Mindfulness Counseling Resources

Please click here for updated corona virus information

Read these useful resources and tips to better prepare yourself for counseling and therapy. Note that Mindfulness Counseling is not responsible for the content, claims, or representation of the listed sites. Complete your intake paperwork via our online portal.

Addiction and Recovery

Anxiety Disorders

Associations and Institutes

Attention Deficit

See the websites for ADDA (Attention Deficit Disorder Association) and Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, NIMH.

Child Abuse and Domestic Violence

Childhelp USA®

Questions and Answers about Memories of Childhood Abuse

The National Domestic Violence Hotline Website

Chronic Fatigue

Learn about chronic fatigue syndrome with the help of this resource from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Depression

Developmental Disorders

Read this useful resource about Asperger's disorder and visit the NeuroWeb database to learn about developmental disorders.

Diagnosis

Find out about APA Diagnostic Classification DSM-IV-TR. The resource contains useful information about diagnoses and criteria.

Eating Disorders

Browse through the information provided by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and Something Fishy about eating disorders.

Journals and Magazines

Medications and Health Supplements

Drug Interactions, Drugs.com

Medications, FDA

Medication, Internet Mental Health

Medications, PDR

Medline, Comparison

Multivitamins

Mental Health Care General Links

Personality Disorders

Learn about personality disorders from Mental Help and Focus Adolescent Services.

Suicide Awareness and Hotlines

Additional Mental Health Care and Counseling Resources

Get Dirty: Lessons From the Wildest of Souls

Who understands the exact tone of hoofbeats across grass and then dirt?

I am that wild horse-beat, heartbeat.

I am a refugee of my own creation.

Horse-beat

So, tell me, who is in your herd? What color are their beautiful manes, their eyes? What is the texture of their wounds? How bright do their souls shine? Who is near you in the field, when you are on the ground, legs folded beneath you, injured, alone, ready to give up? Who protects you at any cost? Which wild-eyed soul is your salvation?

Who do you follow, while you desperately search to find home within your own huge bones, moving your ribs with your deep breath, as you race across the plains?

What are the ways that you have said goodbye to those wise, strong, nurturing spirits that have gone on to conquer new ground or been carried away by angels? How did you grieve with your head hanging low, your whiskers touching the ground?

Who did you call to, when the loss was so deep that it filled the spaces and cracks in your heart, like mortar, made of fear and rage? Whose hooves did you rest upon?

Heartbeat

I was two years old, standing on a wooden and weathered fence board, staring at horses in a field. My father was beside me, talking to me. Although I can’t remember the words, the essence of the connection is burned into my fiber. Horses are beautiful, noble, strongly wild and soulful. He and I knew this, and I looked up at him, smiling.

From that point on, I only drew horses on paper, even when there were misguided art assignments to create something that did not speak to my heart or soul. I read about horses, dreamt of horses, and heard the sound they make when they breathe.

My father died when I was eight years old. He began to leave Earth while we were all home on a snow-covered Sunday morning. And he finished dying in a hospital where a social worker handed me a piece of paper on which I drew a brown horse with black hooves.

I drew, I didn’t talk to her, and I vividly heard people talking about how I was too young to understand… but I understood. I understood that it was okay that I didn’t kiss my father’s body in the casket because it was not really him anymore. They said they didn’t want me to regret that choice later, and I said, “I won’t.”

Something died in me too, something ancient and warm, something that knew how to cry.

When I was 26 years old, I met that brown horse with black hooves from that drawing. That horse was sent to me in the most gentle, powerful and steady soul in the world. I was love-struck. I named him Romeo. One day, as we rode, I fell from him while going over a jump, and I started to cry. I cried for him.

I cried for his spirit — a spirit willing to risk his own protection for me. I cried because my heart was so open to the mysteries of this creature and my fear that something could have happened to him, even though it did not. Since then, I never really stopped crying.

I witnessed and felt his sacrifice and love in a life of service to others, and on some level, I desired to touch that piece of him, to touch that piece of us all. The spirit of this horse was the definite and clear reflection of my mother, who spent her days picking me up off of the ground so that I could continue to jump and leap through the air.

Hooves and Talons

When I began to journey into the world of hypnotherapy, healing energy and spiritual work, I started to have encounters with hawks. Everywhere! One hawk flew across the barn driveway, right in front of my shocked and surprised eyes. I often saw three to four hawks per day.

I did what all of us would do — I rationalized these experiences with my humanness, saying “Well, we sure have a lot of hawks around here,” but my spirit knew, there was more to this hawk messenger than I could have imagined.

Being a child of Nature, I had roamed woods and meadows for most of my life, yet never had I encountered so many red-tailed hawks. And then one day, this happened:

I was staring at a baby hawk. This hawk had her wings splayed out in front of her body, not behind, where she was perched. I was enamored with her. Huge raindrops were falling earlier and winds pushed the turbulence from the sky, and stirred it up in my gut, in my life. The hawk was fanning her wings to dry them.

I decided to begin a campaign of fear for her and on her behalf. What if… she really couldn’t fly yet or she took her first flight but wasn’t strong enough.. .or the storm dislodged her from her safe and cozy nest too soon?

I created a picture of how I would catch her and take her for rehabilitation at the animal sanctuary… because after all, it may be that she had a broken wing on top of being way too small and way too young to fly.

I pictured her fleeing me in small bursts of flight with her gangly wings as I tried to save her by making her my captive, for her own good.

Suddenly, I realized how I was doing what I often do, trying to save everything and everyone, because of the one that I couldn’t save when I was eight years old. I was this hawk, too young, too scared, too broken. These were my fears. They did not belong to Nature.

So I didn’t move. I just held my breath. She looked all around. I stared, mesmerized. I just knew that she would test those wings soon, waving them in the air to feel their lift, making sure her feathers were dry and capable of holding her up. I knew this and I felt the excitement building.

And then it happened. She looked to the right and flew with such force, such confidence, in a half-second, before I even realized it. There were no pre-flight tests, no doubt, nothing but straight and clear knowing. I said to myself, “I want that, I want to know the exact moment when my wings are dry.”

Get Dirty

When you are lost or cold in your soul, go to Nature. Get dirty. This is a command. A horse, a tree, the sky — they all reflect your path back to you so that you can see it, really see it. Sometimes the path is a warpath, an ancient fight with the world or yourself. You will find your warrior in nature, right underneath your surrender.

Your own spirit, your own nature, will be presented to you in the eyes of a horse. It will be your choice to believe it, to nourish it, to transform it.

When we begin to see our patterns in life, we sometimes feel anger. It is easy to call up the part of ourselves that says, “Seriously, this pattern again? This thing I do that is so unhealthy?”

But in nature, you sometimes learn that a pattern is a part of your essence and the only way that you are launched onto your path, wrenched out of your stuck-ness, moved to tears with grace. So love your patterns too.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t use them as resources to grow, and then grow like a tree, drinking in the water of your lessons, feeling the scuffed edges of your bark, carved by the winds of this adventure.

Find that cliff, stand on it and then fall harder than you ever have. Run to something with wild fear, with fierce love. Run to yourself. Stomp your hooves on the trail, and say No to anything that attempts to bridle your life force fever. Honor your herd for their desperate, steely support and dancing gait.

Honor your own scarred heart that continues to take you forward. These pilgrim wanderings, these dusty and rain-soaked trails will lead you home.

Yours truly,

Dirty Wild Horse Girl

PS: My wings aren’t dry yet.

May 9, 2016 / Via Maura Coyne

Useful Articles to Help You Learn About Mental Care

Dear Coyote: A Love Letter to All the Wild-Haired Wanderers

Dear Coyote,

You crossed my path today with your red-brown-grey coat catching bits of glistening light just as the sun began to bite the darkness.

Coyote, you stopped twice and held my gaze, the first time longer and the second time making me want more of your wild soul lessons, before you trotted off down your path. It happened right as these words crossed my heart: “Sometimes when I am lost, I don’t really want to be found.”

I am you, Dog, trotting into the woods craving solitude and rest. Soul Hunger.

Some say, Coyote, that you are a trickster, but in this case, your pure, raw Spirit looked back at me, stared truth into the ghostly corners of my bones and held me at a distance with purpose. You demanded respect and I accepted the demand.

I thrilled at the desire to chase you all the way down your path, but your respect-claiming eyes said No. You Howled No.

Your independent, swishing tail signaling the final No, No, No, waving goodbye to me in dusk light.

Coyote, you are full of Beauty Wild. Mystery.

In my 44th year, sometime in the Spring, I broke. Sometimes people will say that it is impossible to break, but I did it. I circled around everything that I knew, and found myself standing still, splintered, shattered and bent. Unrecognizable, except for the dark circles under my eyes.

I had been doing a lot of work on healing past wounds, and felt I was making progress in understanding myself, yet all of a sudden, I felt untethered. A burning anger was surfacing. There were so many times that I had not fully expressed how I truly felt, especially in my romantic relationships. Lost. Fire. Truth. Hot words always find their way out. That fire burning inside had to breathe.

Those words needed to leave my body and find oxygen. I barked. I howled. I screeched.

I was full of judgment for myself and my past choices at the exact same milli-moment that I was also full of great love for myself. This paradox left me feeling very confused and consumed in grief pain. I craved isolation to settle into the current state of Me. I grieved the past, but I also grieved the part of myself that I was still struggling to access, the part I couldn’t quite find.

The weird part was that this pain felt so desperate and bitter, intermingled with the excitement of the journey ahead. What would that fire inside produce? Where would it take me now?

On one level, I was starting to reclaim my soul, but the arrows on the compass of my life path were pointing backwards and forwards. They were pointing to all directions at once. North felt like West. I was grasping for life in a ferocious battle with emotional death. And all of this was taking place in the wilderness of my soul, a place where no one had yet traveled. Especially not me.

I was sitting among the quiet, breathing, pines in isolation.

Yet there was also something delicious about being lost. And I wanted to stay there.

What remained crystal clear in my memory was the decision that I made at eight years old in the hospital where my father died. Amidst the confusion, deep pain and shock, the wreckage of a life ending too soon and too suddenly, I decided that I would take care of everyone else by being very, very good. I would not cause problems. I could feel the hurt of my family, and I felt it in every cell.

I wanted it to stop, and the only way out was to be very, very good — a good daughter, a good sister, a good student. That first night without him, I could not sleep, convinced that I too would just stop breathing.

My father was amazing. Sometimes, he took up all of the space in the room with his laughter, his fiery soul, his protection and honor of women. So, when you are lucky enough to have experienced that, it is difficult not to feel anger at the general lapse of chivalry in society.

I tried to deny that I was committing the classic relationship patterns, like comparing people to my father or seeking people like my father. A father who at times I felt I barely knew, barely had time with, barely understood myself. But grief is deep. It stands strong against denial. It had wrapped itself around my heart and moved into my veins.

Even my desperate craving for nature, and the messages that I could always find there, did not help to pull me out of the dark. Nature seemed silent too.

I refused to celebrate my 45th birthday.

And at 46, a stark clarity descended upon me that shook my soul to the roots, where it attempted to anchor me into the Earth.

I had now lived longer than my father.

I had spent more days alive on the Earth than he had. Nothing made sense because he would always be older, except now I was older. You would think I would have seen this coming, as the number 45 was etched in my mind, heavy like a metal weight on my heart. I had too many memories of people saying, “He was so young when he died, only 45 years old.” But I had completely missed it.

Even now, it seems so stereotypical, that as my birthdays got closer to 45, I would feel as if I was disintegrating. How could I live longer than him?

Even today, what no one seems to understand is that I am in a pause, and have been there for the past few years. I feel tired of constantly trying to be good, to achieve, to help everyone else. I am worn out. I don’t want to make any decisions. I don’t know how to proceed past 45.

I have been chasing a ghost coyote down a path for a long time, but now I am the pilgrim. I am on the uncharted path.

And so at 46, I saw you, Coyote.

I wanted to follow you. I loved you so from the first minute I saw you running across the grass. Your wild heart going to a place that I could not go, not yet. Maybe you were hunting, maybe you were going home, maybe on the way, your wild-haired coat left your scent against a fur tree.

So I am writing this love letter to you, Coyote, this love letter to a noble, strong, vulnerable, wild, trickster Father Coyote that firmly and gently told me that I have been chasing down the wrong path for far too long, chasing the mystery of him, chasing his ghost for too long.

The Father Coyote that said, “No, you cannot come this way with me, desperate to see what I see, hoping to get a glimpse of the universal knowledge that you seek.” You, Coyote, ordered me to choose my own path right now on that Fall day, when I was just barely 46 years old, when I felt maybe one day older than my eight-year-old self.

In chronological time, my lungs have breathed longer than my fathers ever did, my legs have walked more days, and that makes no sense. None at all. But I know that I am strong, that I am vulnerable, that I am a survivor. And I know that my father is an old soul, my teacher. I believe that he will always be older than me.

Oh, Dear Coyote, we are the same yet we are different. You and my Father are one. I envy your nature, your complete acceptance of where you are right now. I hate to miss the adventures I would find by chasing you down your trail, but I love you for stopping me, for challenging me, and for giving me a message to always seek my own adventures, to live wild and full.

I lust to wander in this life and find myself over and over again.

Love,

The Wild-Haired Coyote Girl

Maura Coyne

Maura Coyne is a seeker, a dirty wild horse girl, and a lover of the passionate life. She practices hypnotherapy, equine therapy, and energy / breathwork to assist others in removing the blocks and obstacles that often prevent them from moving forward on their life path.

Teaching others to transmute the heavy and dark challenges that they face, by moving them into the light of creativity, strength, and spirit, she is committed to healing herself along the way, and witnessing miracles in Nature.

If you are interested in a little soul archaeology of your own, contact her at Wild Goose Farm, named for her patriarchal Coyne ancestral line. She aspires to continue going on wild goose chases for the rest of her time on the planet.

Call us to ask about our online appointment and payment options.