Editorial: Emerging Innovations in Counselling and Psychotherapy

It is with great excitement that we bring to you a special issue on leading and emerging counselling and psychotherapy innovations in addictions and mental health. The intention was to deliberately give this issue a transformational intensity in that it was a special goal that the articles speak of the phenomenon of vital interest in that people would find the stories of clinical transformation ground breaking and pull the readers in themselves. In short, we were hoping the articles would not only be well written, scholarly, and use evidence based interventions, but also be compelling. Ideally, each reader will find two or three articles in this issue inspirational for their own transformational journey. We proceeded on four related but different theme pathways with this issue. 1) Integrating meditation and altered states of consciousness into psychotherapy Michael DelMonte’s Mindfulness meditation and Awareness: Constructivist, Psychodynamic and Eastern Perspectives picks up on this thread of awareness in looking at how mindfulness meditation and the contemplative wisdom tradition can be combined with psychodynamic and constructivist approaches to facilitate the therapeutic process and the transformational journey of the client. In a similar vein of working with altered states of consciousness, Marcia Rich’s article Integrating Shamanic Methodology into the Spirituality of Addictions Recovery Work demonstrates how going beyond conventional psychotherapy strategies to embrace shamanic approaches in working with altered states of consciousness can open up new territory in working with clients. The shamanic tradition has been around for thousands of years but only recently has been incorporated into psychotherapy.