By Tim Desmond - Buddhist practices hold potential for helping clients, particularly those suffering from low self-esteem. One of the main goals of Buddhist meditation is cultivating compassion and love. Here are several techniques that focus on developing these qualities toward oneself.

By Richard Schwartz - We normally think of the attachment process as happening between caretakers and young children, but the more you explore how the inner world functions, the more you find that it parallels external relationships, and that we have an inner capacity to extend mindful caretaking to aspects of ourselves that are frozen in time and excluded from our normal consciousness.

By Richard Schwartz - Many therapeutic attempts to integrate mindfulness help clients notice negative emotions from a place of separation and extend acceptance toward them. But what if it were possible to transform this inner drama, rather than just keep it at arm’s length? The goal of Internal Family Systems (IFS) is to build on this important first step of separating from and accepting these impulses, and then take a second step of helping clients transform them.

In a moving closing address, Rick Hanson invoked the spirit of Mr. Rogers to help attendees better acknowledge their connection with each other and savor their most inspiring Symposium experiences at the meeting.

By Shai Lavie - It sometimes seems as if there isn’t a psychotherapy seminar or workshop anywhere in the country that doesn’t have “mindfulness” in the title, yet most therapists these days are still vague about how they can use mindfulness techniques, minute-by-minute, in sessions, and how guiding clients through mindfulness exercises can help resolve difficult, long-standing issues. What follows is a brief primer on the specifics of incorporating mindfulness into therapeutic practice.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is an expert when it comes to exploring the connection between the intensely private experience of living a meditative life and responding to the vast deluge of global and social problems we collectively face. In the following interview, he explains what it means to be mindful and why it’s becoming increasingly relevant in our modern world.

The explosive growth of mindfulness in America has inevitably triggered a backlash—a low, rumbling protest, particularly from Buddhists, who're disturbed by how much meditation in America appears to have been individualized, monetized, corporatized, therapized, taken over, flattened, and generally coopted out of all resemblance to its noble origins in an ancient spiritual and moral tradition.

Now, more than ever, we tend to greet every minute with demands such as: "I want this. I don't want this. I want more of this. I want less of that." We have ideas about what our minutes should or should not be. But if we are lucky, occasionally we experience a sparkling moment when we break out of our trance of self and are fully present. Sometimes these lead to epiphanies, which present us with aha moments of new understanding. Or our thoughts simply may be "Isn't this wonderful?" or "Isn't life amazingly rich and complicated?"

In our consumer-driven economy, we've long been asking material things to do what they really can't: regulate our emotions, improve our social status, and turn us into our ideal selves. The closer one examines the psychology of shopping, the more intricacy and nuance we discover in our decisions about what and why we buy. Whether we're shopping for a plant, a pair of pumps, or a political candidate, it's a way we search for ourselves and our place in the world. As mental health professionals, we can help the many whose consumption is driven by emotional needs to discover what it is they're really shopping for and how to get it.

Human beings are creatures of habit, and nowhere is the force of habit more apparent than in the way most of us use the Internet. Few of us are disciplined enough to go online, do one thing, and log off, and researchers are beginning to document the emotional and psychological price we're paying for doing so. But the good news is that feeling overwhelmed and lost online isn't an inevitable consequence of living in the Internet Age---using a few mindfulness techniques, we can change how we behave when we go on online and how we interact with the web.