My favorite definition of mindfulness comes from founder of Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and mindfulness researcher, Jon Kabat-Zinn: 

“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: On purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”

In therapy, we might use mindfulness exercises like guided imagery, body scans, progressive muscle relaxation, or short meditations to help you become more aware of your thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and actions.

To put it simply, transpersonal translates to “beyond the self.” Transpersonal psychology marries humanistic psychology (humans have inherent value and unique agency) with spiritual, transcendant, or unseen aspects of the human experience. Anything that expands your awareness of life, the human psyche, or even the universe. 

In therapy with me, this orientation means that I will honor and accept all of your lived experience, as well as incorporate it into your healing. Want to use tarot cards to help conceptualize yourself? Sure! Have intuitive gifts that you don’t want to feel judged for? Count me in! Don’t care about anything like that? That’s welcome too!

Simply put: “of the body.”

In therapy, this means that we will use the body as a way to experience and process through emotion, either through observation of physical sensations or through movement.

When I refer to your inner child, I am referring to the part of you that represents your childhood self and all of the coping skills you developed to survive through the discomforts, wounds, and/or trauma of growing up. Your inner child is the part of yourself that comes to the surface when something in your daily life triggers a wound from childhood. Sometimes we even respond to that trigger the same way that we did as a child.

Inner child work is the process of noticing those childhood hurts when they pop up in your current life, accepting your inner child for their wonderful, resourceful nature, and healing any attachment wounds. 

I like to remind my clients that while a good bit of therapy can include undoing the responses we learned as children, we can also stop to appreciate how useful and incredible that adaptation is in helping us to survive childhood.

Gestalt therapy is a form of therapy that goes along very well with mindfulness and transpersonal psychology, because it focuses on present moment awareness, a person’s previously-developed coping skills, the full context of the person’s life, emphasizing personal responsibility for language and emotions, and the importance of the therapeutic relationship between therapist and client (often referred to as the “I-Thou” relationship, which means that the therapist and client meet authentically as equals, not as expert and non-expert).

Empty chair work (or Empty Chair Technique) is an approach used in Gestalt therapy that is used to create dialogue around someone’s internal or interpersonal conflict.

When doing empty chair work, you would sit facing an empty chair, then you would imagine a person or a part of yourself that you have conflict with. You speak to this imagined person or part and express your feelings and thoughts to them. Then, with the therapist as a director of sorts, you move to the opposite chair, take on the role of the person or part you were just speaking as, and respond as that person or part. Moving back and forth between chairs to continue the dialogue is an important part of this technique.

This technique works very well with mindfulness and transpersonal practices because it helps bring the conflict into the present moment, as well as helps solidify abstract concepts or thoughts. I would even say that this is altered states work, because I’ve found that when we are embodying another person or part of ourselves, sometimes we catch words coming out of our mouth that make us stop and go, “Ohhhhh, that’s where that comes from.”

To understand parts work, first we need to understand what we mean when we refer to parts: Parts are the many different facets of people and their minds. They are characteristics or feelings or thoughts or behaviors or experiences that add up to a whole Self. Parts work acknowledges that sometimes those parts are in conflict and require some attention to resolve. 

For example, after dinner, there is a part of me that wants to eat dessert and a part of me that doesn’t. Both parts are valid and neither part is the entirety of my identity. I might not be able to move forward in a dessert decision until I understand why each part feels the way it does, which is part of parts work.

Gestalt therapy uses parts work (empty chair technique), as well as Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Ego State Therapy.