"Many of us have jobs or hobbies that keep us in our heads and out of our bodies, says Brandy Engler, LA based therapist and author of The Men on My Couch. Activities, including Yoga, gardening, and exercise, that don't rely on mental stimulation and instead connect us to our senses, relax us, or get us into our bodies are more likely to open us up to being sexual."
 
​- Dr. Engler in Good Housekeeping Magazine, "20 Bad Habits That Are Killing Your Libido"

I’m a big fan of using mindfulness as a supplement to psychotherapy.  It weaves effortlessly into the natural process of therapy turning insights into lasting changes.  Mindfulness is a skill set and a new orientation to being with ourselves and the world around us. It’s useful for most concerns that people bring into therapy. Mindfulness offers us a new way to be with life’s struggles, a path to living more open-heartedly and a way to create real change.

Change requires a practice. Clients can learn to use the present moment to create new ways of being. There is opportunity in every day micro moments to experiment with new behaviors, thoughts or feelings. Mindfulness breaks us out of auto-mated reactions so that we can feel or become what we want.

A great example of the benefits of mindfulness is improving our social skills or social anxiety. Many of our client’s report feeling lonely, disconnected and unworthy—and they hardly want to reach out in that state. Therapy is excellent for helping people to see their defense mechanisms that block connection and a good therapist would highlight those defenses as they happen in session.

Mindfulness slows us down and tunes us into our immediate experience so we can see our obstacles to connection more clearly; the moment your mind goes blank at a dinner party, the moment your heart races as you approach someone you’re attracted to, the way your body closes in or your mind becomes dismissive of others. Therapy can create a clear diagram of how you relate and how you became that way and mindfulness helps to disrupt the old pattern with a new way of thinking and feeling. The therapy room gives us a safe place to rehearse this new way of feeling and thinking.

We can learn to hone in on the moment we would normally shut down and instead learn to keep our nervous system regulated and to choose to reach out and stay open.

Mindfulness is also great with sexual anxiety, eating disorders, trauma, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic attacks and addiction.
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We get tons of questions about the advantages of choosing an out-of-network provider when you have a PPO plan. Here are some of the reasons a person might choose and to go outside the network for care:

*Quality: Many highly trained, seasoned therapists choose to remain out of network.

*Choice: With PPO plans, you have the right to see out-of-network providers. 

*Specialization: You can choose the best therapist for your needs—couples therapy, sexual concerns or modern technology-based therapies like EMDR, neurofeedback and sensorimotor therapy are offered by out-of-network therapists.

*Access: No wait lists. Get seen quickly.

*No gatekeepers: No referrals needed from your primary care doctor—simply book an appointment and our staff will take care of the paperwork needed to process your insurance claims.