When Meditation Isn’t Enough: Healing the Wounds That Still Hurt
You meditate. You read the books. You’ve gone on retreats, followed the gurus, lit the incense, and opened your heart in yoga classes and silent sits.
And yet… there's still a hollowness. A question you can't quite shake:
Why do I still feel this lost?
You’re not alone.
In a 1989 article titled "Even the Best Meditators Have Old Wounds to Heal," Jack Kornfield wrote:
“For most people, meditation practice doesn’t do it all. At best, it’s one important piece of a complex path of opening and awakening.”
At the time, this statement was met with resistance in many meditation communities. After all, wasn’t mindfulness supposed to be the way through everything?
But over the years, lived experiences have shown what many feel:
Meditation can help us cope, ground, and grow. It can even open up profound experiences that are beyond the norm—but it often doesn’t touch the oldest wounds.
Meditation Helps Regulate the Nervous System—But Attachment Wounds Run Deeper
Mindfulness practices can bring beautiful shifts—quieting the mind, softening stress, and even bringing profound insights.
But if you’ve spent your life longing for a secure connection, navigating relationship patterns that leave you aching, or feeling a persistent emptiness no matter how much inner work you do… then it might not be your breath you need to return to.
It might be your early relational experiences—the attachment templates you carry from childhood—that are asking for healing.
“Why Can’t I Meditate My Way Out of This?”
Because attachment wounds live in relationship. They were formed in connection, and they are often healed through connection—specifically, through a safe, attuned, therapeutic relationship.
In my therapy practice in Manhattan, New York, I work with individuals who may have done years of spiritual and self-development work. Many are highly insightful, articulate, and deeply committed to their healing journeys.
But what they often haven’t explored is how their wounds show up in relationship to others—through patterns of avoidance, people-pleasing, distrust, fear of engulfment, or deep longing.
This is where relationally-oriented therapy becomes powerful.
We don’t just talk about your patterns. We also gently and compassionately explore how they emerge in our work together—so healing can happen in real time, through the therapeutic relationship.
A Mindfulness-Informed, Depth-Oriented Approach
As someone who uses both traditional psychotherapy and Buddhist-informed approaches, I bring a grounded, integrative lens to healing.
We might incorporate mindfulness. But we’ll also explore the patterns of relating that have been holding you back. We’ll use the therapeutic relationship itself as a laboratory for what emerges in your life with others. From this laboratory, we’ll see the relational patterns that have caused you pain and do the deep work of healing them. We will also examine the symbols and stories of your psyche through tools like dream analysis to see what your deeper Self can teach us about your growth process.
This isn’t quick-fix work. It’s slow, rich, and truly transformative.
If you're looking for psychotherapy in Manhattan that honors your spiritual path while offering grounded, clinical support to heal what meditation alone hasn’t touched—I’d be honored to walk with you.
Call or email to schedule your free 15 minute phone consultation.