To fully experience health we must bring our body, mind, and spirit into balance. Our goals in any therapeutic process likely include promoting energy, creativity and inner awareness. But the demands of our daily schedules can throw us off balance and leave us overwhelmed. Stress builds up, we feel anxious, and these negative feelings disturb our balance and can potentially lead to compromised health. Psychological and physical problems can contribute to our discomfort – difficulties can occur in our close relationships and at work, and we might experience headaches, digestion problems or sleep disturbances – all seem to suffer as we move further out of balance from the state of health. Many alternative practices, in complement to psychotherapy, help restore the balance of mind and body, where we can feel calm and in control rather than experiencing anxiety as we address our daily responsibilities.
At Pacifica Psychological Services, we offer these alternative practices:
- Women’s Wellness Workshops
- Alternative Healing and Psychotherapy
Please call our office for a Free Consultation to determine the individualized services appropriate for your needs.
Women’s Wellness Workshops
We offer two Women’s Wellness Workshop 6-week series:
“The Personal Magic of Self-Esteem” – focuses on specific topics to help consider essential components of self-esteem
“What About Stress? Awareness & Coping” – focuses on specific topics to help consider essential components of stress-management
Please view our Workshops page for dates, time, and location.
Alternative Healing and Psychotherapy
At times, integrating the best of Western psychological practices with the healing traditions of Eastern philosophy and practices allows us to reconnect with our “whole” selves to reduce stress and restore balance.
Yoga is a 3000 year-old tradition, which is designed to enhance the mind-body relationship. The practice of yoga utilizes physical postures and breathing exercises to build strength, flexibility and balance, and achieve states of body-centered restful awareness in your daily life.
Meditation promotes a restful, reflective state of mind, and enables you to connect with your true self where energy, creativity, and inner awareness become your normal state of being. Meditation practices focus on quieting the busy mind and directing concentration to one healing element – a sound, an image, a word, one’s breath – thus filling the mind with a feeling of calm anchored in the present.
Guided Imagery or visualization is our most fundamental language, and how the mind communicates with the body. Imagery is at the center of relaxation techniques, designed to release brain chemicals that act as the body’s natural brain tranquilizers. Our imagination is a potent healer and can relieve suffering and encourage healing of numerous physical and psychological ailments, including stress, anxiety and depression.
Sound Therapies are based on the observation that music can promote significant changes in mood, relieve stress, and refocus one’s concentration by altering the neurochemical responses in the brain. It is the rhythm of the music that calms us and promotes a left brain-right brain synchronization that results in a soothing physiological and psychological experience.
Massage Therapy can be used to promote general well-being and enhance self-esteem, while boosting the circulatory and immune systems to benefit blood pressure, circulation, muscle tone, digestion, and skin tone. It has been incorporated into many health systems, and different massage techniques have been developed and integrated into various complementary therapies benefiting the mind-body relationship.
Mindful Awareness is a 2,500 year-old practice which offers the moment-by-moment awareness of one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions, and drawing inferences from one’s own physical, mental and emotional experiences. Mindful awareness practices include meditation, yoga, tai chi, qui gong and other approaches designed to increase attention and foster a sense of calm. One may achieve a greater sense of self-awareness and inner peace, but also a greater connection to others and to community. Such practices can play a significant role in improving the immune response, supporting healing of physical ailments, and in treating a variety of behavioral and psychological disorders. It can also be introduced into other physical and creative endeavors such as dance, art and music.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction is a program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Scientific studies have shown that the Guided Meditations of Mindfulness-Based practices are highly effective in dealing with stress, emotional upheaval, chronic pain conditions and many different types of chronic illnesses. With mindfulness-based meditations the goal is not to achieve a state of deep relaxation, but to simply open ourselves to an awareness of how we are in the present moment. And interestingly, during this simple process one actually can experience deep states of well-being, both of body and mind, even during extraordinary difficulties.