How individual exploration can help
"Meditation wasn’t designed to heal early psychological wounds." Debra Flics
Mindfulness meditation
Life can be certainly be perplexing at times. Mindfulness meditation training through a course like MBSR or MBCT can be very powerful and giving you a map of your inner life and get more friendly and curious about how you tick. It can also provide tools and practices which reduce anxiety, depression and chronic stress and pain. But some troubles might need a more nuanced and individualised approach than a course or training can offer.
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy based in present moment awareness with an understanding of how the past informs the present, can help. It firstly involves meeting together to understand your current experience and to foster a relationship of safety. We can then work respectfully to help you find fresh and empowering responses to the patterns and relationships that are causing stress and distress. All the people listed here draw on a range of training and skills including mindfulness, Internal Family Systems and a dynamic interest in how the body and mind can work together for the healing of complex problems of living.
Internal Family Systems
Internal Family Systems is a creative, evidence-based, non-pathologising approach to human experience that welcomes the complex multi-faceted experience of being. It naturally supports the cultivation of awareness and compassion in an intelligent, empowering and skilful way. We have become very interested and excited by this work as it brings a really intuitive and immediate way of working with the parts of ourselves that are stuck in ruts of behaviour and feeling – that often emerge in our meditation practice, but also perennially in our lives and relationships. Healing is possible.
Deb has been facilitating MBSR courses for the general public since 2011, after completing MBSR Teacher Training with Openground. She also teaches mindfulness workshops in the workplace. She has worked as a psychotherapist in private practice since 2004, after training in Holistic Counselling and then becoming a Certified Hakomi Therapist. Hakomi is a mindfulness-centred somatic psychotherapy. She is also a Certified Hakomi Teacher on the Hakomi Pacifica Training team. Deb has had a long-term interest in yoga and meditation and has an established mindfulness practice which has developed and deepened over many years. She is passionate about sharing the possibilities for self-discovery, connectedness and freedom that mindfulness offers.
Libba is a psychotherapist in private practice in Sydney as well as being a long term mindfulness practitioner. She has been teaching MBSR since 2007 through Openground and is also the co-founding Director of Openground for Organisations which has been running mindfulness programs in corporate, health, educational and government sectors for over a decade. 
Deeper understanding confers that most precious thing — wonder. 
Hello, my name is Eva Papadopoulo. I have been teaching MBSR with Openground since 2004 and am a co-director and mindfulness trainer with the Mindfulness Training Institute of Australia and New Zealand. I have also co-developed and teach the Living with Wisdom and Compassion course. I began my private practice as a psychotherapist in 2002 in Sydney having trained in body-oriented psychotherapy, psychodynamic, developmental and relational orientations with the Somatic Psychotherapy Institute of Australia in 2000. I have also had much experience in teaching mindfulness meditation as pain-management with cancer, HIV and AIDS. My personal and professional interest in nourishing and healing our past so we can live in the present with more peace and ease is informed by an integrated body-mind approach deepened through her many years of practice in insight meditation, yoga, Ortho-Bionomy, Body Mind Centering (BMC) and dance and theatre improvisation. I have a love and curiosity for what moves the heart and brings connection.