Articles
Commitment and Grace; Leveraging the Skill of Dialectical Abstinence this Season
Overcoming addiction requires both a firm commitment to change and a lot of grace for an imperfect process. The DBT skill of dialectical abstinence pairs traditional abstinence with harm reduction tools to help us navigate the path of healing and relapse. By incorporating this skill into our recovery process, we can stay away from an “all-or-nothing” mindset and move a bit closer to balance and freedom.
Small Wins, Big Love
Build-mastery is a key skill in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). The goal of learning this skill is to build a sense of accomplishment, which can support healing feelings of self-loathing, shame, and failure. These challenging emotions often underscore addiction, disordered eating, and other mental health struggles.
The Hour of Power: How to Fill your (Emotional) Cup Each Morning
Many of us have heard the saying, “You cannot serve from an empty cup.”
It sounds cliché, but the image makes sense—imagine if instead of finding your happiness from a full coffee cup each morning, you spent time looking inward, cultivating your own sense of contentment, filling your emotional and spiritual cup.
Cue the “hour of power.”
Tonglen Meditation: an Easy 4-Step Process to Work with Difficult Emotions
Tonglen is a Buddhist practice of “sending and taking.” It helps to cultivate an attitude of fearlessness around our emotions and meet our suffering with grace. Tonglen asks us to invite in the pain, to turn toward it while our habitual conditioning asks us to contract and shield ourselves in the face of pain. In this way, the practice can lead us to a great deal of freedom, courage, and open-heartedness.
Tips for Regulating Emotions & Healing Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Binge eating can feel like a vicious cycle.
I know this not just because of the clients I see regularly struggling with disordered eating, but I also battled myself with binge eating and extreme dieting for over a decade. Desperate for relief, I tried an accumulation of therapists, support groups, meditation practices, yoga classes, and countless self-help books. Nothing helped.
Confronting Difficult Times with Mindfulness and Compassion
When we as humans experience a feeling of unhappiness, we often contract against it. We think something is wrong and our inner alarm bells go off. Whatever the circumstance of our unhappiness—tragedy, loss, humiliation, defeat, or anything else that shakes our sense of belonging—our “bad feelings” can seem like a problem that has to be solved. This reaction is natural and often automatic, but it can sometimes turn organic grief and sadness into chronic dissatisfaction and depression.
Healing Fear of Abandonment
My long-time partner often travels around the world teaching weekend workshops, mostly to young, fit yoga teachers. He leads practices that combine physical therapy, massage therapy and yoga, so he often uses
touch to demonstrate important principles of what he’s teaching. He also has a very outgoing personality, so he usually connects easily with his trainees in meaningful ways.
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New York, NY 10019
Availability
Monday: 1pm–9pm
Tuesday: 1pm–9pm
Wednesday: 1pm–9pm
Thursday: 7am–5pm
Friday – Sunday: Closed
