Lila O’Farrell

Currently accepting clients online and on Waiheke Island (CBD practice is full at this time)

An integrative approach draws from psychological and contemplative wisdom, honoring the interdependence of mind, body and spirit; our relationships and the environment. 

You may benefit from an integrative approach if you:

• wish to include mindfulness, awareness, meditation, and/or your spiritual life and practices as resources for healing
• seek greater self-awareness, existential meaning and purpose in life 
• wish to recover from spiritual wounding and/or spiritual bypassing 
• are suffering from stress, anxiety, low mood, depression, trauma or grief
• live with persistent pain, or a chronic or life limiting illness
• recognize an unhealthy pattern and struggle to understand or change it
• feel burdened from unresolved issues from family of origin experiences
• wish to work with your attachment style, and/or enrich your relationship(s)
• are in recovery from an abusive or otherwise toxic relationship.
• find life’s choices and transitions immobilizing
• are experiencing anxiety over global warming and unrest
• seek integration while using psychedelic therapy for growth and healing
• seek support manifesting an authentic gender and/or sexual identity

  During our first session we will inquire into your concerns and desired outcomes, exploring how we might work together. Throughout therapy it will be important to integrate your insights into daily life, so you may experience the change and freedom you wish for. My role is to walk beside you as you discover or recover your inner healing intelligence and unique path to greater wellbeing.

  I am available for a free, fifteen minute consultation by phone or online. This is a valuable way to discern if we might work well together.

Experience and approach: 

Born in Aotearoa, New Zealand, I identify as Tangata Tiriti. Through Irish, English and Portugese ancestry, I am indigenous to Celtic lands. I completed the majority of my therapeutic training in North America, where I lived for twenty years. 

For thirteen years as a senior clinician and mindfulness educator in primary health care, psychological services in Aotearoa, New Zealand I have had the privilege of walking alongside people of diverse cultural and spiritual backgrounds; races and ethnicities presenting with a wide range of concerns.  

I trained to teach Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction in 2003 with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn and Dr. Saki Santorelli. Since then, I have taught MBSR in health, community and corporate settings. My trauma informed adaptation of MBSR – Aotearoa Mindfulness and Awareness – contributed to my employer winning the 2021 Habit Health, Best Mental Health Programme in Primary Health Care award.

Following positive research outcomes, Counties Manukau Health initiated funding for my Maori colleagues and I to co-design an MBSR woven through with matauranga Maori, at Papatuanuku Kokiri Marae in Mangere, Auckland. This programme has been proven to reduce stress, anxiety and depression and is now offered on marae, in community and as a work-place wellness programme. 

In my earlier career as an interfaith hospice chaplain and grief therapist, and through my own experience of becoming widowed and of living with illness, I have gained a lived experience of the impermanence and preciousness of life.

Through thirty years as a student of Buddhism, Yoga and Interfaith Theology, I have explored the essential wholeness and goodness that abides within us all, waiting to be discovered, like the calm of the ocean beneath the turbulent waves of life. I view this dimension of Being as our birthright, and the source of our greatest healing. 

My approach is holistic, client centered, and humanistic. It is is evidence informed: by psychology,  psychodynamic and somatic therapy, the neuroscience supporting meditation practice as healing, compassion based inquiry, and my own psychospiritual training. I am committed to supervised, evidence informed, culturally safe, and ethical professional practice.

Please contact me for a free 15 minute consultation on how we might work together.