In the original draft of my new book Sacred Medicine, the book opened with a legitimate, medically provable radical remission story about a child with a life-threatening illness conventional medicine had given up on. In desperation, the parents of the child,...
Those of you in the wellness world might have noticed a curious polarization between "germ theory" and "terrain theory" advocates during the pandemic. But as I write in my book Sacred Medicine: A Doctor's Quest To Unravel The Mysteries Of Healing, we...
Synchrodestiny got hold of me recently. I had just gotten off the phone with Esalen Institute, planning my first post-pandemic 5 day Sacred Medicine workshop at Esalen in May and a month-long Burnout Recovery For Health Care Workers & Therapists in the fall,...
Although there is a grain of truth in the teachings, law of attraction folks put too much emphasis on thinking yourself well without acknowledging that illness is multifactorial, complex, and your thoughts, beliefs, and feelings are only a part of what impacts your...
Sometimes we get sick, and conventional medicine can cure us lickety-split. And thank God for those cures and for the doctors who deliver them. I was once one of those doctors, and it felt so satisfying when one of those medical cures could ease the suffering of...
What if love, or at least the “love” depicted in love songs and romantic comedies, is not actually love? What if what we typically refer to as love is an intoxicatingly intense boundary-less merging, a blissful brew of emotions concocted from a mysterious and often...
*Trigger alert: Emotional, physical, sexual, and financial abuse at the hands of those we entrust to help us heal when we are at our most vulnerable. I used to believe that doctors were heroes, if not gods. My father was one of those doctors I idolized, and at...
Rise Up, by Lissa Rankin & her daughter Mira Klein, encaustic on wood panel 18 x 18 To say that this has been a hard two years is literally the understatement of the century. Unless you were alive during the Spanish flu of 1918 or one of the World Wars or the...
*The photo is a very blessedly swollen river on Steep Ravine Trail in Stinson Beach. I'm so happy it's been raining nearly all month! First, a disclaimer. I am not a public health doctor, nor a front-line Covid worker. But my colleagues, friends, and clients are,...
As we approach the Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year, I find myself sitting with and welcoming the darkness, in myself and in the world. I just finished reading the galley of My Grandmother’s Hands author Resmaa Menakem’s new book The Quaking of America,...
I have an awesome new housemate, Shannon Gilcrease. She is a powerful, brilliant, gifted, beautiful, insightful, intelligent, unbelievable healer. She's also a trauma survivor in recovery from spiritual bypassing tendencies (she calls it "rose-colored glasses") who...
When we look back at history, we see that the greatest catalysts for change, especially in social justice realms, rarely get to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Usually, as with Martin Luther King, Jr and his "I have a dream" vision, it's quite the opposite. Spark...
Just as a point of inquiry, let's take a moment to explore the relationship between common religious and spiritual teachings and how they might be linked to oppression. I don't believe there's some Evil Cabal out to control the world, but let's consider the actual...
After making a very painful decision to let a long-term friendship expire after repetitive boundary violating and abusive behavior caused me to hit my limit, I just read an article about "bad friends" that I found very helpful. This friendship has been problematic...
Some of you have been asking me privately whether I've become an atheist, a skeptic, or some sort of non-believer, so I thought I'd take a minute to just share with you some of my personal beliefs, which are admittedly always fluid as I learn and grow. In short,...
“Sometimes I wake up & have to remind myself: ‘There is nothing wrong with me. I have patterns to unlearn, new behaviors to embody and wounds to heal. But there is nothing wrong with the core of me and who I am. I am unlearning generations of harm and...