A meditation to build inner strength and resources in order to engage with the human community.  A healing reflection to help deal with difficult people we encounter.

Equanimity Meditation

This is a healing mentor / role modeling visualization for clearing inner strife and building outer resiliency.  This guided practice helps you to call on the idealized role model to help support you when facing fears and challenges or simply to feel at rest and more at ease in your waking life.  At the beginning are basic breathing exercises to help settle the mind.  This meditation is roughly based on deity practice in the Tibetan Buddhist Tantric visualization tradition.  

Healing Mentor /  Role Modeling Meditation with breathing exercises

A guided meditation to take you through the entire experience of the body.  This body exercise came from Richard Miller's iRest training, but progressive relaxation has a history in both Eastern practices and Western Psychology.  

Body Scan: Whole Body Mindfulness and Relaxation

A guided mindfulness of breathing meditation.

Mindfulness of Breathing

A meditation to help guide you through breath, body and consciousness.  This meditation guides you to let go and experience an open field of awareness.

Breath, Body and Open Field

This guided meditation is designed to ground the meditator via a body scan using the work of Richard Miller with some modifications. The body scan then leads into a Tibetan Buddhist-inspired dissolving of the ordinary body and appearances of the everyday world.  This meditation may help to experience the extraordinary body-mind and provide relief from the stress reactive body-mind. The meditation includes several pauses, but it may be useful to hit pause at points in the meditation that you'd like to explore more. 

I plan to present some of these meditations in a modular way so that meditators may use sections of the meditations and arrange them as needed.

Dream Body, Dream World

This guided meditation helps you develop awareness of sensations in the body.  Anxiety and depression often involve losing contact with the body and using this meditation may help you regain a connection.  You will also develop a way of noticing physical phenomena as they arise. This meditation draws its influence from the labeling and body scan approaches developed by Shinzen Young and Richard Miller.

Labeling Body Sensations

This meditation may help develop awareness and organization of thoughts.  Anxiety and depression often involve overwhelming thoughts, confusion  and/or a sense of disinterest. This meditation has the potential to help you get a handle on the appearance and movement of thoughts in the mind.  The purpose is not to override all thinking in your daily life. Instead, it provides another way of noticing your thoughts. This meditation draws from the labeling meditations developed by Shinzen Young and other insight meditation teachers.

Labeling Thoughts

As a long time (25+ years) practitioner of both meditation and postural yoga, I know first-hand the power of mind-body practices. I earned my Bachelor’s degree from Shimer College, a great books Socratic dialogue college in Chicago, IL. Shimer, was instrumental in informing my understanding of communication and group dynamics. While at Shimer, I read Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” which had a profound impact and gave me a glimpse of an expanded notion of self. Reading Buber led me to the study of contemplative practices.

I received my Master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Adam’s State University in Colorado. It is here where I learned to form effective relationships with my clients. Research shows that the relationship between client and therapist is of utmost importance.

I’ve studied with some thoughtful and generous teachers in the fields of psychotherapy, philosophy, and contemplative practice (primarily Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Yogis). I completed a 2 year certificate in contemplative psychotherapy at the Nalanda Institute.  At the Nalanda institute I learned how to take the entire Tibetan Buddhist path (Lamrim) and use it to support physical, mental and emotional health.  I also learned where the  theories and practices  of Western Psychology enhance and support some of these meditative approaches .

Chris Heinisch Counselor

Popular tracks