By Michael Yapko - If you talk to mindfulness practitioners about the similarities between guided mindfulness meditation and hypnosis, they tend to react with various degrees of indignation, if not downright revulsion. But a closer look at the processes, goals, and outcomes of both mindfulness and hypnotism reveals that they share fundamental similarities of purpose and practical knowledge.

By Shai Lavie - In essence, the therapeutic task is to model compassion and understanding as we guide clients through their pain-filled internal landscapes. For exploring these wilder shores of the self, we can take no more promising a journey of discovery than in the vessel of our own mindful body awareness.

By Polly Young-Eisendrath - In order to succeed at truly loving another, you must be able to check in with yourself and get a sense of how you are seeing, hearing, and feeling, so that you can come to recognize your own subjective picture or image or story of the other person and of your relationship.

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.