All You Want to Know About Therapy

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For Therapy to work, you must have a good connection…

and that’s why        

self-help books don’t work.

Our emotional lives, with all their emotional cues, are on board before any verbal or conceptual ability appears. And the consequences of these experiences are unaffected by intellectual efforts to change them.

That may be because emotions, and our most powerful “memories”, seem to be stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. And yet our thinking (or intellectualizing) is a left-hemisphere activity.

Books and conversations about why we act the way we do are certainly helpful, but they don’t seem to be enough to effect real changes in our interactions with the world and ourselves.

So how can we make real changes?

Only by recreating as much as possible the initial conditions in which the processes were created in the first place.

We are born wired to seek connection with others. 

You may have heard that your first loves (parents) create the models for every relationship there after. They become our relationship-blueprints. Our experiences, especially with our caregivers, will become unconscious, intuitive memories that form the basis of our emotional life.

So if you want to change the deep, unconscious patterns that define your reactions to life’s events, you need an environment that can mirror those earliest connections, while, ideally, re-writing them (“neuroplasticity”). The result is a more harmonious existence in your current situations.

A powerful way to do this is through a positive connection with a trained professional (i.e., a psychotherapist). Good therapy aims to create a safe connection with the client so that emotional healing can take place.

And there is more to it, of course. Techniques that require direct experience have proven effective, such as working with the “inner child” , mindfulness meditations, Journaling and others. I believe these techniques work because they access the right-brain.

When my client opens up to me as much as they can in a session, I know that we are accessing the right-brain. In doing so, the chances for authentic change become possible.

If you’d like to contact me, have a question, or want to chat, please click the link:

Work and contact info

call, 801-252-6754 (private voicemail, 24/7),

or Email me:  JaneLCSW@gmail.com

And Please Join Me :  Jane A. Weiss, LCSW on Facebook

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“Let Me Go, Ceaseless Mind!”

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Meditation simply consists of being aware of being aware, or directly noticing mind’s true nature – awake awareness that is spontaneously present, open and spacious, lucid and transparent.

This awake mind has always been present, but we have lost our ability to see thoughts, emotions, and perceptions as they truly are. We instead have been adding interpretation to whatever arises, which has clouded our view and led to confusion. If we are able to recognize the true nature of  thought as soon as it arises, and leave it alone without pursuing it, then whatever thoughts arise will automatically self-liberate.  Nisargadatta Maharaj put it this way:

“To be aware is to be awake. Unaware means asleep. You are aware anyhow, you need not try to be. What you need is to be aware of being aware. Be aware deliberately and consciously. Broaden and deepen the field of awareness. You are always conscious of the mind, but you are not aware of yourself as being conscious.

The mind produces thoughts ceaselessly, even when you do not look at them. Your consciousness shifts from sensation to sensation, from perception to perception, from idea to idea, in endless succession. Then comes awareness, the direct insight into the whole of consciousness, the totality of the mind. The mind is like a river, flowing ceaselessly in the bed of the body. You identify yourself for a moment with some particular ripple and call it: ‘my thought’. All you are conscious of is your mind. But awareness is the cognisance of consciousness as a whole.”

When left unrecognized, the thinking, concept-forming, and interpretive activity of judgemental mind arises, and the sense of “me” is first fabricated and then taken to be the totality of who and what we are. No wonder we are often overwhelmed!

In a state of pure awareness, however, the passing parade of thoughts loses its power to seduce us into a trance of identification with the habitual cycle of grasping and avoiding and simply dissolves. All emotions, thoughts, preferences, perceptions of good and bad, and so forth are naturally released without effort. Attention merely shifts from its chronic obsession with mental fabrications and emotional moods to the natural state of nondual awareness. We can then realize that there is no difference between this moment now and supreme enlightenment. There is nothing beyond this basic state of wakefulness, nothing to grasp or avoid. Our ordinary mind, just as it is, is perfect and complete.

For most of us, however, this clear awake awareness is both wonderful and frustrating. The relative ease of entering a state of non-dual awareness is often overshadowed by the ease of falling out of it. In order to establish ourselves in awareness, we need practices that cultivate our awareness in a consistent way.  Yoga, prayer, mindfulness meditation, and exposure to the peacefulness in nature are a few of the ways. Laughing, being playful, enjoying the absurd are some others!
C'monInnerPeace.CTB 

What are some of the ways you cultivate  pure, nonjudgmental wakefulness?

Excerpts from my friend, Bob OHearn: https://theconsciousprocess.wordpress.com/2014/10/12/true-meditation-recognizing-basic-sanity

Mindfulness Links http://wp.me/p4iGTC-zl , http://wp.me/p4iGTC-vV , http://wp.me/p4iGTC-2e