By Carolyn Daitch - Successfully combating and overriding firmly ingrained behaviors requires practice. It's our job as therapists to help clients learn how and when to practice these skills, and then make sure they go home and do it.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a magic therapy wand to wave in front of our young clients and give them all the answers they need? What if this magic wand could conjure rainbow lizards and talking dogs to sit on our clients’ shoulders, bypass their defense systems, and whisper good, therapeutic advice in their ears? That’s exactly the kind of approach Charlotte Reznick uses with her young clients.

By Lauren Dockett - When sex becomes fraught or painful, fear and worries can overtake this important source of pleasure. But clinicians and clients are embracing a nonmedical solution: mindfulness practices that cultivate sexual self-understanding, desire, and pleasure in the bedroom—and the effects are mind-blowing.

Mindfulness specialist Chris Willard explains the difference between mindfulness work with kids and adults, and shares two techniques you can use today with children and teens in your practice.

By Ronald Siegel - As mindfulness practices work their way into the psychotherapeutic mainstream, we’re starting to ask more clinically sophisticated questions: Who needs what practice when? What about the downsides of some mindfulness interventions?

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.