically located in California. Laurie, LMFT.
What this looks like with me
It starts inside our sessions, not as something you go away and do. Partway through the hour I will ask you to stop and notice what is happening right now: where your attention is, what your breath is doing, whether your jaw is holding something. Thirty seconds, not a formal practice. We do that repeatedly over weeks until the noticing becomes something available to you outside the hour, which is the entire point.
I keep the practices short and unimpressive on purpose. Three breaths before you answer the phone. Feeling your feet on the floor while the kettle boils. One minute in the car before you go into the house and become whoever your family needs you to be. People come to me having tried and abandoned twenty-minute sittings, and concluded they are bad at this. They are not bad at it. They were handed a version that assumes a life with more room in it than theirs has.
We also work with what turns up when you stop moving, because something usually does. Busyness is one of the most effective anesthetics available, and when it eases, whatever it was covering tends to arrive. Often it is grief, which is my primary specialty and no accident: a great many people keep moving specifically so that they do not have to sit down inside a loss. When that surfaces, we do not treat it as a distraction from the practice. It is the material.
And I am direct about the limits. Attention training does not make a hard situation less hard, and I will not sell it to you as serenity. What it does is give you a small amount of space in the half-second before your usual reaction, and it turns out a great deal can happen in that space.
The skill is not staying. The skill is returning.
Calm is sometimes a result. It is not the assignment.
Where I find this fits
Anxiety and rehearsal
Hours spent in a conversation that has not happened, or one that already did. Learning to notice you have gone there, earlier and earlier, is worth more than any argument against the content of the worry.
Reactions faster than thought
The sharp reply, the flare, the shutdown. We work with the half-second beforehand, which is the only place there is actually a choice available.
Grief you have been outrunning
For people whose main strategy has been to keep busy, stillness is not neutral. We approach it in small amounts, with the understanding that what arrives is meant to arrive.
Highly sensitive people
When you take in more than most people do, attention is not a luxury skill. Being able to notice what is yours and what belongs to the room is what makes a full day survivable.
Sleep and the mind that will not put itself down
Practical, undramatic structures for the three a.m. review of your own shortcomings, taught with some patience rather than handed over as advice.
How we would work
We start with a free 20-minute consult by phone, text or video. You tell me what has been happening, and I tell you honestly whether this is work I can be useful in.
If we go ahead, sessions are weekly by secure video or audio, and this runs through the hour rather than occupying a segment of it. Alongside it I use somatic work, since attention and body are hard to separate, Internal Family Systems when a part of you resists sitting still and has reasons, hypnotherapy, EMDR when one memory keeps pulling attention back and I am EMDR certified, and my own Positive Re-Narrative and Repatterning when the same loop keeps closing.
I work with adults, seniors, couples and families, and this translates unusually well to couples: two people who can each notice their own reaction arriving have a different sort of argument.
- Short practices, built for an actual life
- Practicing inside sessions rather than only assigning it
- Returning as the skill, not staying
- Making room for what surfaces when you stop moving
- Your framework, spiritual or secular, never mine
- No claims that this will make hard things easy
Questions people ask about mindfulness in therapy
- I cannot meditate. My mind will not stop.
- Your mind is not supposed to stop, and nobody's does. That expectation is the single most common reason people conclude they have failed at this within a week. What we are practicing is not an empty mind but the return: you notice you drifted, and you come back. The noticing is the skill. If your attention wandered forty times in ten minutes and you came back forty times, that was forty repetitions of exactly the thing we are building, not forty failures.
- Is this religious?
- Only if you want it to be. These practices come out of contemplative traditions and I say so honestly rather than pretending they were invented in a lab. But what I teach is entirely usable as plain attention training, with no framework attached. If you do have a spiritual or religious life, this can sit inside it and often deepens it, and I will use your language and your framework rather than importing mine. If you are secular, nothing here requires you to adopt anything. I am not offering readings of any kind; this is psychotherapy.
- How is this different from an app?
- An app is fine and I have no argument with it. What an app cannot do is be with you when something surfaces. People who sit still regularly find that things come up: grief you had shelved, an old memory, a wave of anger with no obvious cause. That is not a malfunction, it is what happens when you stop moving. The difference here is that we do it in a relationship where those arrivals get attention rather than being logged as a bad session on a chart.
- Do I have to do it every day?
- A small amount most days does more than a long sitting once a week, and I would rather you did two minutes reliably than twenty minutes twice and then never again. I do not check up on you. When it stops happening we look at what got in the way, and there is usually something worth knowing there: a part of you that finds stillness threatening, or a week where survival genuinely took the hour.
A small amount of room
If your attention has belonged to your worry for a long time, some of it can come back to you. Text or email and we will find a time to talk. Telehealth only, by secure video or audio, for people physically located in California. Laurie, LMFT.