It can be difficult to leave your emotions in the consulting room at the end of the day, especially when a client's story is heartbreaking or horrifying. But being shadowed by a client's pain can leave you depleted and ultimately interfere with your ability to be present and effective in session. Jack Kornfield explains how to keep a wise and compassionate balance.

By David Whyte - According to poet David Whyte, the focus of psychotherapy is restricted to the individual’s biography—a good start but too small an arena for the capacious human soul. In the following excerpt from Whyte's Consolations, he urges us to move beyond the edge of our familiar, known world.

By Kristin Neff - An impressive and growing body of research demonstrates that relating to ourselves in a kind, friendly manner is essential for emotional wellbeing. More pointedly, research proves false many of the common myths about self-compassion that keep us trapped in the prison of relentless self-criticism.

By Jared DeFife - It’s time for a new year and a new you, right? Unfortunately, some old acquaintances aren’t too soon forgotten, and our bad habits tend to follow us into the New Year. Rather than try to change them outright, New York Times reporter and bestselling author Charles Duhigg says we should pay more attention to analyzing and diagnosing what he calls The Habit Loop.

Increasingly, therapists are looking for alternatives to the office-bound rigidity of traditional private practice. In the following interview, The Center for Mind-Body Medicine's Sabrina N'Diaye shares the takeaways from her work, and what it means to be a therapeutic "peacebuilder."

By Diane Ackerman - Despite all the seeming connectedness, we’re not the most socially connected we’ve ever been. Generation by generation, our brains have been evolving new networks, new ways of wiring and firing, favoring some behaviors and discarding others, as we train ourselves to meet the challenges of a world we keep amplifying, editing, deconstructing, and recreating.

By Oren Jay Sofer - Dialogue is a lot like dancing. It takes time to learn the basics, but when we’re conversing smoothly with someone else, it can be magical. We find a flow as we shift attention back and forth, hearing one another and allowing things to settle.

By Ann Weiser Cornell - Clients need to tell their stories, of course. But when the stories manifest habitual categories—ways of labeling and explaining experiences—the process can get stuck. The formation of a felt sense is a breakthrough moment, in which we slow down and form a new bodily awareness of some life situation.

By Ashley Davis Bush - Self-care is fundamental to our ability to be our best selves, personally and professionally. Micro self-care, however, is about the benefits of making small changes with reliable frequency. The emphasis is on repetition. Small and frequent works better to create desirable neural pathways than big and seldom.

By Robert Scaer - How often do we find ourselves ruminating about this or that familiar resentment or well-worn worry? It's as though some dark entity invades our mind and fills it to the brim. That entity, I believe, is the total body-mind experience of a past trauma. Healing, in essence, is the recovery of the present moment.