Online Mindfulness Therapy for Anxiety

Are you looking for an alternative to medications for treating your anxiety?

Please email me and tell me about yourself and how I can help you.

Schedule a Skype therapy session at a time that works for you.

Online Mindfulness Therapy is very effective for learning how to neutralize and overcome anxiety disorders without years of therapy and without using anti-anxiety medications, which, of course, do nothing to heal the underlying psychological cause of your anxiety.

Most of my clients see significant changes after 3-4 sessions. You will notice changes as soon as you start applying the mindfulness techniques that I will teach you during our sessions together.

“Mindfulness therapy has helped me with my anxiety in a very significant way. No longer am I bound to my anxiety in a continuous circle. I’ve been able to see my anxiety for what it truly is, and it has liberated me. Thank you Peter.”

Go to my Contact Page to talk to schedule online therapy via Skype for help with your anxiety

All sessions are with Dr. Peter Strong via Skype
Schedule a session to see if Mindfulness Therapy is right for you
There are NO upfront payments. You make your payment via PayPal after each session and only if you are completely satisfied with the therapy session
You should expect to see significant improvements after 3-4 sessions

Anxiety disorders that I treat via Skype:

Online Mindfulness Therapy for Anxiety

Welcome! My name is Peter Strong. I’m a professional psychotherapist specializing in Mindfulness Therapy for anxiety and also for depression. So if you’re looking for real change, that is changing the underlying cause of your anxiety, then I have developed a system called Mindfulness Therapy which is extremely effective.

It’s the next stage in anxiety treatment after CBT. CBT is a good approach because it helps you work with the actual cause, the mechanism of anxiety, in that case the underlying patterns of reactive thinking.

While Mindfulness Therapy certainly works on helping you break free from reactive thinking, it also helps you change the underlying emotion that is causing that reactive thinking.

So in Mindfulness Therapy we take this opposite approach, if you like. We recognize that the emotion precedes the thoughts. If you have anxiety, that anxiety will manifest itself in the form of different anxiety thoughts.

Thoughts do not themselves cause anxiety. It’s the other way around. However if we become identified with reactive thoughts then that has the effect of feeding the underlying emotion, the underlying anxiety, and then that creates a circle, a positive feedback loop that simply feeds the anxiety and prevents it from subsiding, from healing, so then it becomes ongoing.

Develop a mindfulness-based relationship with your emotions

So Mindfulness Therapy works very much at the level of the emotion itself, and that the primary way that we heal the underlying anxiety is by changing the relationship that we have with that anxiety. So typically, we have a very poor relationship with our painful emotions, whether that’s anxiety or depression or guilt or anger or stress or shame, whatever it might be.

We tend to run away from those emotions. We tend to push them away. We develop a fear-based relationship with our anxiety and, of course, if you react to anxiety with more fear then you will feed that anxiety. We typically try to push it away; we develop an inner hatred for that anxiety as well. Well, hatred is simply another form of fear. So again if you develop hatred for your anxiety you’ll end up feeding it and preventing it from healing.

So in Mindfulness Therapy we focus on developing a conscious and friendly relationship with our anxiety. This is what has been proven to work over and over again. The better the relationship that you create with your anxiety the quicker it will heal. So the two principal factors in that relationship have to be increased consciousness and increased friendliness or compassion.

Meditate on your anxiety

So the way we develop increased consciousness of our anxiety is to meditate on that anxiety, to put it in the center of our awareness, our attention, but to observe it as an observer. That’s quite different than simply allowing yourself to be overcome by the anxiety and identify with it. We are learning to train out of that process of habitual identification so that we can see the anxiety without becoming anxious. So that’s the first part of our training and it’s really the central principle, if you like.

If you can stop feeding the anxiety then that anxiety will heal and there is nothing that can stop that process of healing. So we learn to sit with the anxiety without becoming reactive. Then we develop this friendliness or compassion for the anxiety and that will accelerate the healing process many, many fold.

So this is equivalent to the exact process that you would do to heal the anxiety of a baby or a child or a hurt animal. You go to it and develop more consciousness to see more clearly what is causing that anxiety for the child or the baby or the animal. You then respond with friendliness and compassion, embracing that and helping that heal by interacting with a child or the animal. You interact in a process based on friendliness and consciousness, not reactivity and fear.

So this is what we need to develop internally, and meditation is the process for doing this. It’s not a way of trying to escape your suffering. That’s one form of meditation and it’s basically wrong as far as I’m concerned. So real meditation is about taking care of real problems, and your emotions, if they are suffering, they’re in a state of pain, they need your consciousness and compassion. They need you to meditate on them so you can help them change and heal.

Mindfulness: Consciousness + Compassion

So developing this an internal relationship based on consciousness and compassion is vital. If you do that effectively then your anxiety will heal quite quickly even if you’ve been suffering from the anxiety for many years. Once you start to change your relationship to it, it will heal very quickly. You can overcome generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, panic attacks, OCD, and even agoraphobia, when you start to change the relationship that you have with those emotions.

Now in our sessions I will teach you how to do this. We will work very much in depth in developing this process of mindfulness-based healing. I will teach you how to meditate on your emotions. You’ll then practice that between sessions, and depending on how committed you are making real change will determine how quickly you change.

I usually tell everyone that I work with, you should expect to see major improvements within three to four sessions. If you do not then that’s either a problem of commitment on your part or it’s a problem of the wrong approach on the part of the therapist. So this is really important to understand. Do not engage in treatment-based approaches. Why? Because that does not change this fundamental relationship that you are trying to create with your anxiety.

Treating anxiety with medication is simply another way of cultivating ignorance and hatred of that anxiety. You’re not taking care of it with medications you’re just papering over the symptoms. That is not going to work. It may provide short-term relief, but that’s not what we’re interested in. We are interested in long term healing so that you do not suffer from anxiety anymore. That’s our goal and it’s a very realistic goal.

So never let anyone tell you that you have to live with your anxiety forever. That is wrong. It simply indicates an improper understanding of the cause of anxiety and an improper approach to the resolution of your anxiety. So that’s important.

Contact me to get started with online mindfulness therapy for anxiety

If you’d like to get started with me then please email me and let’s schedule some sessions. All my sessions are based on satisfaction. I do not charge up front. And if you are not satisfied with the first session then there’s no payment. It is as simple as that. You generally will be very satisfied of course and you will see some changes even after the first session. And as you start to apply the tools that I teach you will gain greater and greater confidence and your anxiety will continue to heal very quickly.

I have worked with hundreds of people over the years and mindfulness-based therapy is definitely the way to go. It’s very natural; it will feel very natural for you. It basically will give you tools that you can apply to many different areas of your life to improve the quality of your life. It’s really about teaching you how to grow. So anxiety, I do not regard that as a disorder. It’s simply giving you material for growing and becoming stronger and becoming more conscious and more compassionate and your life. It is a vehicle for training.

So if you would like to learn more about how to work with your anxiety using mindfulness, then please email me.

People love the idea of online therapy. It’s so convenient. It’s so empowering for you. And being able to talk to a therapist online using Skype is just as good as talking to a therapist in person. You have to be able to see each other. That’s just common sense. You need to see each other for effective communication. But if you can see each other then there’s no difference whether it’s in person or through Skype. So all my sessions are done through Skype.

So if you would like to get started with me please email me now. Thank you.

Feeling stuck?

Do you feel stuck and unable to get beyond anxiety, depression and traumatic memories? Do you feel a victim of your emotions?

Intense emotions resulting from childhood trauma, personal loss or a recent traumatic experience have a tendency to become stuck in the deep recesses of the mind where they continue to ferment and generate recurring anxiety and patterns of negative thinking. These core emotions can have a severe impact on the quality of our lives and our relationships. Core complexes contain emotional energy that has become trapped and frozen in place, unable to change and resolve, internal generators of suffering.

We may be plagued by guilt or regret or a feeling of great hurt and inner wounding that just won’t go away. We become victims of our inner emotions and prisoners of our conditioned habitual reactivity. These patterns of inner suffering become established as habitual patterns of reactivity that affect our thinking, our inner beliefs and perceptions of the world. The world is seen as a hostile place and we feel overwhelmed, fatigued, negative and empty.

So, how do we go about changing this less than satisfactory state of existence? How do we break free from being a victim of our patterns of habitual emotional reactivity? How can we restore balance and heal the wounds that cut so deep?

The Power of Mindfulness for Overcoming Anxiety

I believe, as a practitioner of mindfulness-based psychotherapy, that all successful forms psychotherapy and spiritual practice are based on one fundamental principle, and this is the principle of engaged-presence. We must begin our journey of inner transformation by establishing a profound level of relationship with the inner suffering, hurt and wounded parts of our psyche, and this relationship should be based on genuine care, openness, and non-reactivity.

All our activities must be channelled into this one end, to be able to sit down with our pain and care for it with the same level of attention and love that a mother gives to her baby. This is what we mean by engaged-presence, or mindfulness.

Mindfulness is an ancient practice, and central to all the teachings of the Buddha, in which we let go of doing and reacting, thinking and trying to fix things, and simply sit with each of our emotions with a mind that is open, caring and genuinely interested in the subtleties of an emotional complex.

It is a central tenet in Mindfulness Psychotherapy that what keeps emotional suffering and anxiety alive is our inattention or un-mindfulness, also simply called ignorance. We suffer from our pain day in day out, but never really take the time to simply be with our pain, observing it, gently massaging it with the love of pure undivided attention.

There is a growing awareness of the prime importance of this quality of mindful-attention. Its not about analyzing the problem, not about trying to change negative beliefs, not about fixing things, but about creating a safe space around the suffering that gives it a chance to move, unfold and change in its own unique way, free from the interference of the ego-directed thinking mind.

Trying to fix things externally can only be partially successful if done in isolation. We need to heal at the core, and this means allowing changes to arise from the intuitive level, a much more sensitive level than provided by the ego and thinking mind. After all, the problems of inner conflict and disharmony are largely a product of the ego trying to control emotional suffering through the ego-reactions of repression, diversion and avoidance.

It is a far better practice to first establish a foundation of stillness and inner listening at a deeper and intuitive level, a foundation in the fertile ground of mindfulness and allow action, new beliefs and insights to arise from this solid foundation.

Everyone knows the importance of facing our emotions directly and getting in touch with our feelings. But what does this mean in practice, and how do we do it?

Every emotion can be seen as a mental object, something that arises in the mind and has a certain life of its own. We get a sense of the anxiety or depression or fear as being a part of our mind: an inner child, a judgmental parent, or simply as an object with a certain shape and color. Frequently these inner mental objects can be felt to reside in a particular part of the body – the heart, neck or stomach. Most seem to occur in a specific position in your inner visual screen, perhaps to the left or right, or in front of you.

Take the time to focus your mindfulness inwardly and see if you can get a sense of your emotional objects, whether anxiety, anger or guilt. Every inner part, every emotion has a certain aura, a felt-sense that surrounds it. Mindfulness helps us detect this, as well as detecting our habitual tendencies to react to the emotion or traumatic memory.

Another essential tenet of Mindfulness Meditation, and this is what you are doing when you focus mindfulness on an emotion, is to learn how to respond to these reactions, the fear of the emotion, the tendency to get lost in thinking, in self-judgement and inner dialogue. The critical point to understand is that these reactions can also be seen as mental objects, to be related to in exactly the same way – with mindfulness.

One of the things that makes mindfulness special, and different from general attention or awareness, is that nothing is excluded when we are cultivating a relationship based on mindfulness. We make room for our emotional object as well as our reactions to that emotion; there’s plenty of space for all.

The consequence of establishing a mindfulness-based relationship with your inner emotional suffering is that it stops the cycle of reactivity and opens up a space, a therapeutic space, and it is in this space that emotional suffering begins to unfold and change. It’s rather like massaging the sore parts of the mind with mindfulness.

Every time you touch suffering with mindfulness, it responds by healing. The more you massage it with mindfulness, the more it will heal.

Practice focusing on your pain and saying, “I see you. Welcome. I promise you that I am going to be with you and give you 100% of my attention.” Each moment of mindful-contact heals. It breathes warmth into those parts that are frozen. It softens those parts that have become contracted and contorted into tortured forms. It envelops suffering in the healing space of inner freedom and care that is the expression of genuine love.

Practice this way of relating to your anxiety, depression, grief or trauma a hundred times a day and see for yourself if this doesn’t have a beneficial healing effect. Quite different to our usual mechanical reactivity in which we run away from our pain, or the pain of others. Quite different to becoming lost in thinking.

The purpose of mindfulness meditation on emotions is not to re-experience the emotion or traumatic memory, but learn how to experience them differently, as parts of yourself that require your attention and love. Love that you give through being there for your emotions, being present, being engaged with your suffering. That quality of being present is a movement in stillness, not words and thinking, but listening fully with a mind that cares and is open to every tiny movement. You learn to hold your emotion in the cradle of mindfulness.

If you tune in to your emotions in this way and listen, they will respond by releasing their iron-grip on you. If you learn to love your pain in this way, your pain will reward you by releasing trapped emotional energy, and make it free to re-assimilate back into the psyche where it can do good and breath life and vitality back into your being. It may seem strange, but in essence, if you give your emotional suffering space, it will respond by transforming and resolving in direct proportion. If you allow it to heal, it will heal.

The only thing that stops our suffering from healing is our reactivity, our un-mindfulness and ignorance. This habit can be undone right now by learning to greet each emotion, each reaction, each thought and memory as an object to which we can relate with mindfulness, with full engaged-presence. Give it a try. Give your emotions a massage – the massage of mindfulness.

The Structure of Anxiety

Anxiety and depression affect most of us at some time in our lives. For many, and estimates vary from 10-50%, these powerful emotions can take hold and reduce our happiness and vitality, leaving us feeling fatigued and fearful. We become the victims of these emotions.

All emotions are created around a complex network of negative beliefs and negative patterns of thinking that we acquire over the years that become the prison bars that keep us penned up and suffering. The first part of making a change for the better is learning to recognize these negative patterns of habitual reactivity. Most of the time we aren’t aware of these reactions when they arise – we just react out of habit. We tend to blindly accept the reactions as inevitable, the way things are. This provides our first challenge, right here.

We have to break out of this delusion and understand that we are not the thoughts and emotions that arise in the mind; they are simply mind objects that arise due to conditions. Therefore, the first step in developing the art of recognizing our reactivity is to look at the reactions, emotions, worries and other negative thoughts as objects. We need to learn to look at these internal mental objects the same way that we might look at a table, a chair, a picture, or any other external object around us.

In fact, this is the first step in cultivating mindfulness meditation that we can practice right now. Settle into your chair, take a moment to relax your body and mind and start observing the objects around you. Pick an object and examine its details. Note how you can observe the object as it is: it exists in its space, and you exist as the observer, observing that object. You don’t have to react to the object, and the object has no power over you. In other words you have a very spacious and open relationship with the object, without any overlay of reactivity.

This is the nature of mindfulness and with careful practice you can develop this same kind of mindful relationship with your thoughts and emotions.

This is where mindfulness becomes an invaluable tool for both the client and the therapist. Mindfulness is defined as the non-reactive present-centered awareness of an experience. It is the art of sensitive listening, being fully present and receptive to whatever is being experienced.

During Mindfulness Meditation Therapy, mindfulness is applied directly to the felt-sense of the emotion to cultivate this quality of presence. We choose to make the emotion the primary object of our meditation and our task is to develop a relationship with the emotion, with the anger or fear in which we can observe the emotion and allow the emotion to unfold.

The purpose of cultivating the mindfulness-based relationship is so that we can move from the superficial surface structure of the emotion to the deep internal structure and reveal the subtle internal structure.

As we all know, it is what we don’t see that has the greatest power over us, and this is exactly what happens with anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress and anxiety. Through the mindfulness-based relationship that we cultivate with our inner emotional pain, we effectively allow it to change and witnessing this change is the essential part of the transformational process.

How to overcome anxiety attacks without medication

Online Anxiety Therapy via Skype

The most effective way to overcome anxiety and depression is to break free from the underlying habitual reactive thinking that fuels your anxiety or depression. This is precisely what we focus on during online therapy sessions. It is very effective and most people see significant improvements after 2-3 sessions.

Medications only provide temporary relief from the symptoms, but do not change the underlying cause; Mindfulness Therapy does change the underlying process that causes anxiety and depression and that is why it is so effective for producing lasting changes.

Medications may relieve symptoms of anxiety or panic attacks, but the results are only temporary. Prescription medications do nothing to change the underlying psychological habits that cause your anxiety or panic attacks. The only way to change your emotional habits is to work on them directly, which is the focus of mindfulness therapy, which is what I teach during these online therapy sessions.

Contact me if you are looking for a more effective and permanent solution to managing and eliminating your anxiety or panic attacks. Mindfulness therapy is immensely effective and you should expect to see BIG IMPROVEMENTS after the first few sessions.

Go to my Contact Page to schedule online therapy via Skype for the treatment of anxiety disorders

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Online Mindfulness Therapy for Anxiety