There are many ways in which mindfulness complements traditional approaches to counselling and therapy. Counselling and therapy involve cultivating awareness and insight into your life and the issues you're facing, exploring your patterns of thinking, and your feelings and emotions, how these are affecting you, and learning to handle difficult thoughts and emotions.

Mindfulness helps facilitate these processes by slowing down your mind, and using this calmer, clearer mind to allow you to get in touch with you inner wisdom and gain fresh perspective and understanding about your self, your life, and the issues you're dealing with.

Mindfulness also teaches you to relate to difficult and painful thoughts and feelings in new ways. Instead of becoming overwhelmed and desperate to escape, you'll learn to you deal with problems, pain, and stress through awareness and understanding.

Incorporating mindfulness into psychotherapy is becoming more and more common as research continues to demonstrate its effectiveness in helping people who are experiencing a wide range issues of mindfulness. The Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, has been used to help people deal with stress, anxiety, depression, fibromyalgia, chronic pain, high blood pressure and many other conditions.

Other approaches to therapy that have grown out of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction that are used to help people experiencing depression and anxiety include Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), also based on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, has been used to help people with borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder and eating disorders.