Testimonials From Clients

"I know that the work I did with you helped me to shed the sadness and negativity that I needed to do in order to make my heart become open. In early December I was set up on a date with a man who is perfect for me. He is a truly beautiful person, and we are enjoying each other so much. Because of you, I made myself available for him to appear in my life and married him a few months later" -Jill

"I have gone through some wrenching mid-life challenges in recent years in my marriage, career, and synagogue. Miriam has helped me use prayer, meditation, and therapy to understand myself more deeply and to approach the world from a more mature and well-grounded awareness. I feel wonderful about the new directions I am taking in my life now. I feel like her mix of compassion, empathy, and insight have been enormously helpful in getting me to this new place." -50-year-old male client

Melinda's Own Words About Being A Therapist

"Being a therapist is a great honor and an awesome privilege. It is an extension of my work as a spiritual teacher. When I was in graduate school for a Masters's degree in social work, spirituality, and meditation were certainly not part of our curriculum. Professionalism required a therapist to be value-free, neutral, and of course not advocate any belief in religion. Yet I knew from my own life, even then, that it was the opening to the experience of God that healed and transformed me. As this was the most powerful vehicle for healing and personal transformation, I knew that this was what I wanted to share with my clients.

Many years later I began working in this way, helping people access and strengthen the God experience, especially when they could not access this soul dimension within themselves. My work as a therapist is part of my own spiritual practice and service. As a therapist, I feel that I am God's representative, and I allow God's light and love to shine through me. I pray and meditate before each session, during, and even after each session. I am totally committed to loving the person who is coming to me for therapy, helping them to love themselves unconditionally, and to experience God's love of them as well.

To me, being a therapist is a little like being a priest of ancient times privileged to enter into the Holy of Holies of the Holy Temple. In many ways, in our modern times, the therapy room is a place of revelation, one of the most holy and sacred places available to many people. It is here that people share their secrets-their deepest feelings, their fears, resistances, their hopes, their dreams, and their fantasies. It is here that they discover and experience aspects of themselves they did not or could not previously acknowledge. As a therapist, I symbolically and often literally hold the hand of the client as we enter into the deepest places, the most inner chambers, to experience the most holy, the most hidden, the most real, the most beautiful, and the most wounded and dark places within the human soul. Through the therapeutic process, we release the hold of the negative inclination, the judgmental inner critic, free up klippot, the shells of the wounded ego, and redeem the hidden sparks of the holy soul. In opening to the truth of our inner essence, we open to the inner essence of Reality, which is what we call God and we become vessels to receive greater love and joy than we previously allowed.

What is unique about working with Melinda in psychotherapy?

Melinda Ribner L.C.S.W., is a formerly New York State licensed social worker in private practice for more than 30 years. What distinguishes her work in psychotherapy from that of a traditional psychotherapist is that meditation, prayer, spiritual and kabbalistic teachings along with transpersonal psycho-spiritual processes are a part of treatment. In integrating Judaism and kabbalah with modern-day transpersonal psycho-spiritual and bio-energetic techniques, she has carved out a unique and powerful way to access the innate spiritual intelligence, the soul within a person enabling a person to more easily let go of negative limiting patterns of thinking and behavior, increase self-esteem and the capacity to make choices in life to move toward the goals set for oneself.

Individual sessions are generally more experiential than traditional talk therapy with an emphasis on transformation, rather than insight. Though each person is unique and is worked with differently through a variety of meditation processes, people are generally guided to use meditation to focus on the sensations in the body, to release and transform the depth of their feelings buried in the body, re-parent the inner child, access the soul, heighten the relationship with God, so as to more fully open to the awesome spiritual potential within.