Below I have summarized five suggestions to help clients move more mindfully through the divorce process: Settle In contemporary American society, most of us are highly conditioned to avoid or turn away from difficult experiences, emotions, etc. The fracturing of a family unit or severance of a love relationship can precipitate fear about the future, […]
Category: Mindfulness
Much of suffering can be tied to some deeply conditioned notion that we have some fundamental baseline of “happiness.” When some event, stimuli, or phenomenon is interpreted as “bad,” “unpleasant,” or “painful,” we almost instinctively engage strategies to obtain something we interpret as “good,” “pleasant,” or “pleasurable,” to return our condition to this baseline. Such […]
Mindfulness is especially valuable in conflict situations, or other situations that present challenges to central components of one’s perceived safety, self-concept, etc. One recent study by Natalia Karelaia, Assistant Professor of Decision Sciences at INSEAD in France, suggests four central ways in which mindfulness can foster improved decision-making; Framing the Decision: As Dr. Karelaia explains, […]
The mind seems to incessantly scan the environment for problems to solve. This active intellectual engagement with our environment likely served to ensure our survival as a species over millions of years as immediate physical dangers routinely confronted us in more primitive times. The mind seeks problems to solve largely within the parameters of cause […]
The issue of spousal support, especially when involving highly disparate incomes of a separating couple, is one of the most challenging areas of the divorce process. Underlying the complexity are fundamental notions of “fairness” that may significantly differ for each spouse. To successfully deal with the issue of spousal support in a way that minimizes negative […]
In working with clients to break through learned conditioning and habitual reactions that have led to, or exacerbated, legal disputes, holistic law strives to tap into the inner wisdom of participants as the primary source of optimal solutions. In orienting the identification of solutions towards clients, holistic law presents a fundamental challenge to the entrenched […]
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What is Mindfulness?
At its core, mindfulness refers to a felt sense of present-moment experience. This felt sense fundamentally differs from time caught in thought-driven judgements, interpretations, stories, fears, expectations, etc. These latter mental formations though “real” are far more than often not “true” and often serve to disconnect one from present-moment experience – the only experience within […]
In conducting more than two dozen mediation sessions in Alameda County Superior Court, what is most glaringly apparent is the extent to which mediation participants enter mediation with all-defined, hardened positions. Moreover, these individuals almost always are convinced that their interpretations of some event or events that have taken place in the past are the […]
Partners facing marital breakdown typically are confronted with deep fears and insecurities that can trigger a wide range of emotional reaction. Divorce often has serious implications in family relationships, finances, daily routines, and can shatter one’s sense of security. Divorce involving children can magnify these challenges as well as pose serious long-term harmful consequences especially […]
Through evolution, as an important means of survival, it was often critical when faced with challenges in meeting our basic needs that we were able to identify a cause in the environment that we could then act upon to remove the current obstacle. In many of these primordial situations, if one were to just do […]