When I posted my review of the Chris Hedges video "The Politics of Cultural Despair" on my blog yesterday, I had no idea how prescient the timing of that would become. Like my BIPOC sister, I was horrified but not surprised by yesterday's deadly QAnon and Proud Boy coup attempt. I was not shocked that shirtless white supremacists dressed in bull horns, KKK symbols, and QAnon markings waved Confederate flags in the seat of our democracy.
So far, for me, 2021 has been a surreal extreme of facing an increasingly despairing reality with sobering awareness and an exquisite delight in watching the nightly starling murmuration at a local cemetery with my fellow birdwatchers.
As dire as things seem, I have high hopes for at least one thing in 2021, and I'm excited to tell you about it. But first, let me give you some back story. Seven years ago, I co-taught an online program called Medicine For The Soul with my spiritual mentor Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, author of Kitchen Table Wisdom. It was a great honor to teach with her and I learned from her far more than I offered in that class, I’m sure, though she tells me we are practicing “inter-generational mentoring.” One of the eight live classes surprised us a great deal.
“Beauty, grief, death, the struggle with our own mortality, the search for a life of meaning, love, the capacity for transformation- those forces are ones that make us stop and become introspective and think and look within ourselves to see who we are and where we’re going. And that’s what any totalitarian state seeks to crush... And yet, we have kind of blissfully checked out.”
When I decided to rewrite 2/3 of my classic bestseller Mind Over Medicine a year ago so I could update much of the science, add new tools for healing and transformation, and entirely modify the Six Steps To Healing Yourself based on my deeper understanding of how...
A meme floating around said, "Kinda feeling like the Earth just sent us all to our rooms to think about what we've done." Sounds just about right. We know that pandemics are part of Earth's immune system. If we are not behaving as healthy, cooperate cells in the...
I graduated from medical school in 1995, but it wasn’t until 2009, two years after I had quit my job as an OB/GYN and left the hospital to study mind-body medicine, psychoneuroimmunology, the placebo effect, shamanism, energy healing, and cutting edge trauma...
Physician burnout is all the buzz in hospitals these days. With rates of physician suicide, addiction, depression, divorce, and early death rising uncontrollably, and with physician drop out rates peaking, hospital administrations know that something has to...
We all know medicine is in crisis, and so are those of us who serve the sick and injured. Astronomical numbers of health care providers, especially physicians, suffer from abusive medical training, neglect of self care, unmet physical and emotional needs,...
We’ve all seen this famous image. Is it two white faces looking at each other? Or is it a black vase? See how you have to shift your lens to see one or the other? It’s almost impossible to see both at the same time, isn’t it? But if you pull back far enough, you...
The Whole Health Medicine Institute, founded in 2013, has mystical roots. After a nudge from Jay Fiset, who suggested to me at an Association of Transformational Leadership meeting that I might create a training program for doctors to invite them into a...
My friend and esteemed colleague Jason Wachob, who founded Mind Body Green, where I am a regular blogger, just released his new book WELLTH: How I Learned to Build a Life, Not a Resume. I contributed to his book on the topic of gratitude, and I want to share with...
I have two friends who are trying to do beautiful things in the world. One is an ardent environmentalist who really passionately yearns to save the biosphere and protect the planet. The other is a social worker serving abused, abandoned, neglected, traumatized...
What does it take to become more tender, open-hearted, and compassionate human beings in a world that trains us to judge, criticize, compare, blame, and shame? How does this evolutionary initiation happen, when one makes the journey from the head to the heart and...
Dear God, Help me remember everything that comes through me comes from You, that none of it belongs to me, that it's not mine to control. Let me remember that I am of You and in You and connecting to the You in All That Is, but I am not in charge of how You flow...
We are all, every single one of us, heroes. Life is hard, and to live it fully and express your soul authentically requires the courage of a warrior and the softness, gentleness, and yielding flexibility of a goddess. In my spiritual self-help book dressed up as a...