In this MysticMag interview, Dr. Matt Hersh, Ph.D., DCEP, an American Psychological Association distinguished practitioner awardee, discusses his journey to becoming an integrative psychotherapist, mindfulness meditation teacher, and advocate for his fellow therapists. Matt also describes his excitement for integrating Energy Psychology into anxiety treatment as well as his future aspirations to be a voiceover artist for healing-oriented offerings.
Can you please share a few entails about yourself and your professional journey with our readers?
I’m a clinical psychologist by training and work as a full-time psychotherapist in private practice in the Boston, Massachusetts area. I integrate self-compassion, breathwork, and Energy Psychology into my clinical work with teens and adults who struggle with a range of anxiety and related challenges. To diversify my professional endeavors in meaningful ways, I teach mindfulness meditation to college students and created and operate an online resource for psychotherapists for burnout prevention and enhancement of well-being. My debut book, The Thriving Therapist, was written to help therapists more compassionately appreciate their difficult roles and unique needs as well as to strengthen skills for wellness and flourishing.
After gravitating toward every psychology course I could take in college, I realized that a career in this field was inevitable. Since I was a teen, I had also been developing a subtle interest in Eastern medicine and healing, but I had no real exposure nor knowledge about these powerful and transformative modalities of health and wellness until after college. As I trained extensively in contemporary clinical psychology approaches to mental health concerns, my mind would not accept that conventional psychotherapeutic approaches were “the” most effective ways to help with emotional, psychological, and behavioral struggles. When I found mindfulness meditation and Energy Psychology (synthesizing Eastern healing and Western psychology), I knew I had come home and found a way to help my clients in deeper and more engaged ways that also resonated strongly with what I had been intuiting as my path since I was a kid. Fortunately, I had been open to a range of other healing modalities including hypnosis, guided imagery, and acupuncture when I was diagnosed with a life-threatening cancer toward the end of my graduate training. I believe that an integrative body-mind health approach helped to save my life, and I ultimately believe that to meaningfully move the needle on mental health treatment we must tend to multiple interwoven systems at once.
What is Koru Mindfulness?
Koru Mindfulness (now the Mindfulness Institute for Emerging Adults) was the name given to an evidence-based, mindfulness-centered curriculum developed by two women psychiatrists at Duke University in North Carolina in the early 2000s. Koru is a New Zealand Māori word for the unfurling fern frond found throughout the area. Although the word literally translates into “spiraled” or “looped,” the shape represents balanced evolution and growth around a stable center. The founders of the Mindfulness Institute for Emerging Adults (formerly Koru Mindfulness) realized that this image and symbolism was a beautiful way to honor the unfolding growth that college students and emerging adults experience in today’s complex world. The curriculum itself borrows from secular mindfulness teachings while paying close attention to the unique struggles and life experiences of late teens and twenty-somethings in a higher education setting. The curriculum not only teaches mindfulness as a secular skill but also how to use breathwork and guided imagery as stress reduction and calming tools.
The Mindfulness Institute for Emerging Adults itself has unfurled and grown significantly in the last decade, with worldwide institutional adoption of the basic 4-week program. I am a certified Mindfulness Institute for Emerging Adults teacher and have taught Koru at Harvard University since 2013. I love having the opportunity to not only impart my knowledge and experience of mindfulness meditation and other stress management skills but also to learn from students who inevitably bring curiosity, wisdom, and perspective to this endeavor.
How is mindfulness meditation different from other forms of meditation?
If one counts liberally, there are probably hundreds of subtle variations on a meditation theme. But there is one thing that most forms of meditation have in common and are designed to do: to help practitioners familiarize themselves with their own mind and to cultivate a peaceful, non-reactive, and curious relationship to both internal and external experience.
There has been a big secular movement in the last half-century to bring meditation to the masses, and mindfulness meditation has been leading this contemplative wave. Mindfulness meditation can be thought of as a practice of cultivating self-observational skills and of fostering the Buddhist concept of Sati or remembering to be aware for the purpose of awakening.
When we break mindfulness meditation down into its component parts and explore the evolution of how a beginning practitioner becomes more “seasoned,” we find that a beginning meditator in this tradition requires the practice of stabilizing the mind – like positioning a telescope on firmer ground in order to more effectively study the moon, as the father of Western secular mindfulness meditation, Jon Kabat-Zinn, has offered. The journey of this type of concentration practice never really ends, but when the observing self can bear non-reactive witness to whatever is arising, moment to moment, in the mind, body, and through the five senses, then the person is practicing mindfulness meditation.
Other forms of meditation may focus exclusively on concentration or stabilizing practices without evolving the practitioner toward deeper and more compassionate awareness of that which arises in the present moment. Conversely, one might find more spiritually or divinely oriented meditations that don’t necessarily involve building skills of focus, clear seeing, or deep knowing. Meditations abound within the yogic tradition specifically geared toward balancing the chakras and purifying and strengthening the aura. There are also solace and soothing-oriented meditations as well as those that deliberately help people cultivate self-compassion and self-kindness. Ultimately, these other forms of meditation help to connect a person to themselves and/or to a bigger force that can provide guidance, comfort, and perspective.
What other services do you offer?
I’m a humanistic psychotherapist first and foremost, seeing people as self-determined with free will and with vast potential for growth and healing. In my private psychotherapy practice, I approach my work with clients through an integrative and holistic lens, addressing the nervous system, environmental supports and stresses, history of thriving and trauma, subtle energy systems, and how clients treat themselves. As there is often a good deal of collateral work outside of each client hour, I try to balance the remainder of my professional energy and interests in a few meaningful ways. I serve as a consultant mindfulness teacher to Harvard University students, and I operate an online resource for fellow psychotherapists to help with the prevention of burnout and enhancement of well-being. From this platform, I give talks, hold workshops, and offer online courses on how therapists can tend to themselves with as much fierce compassion as they tend to others. As a certified breathwork coach, I’m developing curricula to help the public tap into the power of their breath for optimal mind-body health. In the future, I’d love to do voiceover work for meditation apps and healing-oriented audiobooks.
How do you measure success and can you share some success stories?
Because each person has a uniquely constructed set of life experiences, a one-size-fits-all model of success would belie the complexities of humanity. With that said, what helps tremendously with success assessment is delineating from the outset what a given client desires to gain from therapy. Then we assess together whether gains are being made over time (allowing for normative ups and downs in daily functioning). For example, an adult client might state during the intake interview or in their first session that they want to be less anxious and feel more confident in their decision-making. We would operationalize what these more general aspirations would look and feel like on a daily basis as well as in the face of everyday life stressors. It is from those more concrete conceptualizations and imagery that we can then assess progress. What would their thinking be like, how would they be feeling differently on an average day, how would they be living their life in accordance with what matters rather than based on the anxiety and low confidence they once felt, etc.
Because progress is often not linear, however, there are many twists and turns throughout the course of therapy. Moreover, if therapy is once weekly, we end up doing therapeutic work together that accounts for less than 1% of the client’s waking hours each week. To acknowledge and allow for these realities is, in my opinion, the compassionate thing to do. Otherwise, clients can become overly despondent if change is slow, and we therapists can become increasingly disillusioned that we’re not doing good enough work.
I once worked with a young woman who had a severe flying phobia. She wanted to be less fearful of flight turbulence. But her fear was preventing her from flying altogether. She had not flown in years despite needing to for professional trips and wanting to for more personal reasons. After many sessions of cognitive-behavioral work, this woman’s tolerance increased for talking about and imagining being on a plane. However, she was no closer to booking a flight and actually getting on a plane. We then engaged in several sessions of energy psychology work, and this was the catalyst that this woman needed. She rapidly became less and less fearful of plane and turbulence imagery and was increasingly willing to book a flight for upcoming travel. She indeed booked a flight in the weeks that followed. In fact, she ended up taking several plane trips over the next year. She had noted minimal anxiety while traveling.
Another memorable success story involved a teen who struggled with agoraphobia, or a fear of feeling uncomfortable bodily sensations (e.g., stomach pain, nausea) when out in public places like restaurants. This client became highly anxious, panicked, and avoidant whenever the family would even talk about going out to eat. The family would often have to cancel their plans. Even when the teen was willing to go out, they would feel incredibly anxious at the thought of sitting at a table in a restaurant and potentially feeling sick to their stomach. Fortunately, this client wanted things to be different for them, and the parents were happy to be able to support any possible progress. Through a combination of imaginal exposure work and meridian energy tapping (with applied kinesiology muscle testing), this teen made remarkable progress in a few short months. Talking about restaurants, sitting at a table, and ordering food no longer produced the elevated anxiety it once did. They became increasingly willing to go out with their family and eat at their favorite restaurant without the same anxiety-ridden experience. They even ventured outside their comfort zone to try new places and new foods as their confidence grew week by week.
Although these success stories show a fairly dramatic change from baseline, success is very often an incremental and subtle experience. Being able to emotionally turn toward something that someone has avoided their whole life would be a massive success for that person while seeming trivial to someone else. That courage to be vulnerable then opens the door for a potential moment of relational connection between the client and therapist or between the client and other important people in their life. This can then serve as a catalyst for even more change. Indeed, that series of small but meaningful shifts may have never been expected nor sought after, but it is moments like these that a therapist can be mindfully aware of and reinforce for deeper growth and healing.
What would you say is the most important advice you could give to people battling with anxiety?
I would start by letting folks know that they are certainly not alone. All of humanity has experienced anxiety, in some form, at one point or another in their lives. Anxiety is not something we have, as many of us will often say to ourselves and others. In fact, we hear this reinforced by pharmaceutical companies and even the best psychotherapists as well. If you have something you don’t want, then there’s an inherent friction or tension created. You’ll want to get rid of it, escape it, avoid it, battle it. You’ll start disliking or even hating the fact that this “thing”, this anxiety is there. You may even start getting angry at yourself for having this anxiety.
The art and practice of surrendering, however, is the opposite of trying hard to get rid of something. Acknowledging and allowing are the countervailing forces of the friction generated by escaping, avoiding, or pushing back against the anxiety you experience.
There are so many tools and strategies for anxiety management and reduction one could avail themselves of. But I believe that the foundation to any further support one could get is a sort of surrender or radical acceptance that this anxiety is not what you “have” but rather what you’re currently experiencing. Once this mindset is adopted, then you can start to cultivate your observing self and bear curious and compassionate witness to the triggers, building blocks, and underpinnings of that anxiety. Anxiety is almost always a symptom rather than something in and of itself. When we help clients discover or uncover what that symptom is pointing to then the real transformational work begins.
Note: Case examples provided do not use identifying information. Some descriptions have been modified to protect client confidentiality.
