Lila O’Farrell

Currently accepting clients online and at Inner City Calm, Auckland CBD.

“We are not human beings in search of a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings immersed in a human experience.”  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 

An integrative approach draws from modern psychology and ancient contemplative wisdom, honoring the interdependence of mind, body and spirit, our relationships and the environment. My extensive training at the intersection of Buddhist and western psychology and Interfaith Contemplative Theology can support you to befriend uncertainty, to clarify your beliefs and values, and to move in meaningful life directions identified in therapy. 

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.

Mindfulness Education, MBSR and MBCT 

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction is our world’s most scientifically researched and validated mindfulness programme, developed in the Chronic Pain Clinic of the Massachusetts Medical Center. Following attending MBSR training for health care professionals with its founder, Dr. Jon Kabat Zinn, I have offered this program for more than twenty years in healthcare, private, social service and corporate settings (see My Experience and Approach for more information). Here is Dr. Kabat Zinn explaining how MBSR can enrich your total wellbeing:

How to Shift the Default Mode | Jon Kabat Zinn – YouTube

Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy is an adaptation of MBSR designed to support recovery from the negative thoughts, feelings and behaviours that accompany low mood and depression. It is suitable for anyone who struggles with negative rumination, overthinking, or “doom scrolling,” and is clinically proven to prevent relapses of depression. Read more at Oxford University’s Center for Mindfulness:

Home | Oxford Mindfulness

Bespoke Mindfulness Trainings: Offer your team a “taste of mindfulness” according to the time and budget available to you. This can vary from an hour, a morning, a day retreat, or an experience woven into your team building or visioning event. 

“While I have never thought of myself as being adversely affected by stress, I completed the mindfulness course run by Lila, and what I learned was so helpful that I practise mindfulness most days… For me, someone who has difficulty meditating passively, the key was translating what I learned into my life…”

Dr David Codyre, FRANZCP

Contact me to inquire about attending MBSR or MBCT at Inner City Calm and online, or to arrange a bespoke in-house offering in your workplace or other setting. 

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 is now in its third iteration and has been proven to reduce stress, anxiety and depression. It is 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.