Buddhist​
Therapy Boulder
Takeaway: Experience the transformative power of Buddhist Therapy in Boulder, where inner wisdom is uncovered and emotional blockages are shed through deep compassion and insight. This approach helps release anxiety, doubt, and trauma, fostering self-appreciation and self-love. Embrace your innate healing potential as you let go of unhelpful patterns, finding true freedom, balance, and connection. Take the first step toward healing and self-discovery with a Buddhist Therapist today.
Buddhist teachings combined with holistic mental health counseling can be immensely helpful in working with long-term patterns, negative beliefs, and overwhelming emotions. We often help clients begin a meditation practice in order for them to develop more self-awareness and to shift their thinking through witnessing their mind and unhelpful thought loops that ultimately lead to human suffering.
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Often, anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues feed off of our unconscious thoughts that hum in the background as we go throughout our days. Using meditation techniques, we teach clients to recognize this programming, and also how to tap into compassion, happiness, and their greater wisdom. When we access the present moment and stay connected to our soul essence in each moment, we learn how to easily tap into our complete freedom as sovereign, wise beings.
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Learn more below about how Buddhist psychotherapy might be the correct healing path for you.
Does this resonate with you?
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There's a longing deep within you for greater emotional freedom, but you struggle to free yourself from overthinking, self-judgment, and anxiety. You're feeling called to develop more self-trust, confidence, and ease in your life, but you know you need to change your perception and strengthen your connection to your intuition. You've been wondering how to start a meditation practice and feel drawn to Buddhist psychology and developing mindfulness to feel greater happiness and peace in your life.
Buddhist teachings are immensely helpful if you're going through a spiritual awakening, experiencing grief, healing mental health issues, or taking a bigger step on your spiritual journey.
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Buddhist meditation techniques have been proven to change how your brain is wired, your perception of reality, and your experience of emotions. Becoming more conscious of your body and how it interacts with the world allows you to make wiser and healthier choices in the way you nourish it, take care of it, and treat other people.
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When you become more conscious of your internal world, your perception changes, and daily challenges become teachers and friends to learn and grow from, rather than pain points that result in more suffering and fear.
If so, Buddhist Psychotherapy could be for you!
Buddhist therapy combines Eastern philosophies with Western medical knowledge of the brain and body to help you thrive and connect with your soul essence. Curious to learn more about mindfulness practice and mental health? Learn more below.
What is Buddhist Therapy?
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Buddhist psychotherapy recognizes that at the core of each human lies basic goodness, or brilliant sanity. In a nutshell, meditation practices from Tibetan Buddhism (and many others) aim to help you connect with your basic goodness through tapping into the present moment. When we get stuck thinking about the past or future, we can often fall into fear, anxiety, depression, and other heavier mental energies that don't feel wise or helpful.
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Your soul essence is considered ancient and interconnected with all beings in the universe, and by recognizing this deep connection in each moment, we live from a much healthier, loving, and trusting place. The energy of the soul lives at the frequency of love, and Buddhist teachings point us in this direction over and over again by becoming aware of all the ways our mental formations and assumptions can block this core energy that is our true nature.
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Often, we collect pictures and stories about who we are very early on in life based solely on our family systems, friends, cultures, and media. If we experience trauma in these systems, we might have an untrue story about ourselves based on other people's perceptions, which becomes a painful picture that we replay over and over again in our minds, which then becomes the story of who we are.
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By developing a mindfulness practice where you simply tune into the thought patterns that are responsible for your beliefs and values, you begin to understand how your perception of yourself directly impacts your emotional life, friendships, relationships, career, and so on.
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At Soul Essence Psychotherapy, we recognize your inherent soul essence and combine traditional psychotherapy with Buddhist philosophy so that you can access higher levels of self-love, and self-trust and alleviate the suffering that comes from living in a world where we often struggle to feel enough.
Our approach to Buddhist Therapy
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Buddhist psychotherapy opens clients up to attaining higher mind concepts, such as the ability to witness their thinking processes with neutrality and curiosity, self-acceptance, and trust. Buddhist psychology highlights the luminous nature of our minds, meaning that our core essence, or inherent nature, is considered wise and able to see through untrue narratives. A strong image of this process might be like a lighthouse cutting through dark, storm clouds. When we struggle with mental health, our basic goodness can become obscured and we define our internal world by our external world.
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Due to the increasing amount of time we spend on social media and technology, which brings our attention outside of ourselves, it is vastly important to develop self-awareness and compassion. Doing so allows for greater emotional freedom that is undefined by the pressures and programming in our society. By developing higher self-awareness, our life experiences become important teaching moments where we practice unhooking from negativity, fear, or jealousy, and instead, we define our reality based on wisdom and kindness, and we draw that energy to us.
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Through a therapeutic relationship with a counselor, you might begin to unravel your thought patterns and become aware of your true values. This process combined with meditation practice results in the ability to shift your relationship to your own mind. Ultimately, you will begin to see your thoughts rather than live unconsciously from them, which allows you to develop fearlessness. Most people are terrified of certain parts of themselves and disown them, but with love, tenderness, and understanding, you can let go of thoughts and stories that might have never been your true essence in the first place.
Here are some of the modalities we use to support your healing journey:
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Talk therapy
Speaking your thoughts out loud allows you to increase your awareness of your internal dialogue and might include Contemplative Psychotherapy, Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT).
Mindfulness practices
Mindfulness awareness practices are hugely beneficial to helping you develop the ability to disrupt, pause, and release old patterns and loops that keep you locked in a cycle of overwhelm and suffering.
Meditation
Developing a meditation practice with an anxiety therapist can help you recognize when you jump into "what if" mode and fast forward into the future, often negatively impacting your ability to resource yourself in the present time.
Energy work & somatic grounding practices
Becoming familiar with your energy body and learning how to regulate and ground your nervous system can be hugely beneficial in calming negative thoughts and grounding you into the present moment. For instance, anxiety often stems from jumping into the future or past and taking care of your body in the present time can bring you back into a grounded, trusting space. Also, learning where you hold stress, tension, and worry in your body can help us map where blockages hold you back from your full freedom and integration of your best self.
Guided meditations
Guided imagery and using the right brain to tap into emotions and different parts of our conscious and unconscious mind can result in the processing and releasing of stored patterns in our nervous system, muscles, organs, and chakras. Xandra is an approved meditation teacher at Naropa University.
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Who our Buddhist psychotherapy services are for
We specialize in working with people who are sensitive, empathic, and intuitive and who are drawn to learn about and heal themselves through a Buddhist psychology lens. We work with people who have anxiety and panic attacks, depression, stress, trauma, difficulty in relationships, grief, and more.
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Sensitive people aka HSPs
Highly sensitive people often feel like life is on steroids. This can cause social anxiety, fear of groups and crowds, avoidance of certain places, and more. For HSPs, lights, sounds, colors, textures and even technology-based objects that emit EMFs and other frequencies can be overwhelming, ungrounding, and cause headaches. Learning how your environment impacts you at a higher level and how to regulate your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations through Buddhist psychology and mindfulness practice can dramatically shift your relationship to fear and pain.
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Empaths
Empaths feel the emotional fluctuations within their environment, and this can be a huge challenge to not taking on the emotions of others. The key to being an empowered empath is learning how to regulate your own emotional field, and learning specific skills and strategies to let energy go that isn't yours. Mindfulness and meditation techniques can help eradicate emotional overwhelm and help strengthen your energetic boundaries.
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Frequently Asked Questions
About Buddhist Therapy in Boulder
Do I have to be Buddhist to benefit from Buddhist psychotherapy?
Answer: No, a therapist with a background in Buddhist psychology has no requirement that you identify in the same way. However, working with a mental health counselor trained in Buddhist psychotherapy can be radically different than normal therapy. For instance, counselors trained at Naropa University in Contemplative Psychotherapy and Buddhist psychology are required to go on meditation retreats for three years in order to practice staying clear and regulated in high emotional distress and extreme states of mind. This translates to our clients often feeling more supported, regulated, and attuned when they are experiencing high psychological stress because we deeply understand these states of mind and can hold healing space for them.
What is spiritual bypassing?
Answer: Spiritual bypassing is when someone uses spiritual ideas or concepts to avoid attending to emotional needs or difficulties. Spiritual practice can induce feelings of enlightenment, joy, ecstasy, bliss, and more, but they are often temporary states. Part of mindfulness practice is recognizing these expanded states, appreciating them, but then not becoming fixated on them and demanding they be our only experience.
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What is the goal of Buddhist psychology?
Buddhist philosophy combined with modern Western psychology aims to eradicate dis-ease in the emotional, intellectual, and physical body through expanding consciousness. Buddhism aims to offer stories, methods, principles, and context for how we can live our lives deeply connected with our brilliant sanity, or soul essence.
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Mahatma Gandhi said, "Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny." In the same way, when we are able to bring open awareness and clarity to our internal world and intricately trace how they bleed into our outer world, then we begin the process of redefining who we are through choosing what we think about, believe, and act.
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How does Buddhism benefit mental health?
There are more and more studies focused on the neuroscience aspect of how meditation and mindfulness practices cause the brain to change and function differently. According to PsychCentral, practicing meditation has been found to:
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change the way we respond to distractions
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strengthen memory and focus
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lower anxiety and depression
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reduce stress
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improve sleep
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regulate emotions
Additionally, practicing mindfulness and learning how to exist in the present moment, despite what is happening, allows you to develop courage, resiliency, and bravery. Becoming familiar with your mind allows you to expand your ability to be comfortable and confident in extreme psychological and emotional states. When we understand what is happening in our emotional world, we can also better communicate this to people in our outer world, which can improve relationships and cause us to have more positive interactions with co-workers, friends, family members, and more.
Further, it is shown that when people have more compassion and empathy for themselves, they are better equipped to deal with failure, change, loss, and higher stress. A core principle in meditation practice is developing compassion, or the ability to have empathy or care for ourselves and others despite what is happening.
Studies show that developing loving-kindness and compassion positively impacts mental health.
Working with a Buddhist therapist in Boulder can help you find your authentic self
We are here to support your mind, body, and soul on this journey. You deserve healing and to live a life filled with purpose, peace, confidence, and self-trust.
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