Compare And Contrast Mindfulness And Existential Psychology

The existential and mindfulness approach will both be compared and contrasted. In order to carry out this task, the essay will point out how each approach understands fear and sadness and what actions they take in dealing with such a problem. This will be conducted by firstly, presenting existential counselling/psychotherapy, identifying the key aspects of the approach and how it has been developed through the use of existential philosophy. The essay will then point out how Existential counselling/psychotherapy understand fear and sadness explaining how it attempts to deal with it in a phenomenological manner. This essay will then move on to mindfulness, pointing out the history of mindfulness and how it has been developed through the years
The existential therapy was first developed in continental Europe in the 1930s, by two individuals Ludwig Binswanger and Medrad Boss. Their work was associated with existential philosophers such as the work of Martin Heidegger (Langdridge, 2010). Existential psychotherapy uses a phenomenological method and it is one of the first steps taken in which provides counselors/psychotherapists to focus on the world as it appears to the client. For some, phenomenology is misunderstood and the philosophy behind it seems complex and difficult to understand but in fact it is simple. The phenomenological approach uses ‘epoché’ in which involves a number of processes such as: bracketing, description, horizontalisation, and verification (langdridge,
Even though existential and mindfulness counseling is sourced mainly from philosophical teaching they are however, different from each other. For example, existential counseling/therapy does not consider Buddhist philosophy but look at existential philosophy. Both approaches also uses different type of healing processes, mindfulness, requires meditation, swaying negative thoughts and being one with self. Whereas existential counselling/psychotherapy uses a phonological approach where the counselor/psychotherapist attempt to understand ones experience and look for ways in dealing with it by the use of