Midtown MFT is located in Midtown NYC and provides counseling and psychotherapy.
“It takes a lifetime of slow work to find a rhythm of thinking which reflects and articulates the uniqueness of your soul” John O’Donohue
A Dangerous Place to Walk Alone at Night…
We often pick up habits of thinking that are not necessarily native to our own mind but that we observed and unconsciously internalized. These thought-habits can be limiting or damaging to our sense of self and our worldview. Often language is too limited to capture the ineffable, the spiritual, the inner landscape of our nuanced experience, and the universal. When we realize that our thinking has a life of its own, we may feel more compelled to consider taking care of our mind as we would our home, a garden, or our children. In our quest for knowing and control, we can often concretize life in a way that imprisons us. Bearing the unknown and opening our mind to finding comfort in uncertainty and mystery can shift our felt sense in the world from that of a dry, step-by-step text book to an adventurous novel filled with unexpected characters and settings that inspire and transform us.
It has been said that the mind is a dangerous place to walk alone at night. If we are afraid, our mind can keep us up at night showing us all the things we need to fear. Some neuro-scientists credit our evolutionary success to this capacity of our mind. Humans, as animals, have no sharp teeth, armor, or claws. We have survived because we have learned what to fear, to remember all that could harm us so we develop strategies to protect ourselves. Unfortunately, this primitive defense is in overdrive in many of us, making our mind a mental prison as opposed to a protective fortress around a treasure. Many dream analysts have come to recognize nightmares and repetitive bad dreams as the greatest teaching dreams. Often times psyche brings up disturbing imagery to guide us to give good attention to what this imagery symbolizes as it is necessary for our healing.
Tending To Our Mind
Therapy can be a space to look into the ways in which your perception may be imprisoning you. You can engage your mind in a conversation that can open the invisible cages parts of you may be anxiously circling within. When we are not free in mind we are not free in body.
“Our bodies know that they belong; it is our minds that make our lives so homeless.”
-John O’Donohue
Thoughts that cause emotional distress can keep our bodies on high alert or direct our bodies to respond as if what we fear is actually happening, even when it is not. This can cause physical pain, discomfort, and dis-ease in the body. Our bodies take the shape of our lives and our lives are shaped by our thoughts.
We all hold negative core beliefs. The path to mental and emotional liberation is to find these beliefs and hold them in the light. How much truth do they really hold? If we are loyal to these negative beliefs, consciously or unconsciously, everything we experience can be filtered through them or used to rectify them. We are infinite and ultimately unknowable to ourselves and others in any absolute or complete way. We are dynamic and always in a process of becoming as well as of coming undone.
What Are You Doing to Create a Beautiful Mind?
Suffering, loss, and traumatic experience can darken our mind as our psyche tries to wrestle with what is out of our control. We cannot live without experiencing all of these at some point. Life is not about not experiencing these crisis, it is about how we choose to respond.
Therapy is the place for the courageous work of transfiguring suffering into a more open heart and mind. John O’Donohue, the Irish philosopher and poet, whom I quote throughout this essay spoke to what it means to have and to cultivate a beautiful mind. He would ask: Who are you reading? What was the last conversation you had that resonated in your heart and your mind for weeks, months or even years? Where is your imagination engaged? What are you doing to create a beautiful mind? Therapy is a conversation, one hour a week, that tends the garden of your mind and keeps you vigilant about developing and enlivening the thoughts that shape your life.
[/column1] [column2]Contact Us and Get Connected!
Call Us: 917-968-5599
We will respond to your email within 24 hours.
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Groups/ Workshops at Midtown
We offer a few groups and workshops to compliment your individual and couples work. Groups and workshops are experiential in nature and provide you with tools and techniques you can implement in your daily life.
8-Week Anger Management Group
Skills Based Anger Management Group. Are you angry? Do you experience too much aggravation and frustration? Are you quick to react, and lose your temper? Join us to explore how understanding and managing your angry feelings can transform your life and relationships.
Premarital Counseling Workshop
PREMARITAL 101: A one-day, hands-on introduction to Premarital Counseling providing you with tools and techniques to make your relationship the strongest, healthiest, and happiest it has ever been.
Anger Management Workshop
Are you angry? Are you frequently annoyed, aggravated, frustrated, quick to rage? Do you lose your temper too often? This anger management workshop provides an in-depth look at the core of anger.
Communication Skills Workshop
From Isolation to Connection: How to speak and listen in ways that are felt, heard, and understood. Communication skills training in NYC for couples and individuals: problem resolution, resolve conflict, communicate more effectively.
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“As Meister Eckhart says: Thoughts are our inner senses. When the inner senses are dull and blurred, you can see nothing in or of yourself; you become a respectable prisoner of received images. Now you realise that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’ and you undertake the difficult but beautiful path to freedom. On this journey, you begin to see how the sides of your heart that seemed awkward, contradictory and uneven are the places where the treasure lies hidden.”
-John O’Donohue