Last week, I had the great pleasure of co-teaching with IFS founder and trauma therapist Dick Schwartz, PhD in both our Healing With The Muse community and in our Rebirth 2021 class.
In my next book Sacred Medicine, I divided up the healing tools shared in the book (which will be published by Sounds True in Spring 2022!) into two categories- energy transfusions meant to fill you with life force when you're depleted, and trauma healing tools meant to plug the leaks or unblock where life force gets stagnant because of unhealed trauma. For those who are severely depleted, trauma healing may be premature. It's better to fill your tank before you dive deep into potentially triggering territory.
Because I used to be a doctor, I have my finger on the pulse of what it's been like to be a front-line Covid doctor, even though I've been safely sheltered in place since retiring from clinical practice over a decade ago. Among my friends, colleagues, clients, and family members are physicians and nurses who have been relentlessly exposed to the traumas of the front lines, not unlike battle-weary soldiers in seemingly endless wars. They have pandemic fatigue, and it's brutal.
The pandemic is not over yet, and we have so much loss to grieve- lost lives, lost jobs, lost financial security, lost belief systems, lost school days, lost friends, lost feelings of safety, and lost social contact, in addition to things we needed to lose- like losing some of our racial, gender, socioeconomic, or sexual preference privileges or losing political leaders who do not wish our countries well or losing online influencers who do not respect science or truth or losing some of the mobility that is causing the climate crisis.
While making the final edits to my Sacred Medicine book, I asked one healer if she had a point of view in response to the question, "Why do horrific things happen to seemingly innocent people?" I explained to her that the question is relevant to the book because those who chronically suffer from physical or mental illness often seek answers to the question, "Why me" or "Why not her?" I told her that every answer I had heard thus far in my research fell flat from a post-2020 lens, and because I had a lot of respect for her, I was curious about her point of view at this point in our understanding (and lack thereof) of human suffering.
In the Healing With the Muse community, our intention is to alchemize uncertain times into creative gold for the purposes of healing and being “makerly,” leveraging both the joyful and painful experiences of our lives (the last year has been chock full of them!) into opportunities to write and make art straight from the raw, cracked open heart.
If you’ve been following what I write, you know I’ve done A LOT of writing about Covid, public health recommendations (including vaccination), and social justice and human rights lately. This is not my typical gig, but given the intersecting disasters we face, it’s felt more important than what I usually write about. That said, what I usually write about (Whole Health) is more relevant now than ever!
If you’ve been following what I write, you know I’ve done A LOT of writing about Covid, public health recommendations (including vaccination), and social justice and human rights lately. This is not my typical gig, but given the intersecting disasters we face, it’s felt more important than what I usually write about. That said, what I usually write about (Whole Health) is more relevant now than ever!
If you saw the rom-com Groundhog Day, you know that this movie explores the question, "What would it be like if you woke up every day to the exact same routine?"
If you’ve been following what I write, you know I’ve done A LOT of writing about Covid, public health recommendations (including vaccination), and social justice and human rights lately. This is not my typical gig, but given the intersecting disasters we face, it’s felt more important than what I usually write about. That said, what I usually write about (Whole Health) is more relevant now than ever!
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...