Good Life Project - Trauma & Transformation | James S. Gordon, MD

Episode Date: October 22, 2019

James S. Gordon, MD is a Harvard-educated psychiatrist internationally recognized for using self-awareness, self-care, and group support to heal population-wide trauma. He is the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Center for Mind-Body Medicine, (https://jamesgordonmd.com/), a clinical professor at Georgetown Medical School, and was chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy. His latest book, The Transformation (https://amzn.to/31Xi5nl), helps us understand that trauma will come sooner or later to all of us, and how to navigate it.Gordon has been on the ground during moments of profound upheaval, from Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love to Mozambique in the wake of a civil war fought largely by child soldiers, and war in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa and more. In today’s conversation, he talks about what it’s like to lead teams in hands-on trauma prevention and integration work in these extremely challenging environments, as well as his hopes for re-humanizing medicine, choosing risks over betraying the self, and the incredible power we have to heal in community.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So my guest today, James Gordon, studied to become a psychiatrist at Harvard. He became a clinical professor at Georgetown Med School, was chairman under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy, and really deeply involved in the world of government and trying to investigate what's working and what's not working in the world of health and medicine. And the further sort of he moved into the field, the more constrained he started to feel by the rules and traditions all around him.

And the kind of inner advocate and activist and rebel inside him kept challenging the system and searching for new and different ways to help people and feel better. That led him eventually to create a really different integrated approach that draws upon self-awareness and self-care and group support to heal population-wide psychological trauma, and then found the nonprofit Center for Mind-Body Medicine in DC. His latest book, The Transformation, helps us understand that trauma will come sooner or later to all of us as a part of the human experience, not as a pathological anomaly. And he guides us to kind of step in a comprehensive evidence-based program to reverse the psychological,

the biological damage that trauma causes. He really shows, drawing on a lot of research and 50 years of clinical experience and a lot of wisdom and inspiring stories, how we can really meet the challenges that trauma brings, discover the ordinary joys as well as the meaning purpose of our lives. And he's also got a fascinating lens on healing trauma, both on an individual level, but also on a societal and global scale and the importance of looking out into the community as part of the process. We dive into all of this in our conversation today. So excited to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun.

On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.

Curious what originally brought you to want to explore medicine, even as a devotion. Well, I had a, my father was a surgeon, and he was not the easiest man on the planet, to say the least. But he was really good with his patients, and he loved what he did. So that was an influence. And my mother's father had been a pediatrician, and I didn't know him particularly well. But through my mother, there was, again, the sense of service, a sense of compassion, a sense know, for people who were in trouble. And in both cases, not just people who had money, but also people who had no money at all. So I had a sense of being a physician as being something useful, as being a work of service, something I could make a living at. Right from the beginning, and I also, I grew up in this chaotic family.

So from the time I was five or six, I was kind of like a couples therapist for my parents. I remember running back and forth between them when they were shouting at each other when I was five years old, trying to help each one calm down a little and understand and listen to the other, and then running to the other one and sort of going back and forth. So I had some early training. And the story, when I was about eight years old, my father said to me, he talked like this, he said, Jimmy, that's the way he talked, Jimmy, what are you going to be when you grow up? And I said, well, either a farmer or a rabbi. And he looked at me and he said, what the hell do you want to do that for? I said, well, you know, I like animals and I like to grow things.

So it would be nice to be a farmer and a rabbi helps people. And my father said, Jimmy, doctors help people a hell of a lot more than rabbis do. And if you're a doctor, you can make enough money so you can have a farm. If you're a doctor, you can do anything. He didn't say quite that gently, but I took that in. I can do anything. And so that's really what I've paid attention to all along. I've done my best, not without some hiccups or obstacles along the way, but I've done my best to do what felt right to me and felt right to me in relationship to my patients and to the world I was living in. Yeah. I'm curious, getting that advice from your dad, sort of being wired the way you're wired,

which seems like there's a sort of like a very empathic heart behind it all. And then seeing how you describe your dad was one way with his patients, but very differently with you. Did that create any level of sort of cognitive dissonance about? I would say so. Yeah. It was peculiar, but what it did really is it made me want to connect with him more. That was a place where I could connect with him, with that tenderness in him. And occasionally, when I was sick myself, he would be much more tender to me. It's a good thing I didn't take that in too much and become a sick person in order to get attention, but it was just something that I was able to notice and I could feel that in him. And I suppose that also comes out in me, that it's easy. And one

of the graces of being a physician is it's such an easy place for that tenderness to come out to other people. And one of the tragedies, of course, is that physicians are now sort of moving so quickly and operating according to algorithms, predetermined ways of doing things that they don't have that opportunity. And of course, their patients don't either. Yeah. I mean, it really does seem like that is an almost tragic shift that's happened over the last maybe two decades in the practice. And I feel like it's also, and I'm actually curious because you'll see this a lot more than I would, whether you feel like it's actually either driving people out of the profession or stopping them from entering.

I think both. There are people who are, you look at some of the studies, when we're doing a training program, I always am, we're working with professionals. Some are health professionals, mental health professionals, educators, community organizers, leaders of women's groups. Health professionals and mental health professionals are getting burnt out. They're not satisfied. And in the studies that have been done, very significant percentages of them say, I wouldn't go into it if I had it to do over again. And I would, particularly with medicine.

And when they ask the question, well, what would you say to young people? Many doctors say, I would tell them not to go into medicine. And as I was growing up, everybody thought it was a wonderful profession to go into. You could help other people, you could make a decent living, and it was always interesting. And it continues to be that way for me. And psychiatry, I think, has suffered the worst. When I was in medical school, 10% of my class, this was Harvard Medical School, 10% of my class went into psychiatry. And we were no dopier than anyone else in the class.

Now it's 1% or 2% because psychiatry has become so narrow, so focused on simply giving medication that it's no longer interesting. And so some of the best students that I've had now as a professor, medical students who are interested in psychiatry wind up not going into it. They go into pediatrics, they go into internal medicine or family medicine because they say, I'm going to have more opportunity to be with people when I go into there. So interesting. So there's literally been about a 90% reduction in the people that are focusing. I wouldn't say that's a controlled study. Your experience but that's what I've observed. That's what I hear from the students and see. Yeah. And on the one hand, it makes sense. And on the other hand, the need for people who understand conditions of the mind has never been higher.

So to know that, but I guess the actual, the medical practice of psychiatry has changed so dramatically and I guess is now so much more focused on medicine that makes sense. That's right, and people who want to be psychotherapists go into clinical social work or psychology, which also have been constrained

in certain ways by this whole medical model, this narrow medical model. Yeah. By my assistant, Tatiana, who's going to be going to medical school next fall. She's determined to go into psychiatry and, you know, do something like what I'm doing and change psychiatry, which is I want to support young people who want to do that as well. Bring psychiatry back to its roots of really

deep connection with other people and also connection with the larger world. Yeah. Do you, in your heart, do you believe that it's possible given the sort of like the, given the nature and the structure of how psychology, how psychiatry and how the medical system works, to actually rehumanize it on that level? Yes. But I'm an optimist. I wouldn't be doing that if I weren't. I think that part of the problem is that medical education is so shot through with fear. So students are afraid they won't do as well as their roommate or the person sitting across the hall.

They worry about what residency they're going to get in. They worry about student debt. They worry about malpractice. They're constantly worried. And for me, one of the beautiful things about medicine was, aside from being helpful to other people, I knew I could always make a living. And they've forgotten. And they feel like they're, they feel so intimidated and so pushed into these various corners where often they don't feel comfortable. So, yes, I think it's a matter of developing an understanding of themselves, a real connection with why they went into medicine in the first place and helping to build up their courage to challenge the system. What are they going to do? They're not going to shoot you if you disagree with something.

I wouldn't do things when I was a resident that I was told. I wouldn't give people shock therapy. I didn't think it was, you know, my experience with it, my reading of the literature. It didn't seem like a good idea. There had to be other ways. I used very little medication then for the same reasons. My supervisors were sometimes very angry at me. But so what?

I'm not there to please my supervisors. I'm there to take care of my patients in the best possible way. And I was enough in touch with that. And it was a different time, to be sure. But I think we need to get back in touch with those values and this sense of ourselves, not just in psychiatry or medicine, but everywhere. Otherwise, we're going to destroy ourselves. Yeah. I mean, I wonder what the role of the way that you described you sort of saying like, no, I'm going to do what I believe is maybe quite right action, regardless of what the construct around it is telling me to do.

Were you, I'm curious, were you unusual among your classmates in being that way? Yes. Unusual is a very polite word for me. I was different or weird among my classmates. My classmates were very smart, and many of them had published papers in scientific journals in medical school before they even got to medical school. And I was an outlier, but I had a sense of what I was involved in civil rights movement when I was in medical school. I was involved early on in the anti-war movement. My classmates thought I was just kind of weird. And I was involved early on in the anti-war movement. My classmates thought I was just kind of weird.

And I was impatient with some of the strictures of medical school. Now, later on, 25 years later, at my 25th medical school reunion, I gave a talk. Some classmates gave a talk. And I talked about, interestingly enough, I talked about psychological trauma. And the talk was called, it's very similar to my book in a way, it was called Trauma and Transformation. And I said the first traumatic events in my life were my first year in medical school when I felt so different and out of place. And what was interesting to me is that a large number of my classmates came up to me afterwards and said, I felt the same way. Oh, no kidding.

But I could never have observed. They seemed to me like it was all fine to them. But to me, it wasn't fine. It wasn't fine the way patients were treated and the education, even though professors were brilliant and the students were brilliant, the education felt much too narrow. It wasn't like the imaginative, challenging education that I'd had in college. So I was, you know, in my questioning of it, I felt very different. And my classmates looked at me as if I were different. Yeah. But it's so interesting to find that the 25 years later, that maybe part of that was perception. Yes. And not actual reality. Exactly. Yeah. Which is one of the reasons why one of the things we do at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine is we train medical school faculty to lead mind-body skills groups.

And what happens in these mind-body skills groups, groups of, say, 10 people, and in this case we're talking about medical school faculty working with medical students, is that the students have an opportunity to really be themselves, to be more vulnerable than they usually are. And it makes a huge difference in the way they think about medicine, the way they think about themselves, the way they take care of themselves. They are less stressed out. They do better. They sleep better. They're less anxious, more hopeful about becoming doctors. And they also have more compassion for each other. So in a way, this is sort of circling back and bringing what I've learned over all these years back into medical education.

Yeah. I mean, it seems like a big piece of that puzzle too. And almost, I wonder if, you know, I think there's this weird tension between being willing to be different and speak your voice and ask the questions and do what you feel is right. And at the same time feeling, even if you know you're different,

in some way feeling safe. And I wonder if part of what was going on with you is that somehow you were able to claim that feeling of safety while maybe others around you weren't. And so that you were willing to sort of like say what was on your mind, whereas it took 25 years later until people could come back to you and say, well, I was different. I wasn't feeling that also, but they just weren't vocalizing it. I'm curious what your lens on the role of safety, social safety, personal safety is. I don't know that I ever thought of it as safety. I just thought, in fact, sometimes I felt quite unsafe, but it was just what I had to do because to have done anything other than what I did would have felt terrible, would have felt like a betrayal of myself.

So it was a matter of choosing, now that you're getting me to think about it, it was a matter of choosing what felt right to me or doing something that would feel terrible. And what was the point of doing that? I didn't want to live that way. Yeah. terrible. And then what was the point of doing that? I didn't want to live that way. Even then, I think it was much more a sense of being, rather than safety, just of being in touch with what I needed to do. And if people didn't like it, it wasn't that I was immune from criticism or attacks. If they came, it was painful, but I'd rather suffer that pain than the pain of suppressing myself and of doing something that felt like a violation of either me or of the patients I was working with. That would be terrible.

Yeah. And if you were bringing this activist heart into the education and then eventually the practice, that also it's sort of, you know, there's almost a justice, a social justice element to what you're doing as well. Yeah, exactly. And I did, you know, there were allies from time to time that I found. People who had a great girlfriend. She was wonderful. I had friends who were outside of medicine, who shared my view of the world. People who were, I was a musician and political scientists and writers and other people I was connected to. I had my, that may be where part of where my zone of safety came from. I had these other people who were there.

And then when I went into therapy, the man I went into therapy with was somebody who, when I would tell him what was going on in medical school, he nodded his head in deep understanding because a dozen years before he'd been through the same thing. Yeah. I mean, would you consider him to be one of your sort of like first allies in the field who really got it? Yeah. This is a man named Robert Coles who was very well-known years ago. I first encountered him in his writings. He was a psychiatrist in the Air Force,

and he was stationed in New Orleans. And in his spare time, he was working with the black kids who were integrating the schools in New Orleans, late 50s, early 60s. And I started reading what he was writing. So this was also then at that time in that place, the height of like the, actually the early part of the civil rights movement. Exactly. And I read what he was writing and I said, this is beautiful. What he's doing as a psychiatrist, helping these kids and, you know, creating this change that as far as I was concerned had to happen. That rang a bell for me.

And I talked with him about his work. And then when I got in trouble psychologically, I'd taken a year out of medical school. My girlfriend and I had broken up. I wasn't so sure about medical school. I called him up and he was there for me on the phone. We talked for two hours on the telephone. I was still in New York then with my year off. He was in Cambridge.

And he was there. And he really became both a model and also an important support for me in those last two years of medical school. Yeah. So to a certain extent, he was the exemplar of what was possible. Exactly. He was not only a good therapist, but he was an example of who I could be. He also got me to laugh at myself, which was very important. I was taking it very seriously at times. And, you know, he was compassionate, but he also, he didn't take me quite so seriously, which was important for me too.

Right. What was your first move out of school when it was time to actually develop your own practice and go, what was the first step out for you? Well, I did medical school, then I did an internship. And my internship, I went to San Francisco during the Summer of Love, 1967, because that was the place to be. And I wanted to be, you know, I wanted to be, see what was happening and feel what was happening and be there. And it was great.

It was at Mount Zion Hospital Hospital and the internship was great. And we were organizing against the war and going to the Fillmore and dancing and, you know, listening to the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and The Doors and all those people. So it was an amazing, an amazing year. Then I came back to New York and I did residency in psychiatry and worked in the Bronx. And it was great. I was really know if you remember Lange. Lonnie Lange, who was the kind. I wrote what wound up being a cover story for The Atlantic about Lang and his work. And then I had an opportunity to be chief resident in psychiatry. So people not only came from the Bronx, but they came from all over the United States because they'd read the article in The Atlantic. And so people were showing up and I had an opportunity to create this community where we were really respecting

people who were going through this psychotic experience or very serious depression. And they had an opportunity to see this experience as a voyage of discovery, a voyage in the interior, a voyage of discovery. And we, to our best ability, created a situation in which they were guided and guarded. Those are Lang's original words as they went through this experience. That was very powerful for me as well. Yeah, I would imagine it would be. or whether your experience being out in San Francisco in 67 and being involved in that community and the music and the celebration

and how much that then influences what you create in the Bronx and then beyond. I think about Emile Durkheim's work on collective effervescence and the culturally therapeutic effect and bonding effect that it has, which effectively was what was going on in the Summer of Love. And how that might have sort of like you being a part of that, not just witnessing it, but being in it, then changes the way that you actually practice. I like that phrase. And I also, you know, also appreciate what you're saying. Yes, I wanted to live in a world which was just and celebratory. And I wanted to make that possible for myself, but for everyone I worked with.

And so from the beginning, there was a sense of wanting to build community, wanting to create a world. Because I understood that it's not just about treating individuals as a psychiatrist or as a doctor. It's also about creating a world in which people can become who they're meant to be. And that's been my theme ever since. And I'm sure all that early experience in the civil rights movement, in the Haight-Ashbury, running a psychiatric ward as a kind of true healing community. All of that has influenced everything I've done ever since and helped to shape the work I do now with population-wide trauma. Yeah. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required.

Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. So you would have been in the Bronx then. Is that, are we in the 80s yet or the late 70s? This was late 60s. Late 60s. Late 60s.

I finished my residency there in 71. Okay. So then Center for Mind, Body, Medicine doesn't start until 91. Right. What did I do in between? Yeah. What's the middle? I went to the National Institute of Mental Health. Okay. What did I do in between? Yeah, what's the middle? I went

to the National Institute of Mental Health. I was there for 11 years. At that point, in the late 60s, early 70s, all doctors were subject to the draft. There was something called the Barry Plan. And I knew I wasn't going to go in the military. I wasn't going to support the war in Vietnam. I wasn't going to say I was crazy. You could argue about whether I was crazy or not, but I certainly wasn't going to try to get out. I didn't have a physical disability. I wasn't going to say I was gay because I wasn't gay. And I wasn't going to go to Canada because this is my country. So I had two choices. One was to go in, if I could, to go in the public health service and to serve my country that way. The other was to go to jail. And I was fortunate enough to be accepted in the public health

service. I think I was fortunate enough. Maybe it would have been better if I'd gone to jail. I'm not, honestly, I'm not sure about that. But what happened is I got accepted in the public health service and I was able to work with, really create my own job. And the job was working with young people on the street, homeless and runaway kids, and working with them initially on the street, working with the counselors who were working with them. And then over time, as I continued to do this work, creating a national program for runaway and homeless kids based on the principles that these kids are not crazy. They were often regarded as crazy and locked up in mental hospitals, which was quite inappropriate. And they weren't criminals. Running away was a crime in most states, or being homeless was a crime. So really challenging those accepted definitions along with the counselors who were working with runaways,

many of whom were seminarians and civil rights workers and hippies who were just kind of coming together to do something worthwhile. And that's where I started. So for a number of years, I worked with these kids and their counselors and really, again, creating communities where these kids could find themselves and figure out who they were and what they were supposed

to be doing. At the same time, within a couple of years of doing that, and this was such a grace, such a blessing for me, I had this real freedom as a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health. I wanted to explore all as a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health. I wanted to explore all of these other forms of healing that I was starting to hear about, to practice. I'd gotten interested in Chinese medicine. This is late 60s. I'd become interested in meditation, interested in nutrition. And I was able to make the exploration of these areas an important part of my job at the National Institute of Mental Health,

which was fantastic. And so I worked with a whole number of teachers and worked with people who were doing the most interesting and exciting work in the field and eventually met many of them and was given the opportunity by President Carter to head up a study and Rosalind Carter to head up a study on alternative mental health services. I proposed it to them for the President's Commission on Mental Health. And they said yes. And so that's what I did. I spent

several years going around the country, meeting all, as many of the leaders in these various fields as I could, understanding what research was done, writing about it, becoming a kind of organizer as well as a researcher and documenter. Yeah. During that window of time, I'm curious, were there big surprises? I mean, entering that process and then spending a number of years in it, I'm sure, were there big surprises? I mean, entering that process and then spending a number of years in it, I'm sure we all go into something like that with certain beliefs or expectations. But then when you're in it, data replaces assumption. While you're in that sort of season, I'm curious, what were the big things that you became aware of that maybe weren't expected or shifted you in a meaningful way?

Well, early on in that work, I was working at a, there was then a laboratory in community mental health, no longer exists. But I became aware that virtually every professional in that facility had some kind of significant stress-related disorder. So I said, this is, something's going on here that shouldn't be going on. And what I did is I brought them together in a group, the same kind of theme, to talk about what's going on. Help them deal with their stress. Help them deal, help all of us deal with the conditions that were contributing to the stress.

And so this partly was surprising, the level of stress-related illness that was there. The other thing that was, I suppose, a bit surprising, but I shouldn't have been surprised, is that my boss didn't like it. She didn't like that I was organizing. And so she— It's a threat to the existing structures. Exactly. So I had—it was a threat to the existing structures. Exactly. Yeah. So I had – it was a two-year commitment that I had. They kept me on for another year because everybody liked the work I was doing.

I was publishing. It was important work. It was a new model for working with runaway and homeless kids. But they didn't like the organizing that I was doing. So I had to fight to stay at NIMH. And I thought I'll be there for two years. I'll come back to New York. I'll work in the Bronx.

But no, I didn't like the idea of being pushed out. And I didn't like the idea of not being able to continue this work that was very important to me. So I had to fight. And this was a real major fight with the NIMH bureaucracy. And I had opponents and I had champions. And so this was, it was, I wasn't, I shouldn't have been too surprised because I'd certainly had challenges throughout medical school and residency, but this was a whole other level. And I had to ask for help from people to, you know, to find champions and to find people who really wanted to keep me there in spite of my tendency

to organize wherever I went. Yeah. I mean, what a challenging and fertile place to be in that moment. Did you, I'm curious, did you, and to this day, do you find it easy or difficult to be in a place where you need to ask others to step in and help? Oh, that's a good question. I'm doing that now with the transformation, with this book. I'm asking, you know, friends. I'm asking people, some of whom I don't know so well, like you.

I'm saying, I've written this book that I think is really important. Could you help me? So it's an interesting lesson in, I mean, I'm doing, I'm promoting my book, I'm promoting myself, but it's also a very interesting lesson in humility. And so it continues as a challenge. So it's interesting that you picked up on that. It is a bit of a challenge to ask for help. And it's good for me to ask for help. It's not only good for the transformation, it's good for my transformation to be in that position of saying to other people,

because I've tended often to be very much on my own and sort of taking care of things and making things happen. And I've found it good. And I've been very touched by people's responses that people have said, you know, sure, I'll help. Yeah. I mean, I'm always fascinated. It's sort of, I think, an ongoing question of mine. And I explore this within myself but also with so many others who I've been fortunate to sit down with. is bright and powerful in a lot of ways and driven and also very confident and competent in their own capabilities and abilities to get things done. When you hit that place where there

is just so much complexity or so much resistance or adversity that there is no way to do it alone. And it's so interesting to see how people grapple with that and move through it and open to it or not and how that affects this bigger thing that they really want to see happen. Well, you know that the idea that we could do it alone seems a little dopey. Yeah, right. When you zoom the lens out like that. It's a big world. Right. much this whole, you know, rugged individualist notion that we have that's particularly peculiar to Americans, I think, that we can and should be doing it on our own if we're really strong,

if we're really good at something. And some of that's necessary, I suppose. Some of that's what makes for the dynamism that we have as individuals and that's there in America. But I think some of it's very limiting and also very dangerous. And so for me, the sense of depending, not just being the leader of an organization and of a community, which I have been, but really depending on other people is really good for me. And it helps me to open myself in many ways to other people and I become closer to them. And I'm finding that as I'm asking people for help with the transformation that all those people, our communications are shifting somewhat. There's a little more sweetness and there's more vulnerability in the way I approach them and they're more tender towards me as well, instead of being,

you know, okay, I'll do this, or in a kind of matter-of-fact way, or being just, oh, of course I'll do this for you. No, it's more mutual, and it's really nice. Yeah, I've seen that as well. The notion of being a bit more vulnerable, of revelation. Blending those two, it's hard, I think, for a lot of people who feel very self-reliant and competent and I shouldn't, you know, quotes shouldn't need help. But when you do, it doesn't just change how you feel, it changes the social dynamic of those around you in a really powerful way that I think not just enables you to do the thing you're here to do,

but changes your experience of the relationship you have along the way. Exactly. And it helps to create whole new structures or reform the structure that you're in. So, for example, I started the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in 91, as you mentioned. And for a long time, I was leading all the trainings. But now we have so many more places that we're working. I can't do it. And I was just at a training in Northern California in Shasta County, where we're working after the wildfires. The whole community has been deeply traumatized and some of, you know, some towns were pretty much wiped out.

And of course, there's all the older issues that are still there, issues of poverty and issues of abuse and all these other distresses in the community that are coming out. And I was able just to be there for the first day or part of the first day because I had to come back here. And it was so interesting turning over the whole program to other people who were leaders from our faculty. And it was good. I mean, and it turned out to be very sweet. I had some, oh, how are they going to do? And is it okay? And I'm sure they're going to do great. And there was such a feeling of warmth between us with the turnover, kind of gratitude from them and gratitude from me that they were going to do it. Yeah. I mean, when you hold the work so tightly, well, sure, maybe you know that it's going to get done the way that you have in your mind it needs to be done. But at the same time, you know, we become the primary

constraint in scale and impact. What happens in 91 or in the years leading up to 91 that makes, that leads to the launch of Center for Mind, Mind, and Medicine? Well, during, I left National Institute of Mental Health in 1982. I could no longer have the freedom. That was the Reagan administration. I no longer had the freedom to create new programs, to investigate new opportunities that I'd had before. So I went into private practice and I was doing practice. I do acupuncture and herbalism, work with nutrition and manipulation the way osteopaths or chiropractors do. So all the things your typical psychiatrist would do.

Not exactly typical psychiatric practice. And I was working a lot with people with all different kinds of chronic physical as well as psychological issues. And I was writing. I was writing for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic. And it was good.

But I began to feel that I needed to do something more, that the understanding I had of the importance of bringing self-awareness, self-care, and group support into the center of all health care, the training of all health professionals, and the education of our children, that that was a mission that I had. And I couldn't do that in a private practice. I couldn't, I was a clinical professor at Georgetown. So I was doing some teaching, but that wasn't, I couldn't really do it there either. And I wanted to have a larger effect. I'd stayed in Washington after I left NIMH because I wanted to support people who were doing work that seemed meaningful to me, people from the, both people within the government, people in Congress, people in the bureaucracies, as well as people who were, you know, doing community-based organizations,

people who were advocating for civil rights or women's rights or health care. I wanted to support them. So I was staying in Washington and I discovered that there was no place that I could really make this vision of self-care being central to all health care a reality. I couldn't do it at Georgetown. They're happy to have me teach there, but there were really significant limitations. And I looked at a couple of other possibilities and it just didn't work. So I said, well, I'm going to have to start my own organization because I do want to have this effect. And I also then understood too, that I wanted to create a healing community and a community of healers. I wanted to bring people

together for this effort. And I would decide the best way to make this much larger change was to create an organization that could support people in all of these established organizations, whether within the government or in medical schools or hospitals or education systems. And so I would work from the outside and teach and educate and train those people in what I was learning. So I really had to do it. It was part of my growth and development,

and it was my mission, if you will. And I started with no money and no paid staff. And we had about 25 volunteers who were interested in, you know, what I was doing and wanted to be part of it. And, you know, doctors, nurses, mental health professionals, teachers, and one professional gambler, which I took as a very good omen. Who was probably also an expert in human psychology and behavior in a lot of ways, right? He was interesting. He was most interested in attachment theory,

how children and their parents bond. And I'm guessing maybe multiple motivations there. Yes. That's funny. We started that way and created a curriculum in mind-body medicine, which is still the one that we're using. And in many ways, many of the elements of that original curriculum from almost 30 years ago are there in the transformation, refined over the years and expanded in many, many ways. So it's there. We began working locally initially with Latino

high school students. I had a friend who ran the Latin American Youth Center, and we developed a program in mind-body medicine, which brought together Latino high school students who were interested in the health professions and Georgetown medical students who wanted to mentor the high school students. We brought them together in a program of mind-body medicine, and we did all kinds of things together. The medical students took the high school students into the dissecting rooms, and they showed them what an autopsy was like, and they helped them apply to colleges.

And we hung out in the Latino neighborhood and got to know what's going on there. It was a lovely program. We started locally. It was going very well. We were also working with other populations, working with people who were in significant need, people who had cancer and HIV. This is before the effective drugs for AIDS. Working with people with other people with chronic illnesses, working with these

inner city kids, also working with stressed out professionals, which are just about everybody in Washington who's in a profession. They're all extremely stressed out. With Georgetown medical students, bringing this model to them. And I was beginning to lead groups, mind-body skills groups for medical students. And also I was seeing a lot of people in my practice who'd been tortured in other countries and teaching them this model as well. So we began locally.

There was enough interest. So we trained a whole, we trained 30 people locally to do this work. That went well. Next step was to train people nationally. I always had the sense that my work was education fundamentally. And then we started training people nationally. I always had the sense that my work was education fundamentally. And then we started training people nationally and we had 120 people come to our first training from all over the country and they learned our model. And then they began to bring it back to hospitals, clinics,

medical schools, community-based organizations, school systems. And then that was going well. So by 1996, I began to wonder if this same approach, using these same techniques of different forms of meditation and guided imagery and self-expression in words and drawings and movement, if that same approach could be used in some of the most troubled parts of the planet. It was a question I had in my mind. So I started going. And a colleague and I went first to Mozambique and spent some time with former child soldiers. So it had been late 90s then? 96. Right. Which was a devastating time there. Yeah. Like, you know, they'd had a war of independence and they had a civil war. And these kids, 12, 13 years old, had been forced to kill their parents and then killed lots of other people. And we started, we went, had a brief visit there,

and we were teaching the kids these same techniques. What, I mean, what was that like for you? Like the first time, you know, you've built the center, you're doing well, you're expanding in the U.S. You're seeing a lot of difficult circumstances, but still within sort of the confines of a relatively modern functioning society. The very first time you drop into Mozambique, I'm just do what they had done, they had to kill most of themselves as well. They had to shut down in so many ways. So these kids were just frozen. We talk about fight or flight and freeze response. These kids were, you could see it in their bodies. They were so tight.

Eyes, they were really fairly blank. They were so, you could, they're kind of vibrating with tension and fear and anger and confusion. So it was painful to be in their presence and required me and Susan Lord, who was with me, using all of our self-care skills to just be able to relax with them. So we had to relax ourselves, which, of course, is the fundamental principle of our work. You can't teach other people how to take care of themselves unless you're doing it yourself. So we had to do it and sit with them. And I had no idea, really, whether they would be interested in anything that we had to

offer. But it turned out, we didn't spend a lot of time with them, but it turned out that they appreciated being able to breathe deeply. They could feel a little bit more relaxed. They were then a little bit more able to talk about what had happened to them, what they'd done to other people. We got them up moving their bodies. And at first, they're so stiff. But then they could also begin to relax and shake off some of that terrible frozen tension that they had. So it was hard. At first, it was really, I went with the question. The question is, is this approach that's working well in the United States, can it be useful? And the answer I got back from my experience with them was yes. And then we spent some time with people who'd had family members

killed during apartheid. And it was the same answer, having a place where you could feel safe, where you could share what had been going on with you and where you could learn some techniques to deal with the disordered physiology and the troubled psychology and difficulty interacting with other people, that those people, those primarily women who'd experienced those losses in South Africa, that it could make a difference to them. So I said, okay, this can make a difference. And then I said, but I think I feel too comfortable in Africa. Let me go to Bosnia. The war had just ended. 200,000 people had been killed. I didn't really want to go to Bosnia at first.

The climate's not very hospitable. I would never speak the language. I thought that they'd been fighting each other for hundreds of years, but it was where it felt like where it was important for us to be. This was a place where we could potentially demonstrate the effectiveness, where people would pay attention and where it was a bigger challenge in a way and somebody had asked me about going a woman i knew who was actually a psychic had said would you like to go to bosnia my first response of a no and then i went to mozambique and south africa i came back i said okay let's go to Bosnia. And so we went to Bosnia and then began to work there. And we had some connections with health and mental leaders in

health and public health. Started with them. Began to work with the Monsignor of the Catholic Church, with the president of the Islamic University. Started to do some training, and it was going well, except it was also clear that this was now a year after the war, a little more than a year after the war was over, that the whole society was traumatized. I mean, you just walk the streets. First of all, on the streets in Sarajevo, where people were shot by snipers, Serbian snipers shooting down at the Muslims and Croats in Sarajevo. Where they died in the street, they painted the streets red. So there were all these splotches of red to signify the blood that people had shed when they'd been assassinated, when they'd been shot by snipers. But the whole city, everybody's

smoking all the time, drinking all the time, very tense. So when the war in Kosovo started in 98, we knew we had to be there right at the beginning and had to work, that that was the time to work. If you wait till after the war is over, all these patterns that come with trauma, the anxiety, the irritation, the difficulty focusing, difficulty sleeping, the withdrawal from other people, the alcohol consumption, the alcoholism, the abuse of women and children, all of those patterns have become fixed. So the time to work was as soon as possible. And so within a month or two after the war in Kosovo started, Susan and I went to Kosovo and began to work with people who'd been bombed and burned out of their

homes, mostly women, children, and older people. And also with the soldiers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe who were there to monitor and come between the warring Albanian revolutionaries and the Serbs who were being rebelled against. So that's how we started. We started in Kosovo during the war. And we could see this is the time to start. And we found that what we had to teach was very helpful to the people who were driven out of their homes and also helpful to the military who were trying to keep the peace.

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you're gonna die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk you've described some of the patterns that get laid down fairly quickly through the process of trauma. What is trauma? Or in your language, what is your lens on what this thing trauma actually is? Well, trauma is a Greek word. It means injury. Injury to the body, to the mind, to the spirit. And all of us are going to suffer trauma in our lives, if not early, because of discrimination or poverty or abusive or neglectful family. Then as adults, we're likely to, we have a breakup of an important relationship or a major disappointment at work or an illness in the family, a parent's death, a child's illness.

And then if not then, toward the end of our life, the Buddhists know this very well, we're going to become frail, we're going to have all the disability of old age, and we're going to have to face our own death. Trauma is a part of life. And that's what I have understood. So for me, you know, my early trauma, I did have early trauma with my very difficult family. And I had some trauma. Some of that was reawakened in medical school and reawakened when I had the breakup with my girlfriend. And this is part of living.

We all experience trauma. And so, yes, some of it is more dramatic. Some of the people I've worked with who've had 20 members of their families murdered, of course, that's huge. But it's not about comparing one trauma with another. It's about becoming aware of those forces and factors and events in our lives that throw us into chaos, that make us shut down. So those are the consequences of trauma. And we know it. We know it in our minds and our bodies when we're shut down, when we want to hide under the bed, when we withdraw from other people, when we can't sleep or can't concentrate.

You can bet we've been traumatized. And trauma is really, I mean, I think one of the difficulties with psychiatry is it's come away from its roots and has forgotten that late 19th century Freud and Breuer, they were talking of this. The founders of modern psychiatry were looking at the role of trauma in the difficulties we experience later on. Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting to hear you describe trauma in that way because rather than this big capital T that we must at all costs do everything we can to avoid, framing it as it's something that we all will experience on some level at some point, potentially multiple points throughout our lives. It gives you a different lens on how to personally frame it, I think. And also your point about comparison, I think is fascinating. Because I wonder if people think about or look at some of the scenarios that you've described, like war-torn areas. People have been through the most horrific things and say to themselves, well, that's trauma. But, you know, I'm just struggling at work or I just broke up with this person or I just have whatever it is. Like, okay, so I'm not really worthy of labeling this trauma and therefore not really charged with doing something about it also.

You're absolutely right. That's a very pervasive notion. I mean, we are in some ways a society that's kind of self-indulgent and perhaps overly preoccupied with the sort of individual self. But on the other hand, there is this deep shame, this deep sense that we are not worthy, that those things, that we compare ourselves to other people. You know, what's interesting to me is that those other people who've suffered those terrible traumas, that, you know, they've lost all those family members, they've lost their homes, they don't feel the same way. They don't feel like just because you're talking about, quote, only a breakup with a partner, they don't see that as so minor. They have, in general, they have a more generous, broader understanding of the nature of trauma, because we often have people in the same group,

some of whom have suffered horribly from war or other circumstances, others of whom have suffered the ordinary trauma of our lives. And very quickly, people see the commonalities among them. They see that, in the words of a famous psychiatrist, Harry Stack Sullivan, we are more simply human than otherwise. All of us, we're all in this together and we need to appreciate that. We don't need to exaggerate. And comparisons are almost always pretty deadly. I mean, either we feel better than somebody, which is not too pleasant to be around. We feel worse, which is not pleasant for us. We're just here. We're all in this together.

We're all going to go through trauma. And that's the understanding that I'm conveying in the transformation. That's what we bring to people in the groups. And people can, after a while, they can relax and they let go of some of that comparison. Yeah. I think it's just such an important thing to focus on because it's almost like it gives you permission to feel what you're feeling. Yes. And say, okay, it doesn't matter what anyone else has been through. It doesn't matter. In this moment, in my life, in my body, in my mind, things suck. I'm feeling this. I'm feeling my mind, things suck. You know, I'm feeling this,

I'm feeling constricted, I'm feeling tight, I'm feeling ill, whatever it may be. And I guess it really doesn't even matter if you label it trauma, but just acknowledging the basket of what you're experiencing and knowing that you don't have to compare it to anybody else to make the decision about whether you want to do something to try and feel differently. Exactly. And the first thing is becoming, for many people, is becoming aware of the trauma because we're not aware. We go around, we think it's normal to sleep five hours and wake up three times or not be able to focus. No, that's not. Something's going on. And often that something has to do with some traumatic events. And the problem is not our immediate response to trauma, fight or flight response to, you know, to struggle against something that's overwhelming or difficult

for us to deal with. The problem is that it continues long after the event is over or we're staying in situations that continue to produce that response, that continue to traumatize us. Relationships are an obvious example, abusive relationships. We don't want to wake up to the fact that this relationship is really damaging us seriously, psychologically and physiologically. So the first thing is to take a little time, take some deep breaths and begin to think about what is going on, what is actually happening to me now. And then there's the opportunity to make a decision and to say, okay, do I want to do something about it? Yeah. I mean, I'm glad you brought up this, the notion of awareness. Because I do agree. I feel that we are so disconnected from our sensation, from what we're actually feeling.

And maybe because we're so distracted by other things that we're just not present and aware. Or maybe we're intentionally numbing ourselves to a certain extent because facing it would require us to either acknowledge the fact that we're choosing not to do anything about it or do something about it, which I think a lot of us would perceive as being disruptive to our lives, maybe more so than what we're actually feeling. Absolutely. You're right. We are busy. We don't want to look at it. We have a hard time looking at it. And we want to move ahead.

The show must go on. And you see this most obviously. I do a lot of work with military people, active duty military and veterans and veterans' families. Everybody thinks we've got to keep moving ahead. But it's not just veterans. It's not just military. It's there in the health professions. It's there in teachers. It's there in business people. It's there so widely, this notion that we shouldn't deal with our emotions, that we shouldn't be paying attention. They're only emotions. Those are only our feelings. Who am I to talk about trauma that I've experienced?

And we need to really kind of, this isn't the word, but re-honor ourselves, to honor ourselves once again or perhaps for the first time and pay attention to those feelings and pay attention to what's actually going on. And then once we start realizing what's happening, we are faced with a decision. Do we want to do something about it or not? It's still our decision, but it's important to have that decision. Yeah, but at least owning the circumstance that brings you to a point where you realize there's a decision to be made. I think in some way, even that's progress. Exactly. And meditation is central to what I'm teaching. It's sort of really the first step in the transformation.

The first step, I suppose, that I make clear is trauma comes to all of us. Right. And it doesn't mean a life sentence to being miserable. There are things we can do about it. And the first thing is to learn how to get into that relaxed state where you actually can become aware of what's going on. Because ordinarily, most of us are so busy making sure the show goes on that we're not aware of what's happening. So it's really important to, and fundamental, foundational, to teach people just to relax,

to breathe slowly and deeply, to notice what's happening. And I'm sure familiar to you. I have a feeling you're a Buddhist practitioner. The beads on it. I'm looking at the beads. So, yeah, this is first principle. This is the beginning of waking up is taking a little time to relax and pay attention. It's very funny working with medical students.

I can't do it. I have no time. I have to do this. When they start, we teach slow, deep, soft belly breathing, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth with the belly soft and relaxed. It's a concentrative meditation that also encourages mindfulness. And they do it for 10 minutes and they're starting to notice, oh, I'm studying better. I'm sleeping a little better. I'm not so irritable with my roommate.

Maybe it's worth taking the 10 minutes. But people have to make up their mind. Everyone has to decide. Are you willing to take a little bit of time to take care of yourself? Yeah, so important. And your approach of integrating a lot of different modalities to sort of almost rewire, neurally, physiologically, psychologically, the way that we experience stress and trauma is, I think, it's so sensible. I also, what I think is fascinating about it is it is not about you looking for the person who's going to fix you. It's about what can I do to have a sense of agency to get myself as good as I can get. Maybe I still need help.

Maybe I still need medication. Maybe I still need these other things. But it is about starting with you. Exactly. Exactly. And it's up to each person. And one of the reasons that I teach so many techniques in the transformation is because some people like one, some like another.

I think this is part of our mentality. This is part of the comparison that we were talking about before, the tendency to compare. No, you may not like this particular meditation. You may not like this particular guided imagery. Don't worry about it. There are many ways for you to understand and help yourself, many different forms in which you can express yourself, many parts of your life that can be healing. Maybe for you, the most important thing is going into nature and spending time there. That's your primary meditation.

That's your primary healing avenue. For somebody else, it may be doing drawings. For somebody else, it may be one of the active expressive meditations that I teach, the shaking and dancing. Everybody's different. And the idea, my idea of working with people, whether I'm working with them in print, in a book, or in person, is it's an experiment. See what happens. We have this notion, and I don't know where we got it, that experiments are supposed to come out a particular way. No. Why do the experiment if you know how it's going to come out? The idea is to do the experiment, use these techniques, see what

happens, check out for yourself. What I do is I provide an understanding, scientific understanding of how these different techniques work in our mind, work on our body. I provide the research. I give them inspiring examples. But ultimately, it's up to each person what works for you and what doesn't work for you. Yeah, it's such a powerful reframe of the idea of viewing action-taking as a series of experiments to see what's actually going to work for you rather than trying on a one-size-fits-all prescription, which should work for everybody because it's been proven in the data to work for a lot of people. But then you fail at it and you think you're a failure and there's no option for you rather than saying, okay, so my primary metric going into this is not cure. It's learning. Like the primary objective is will this work? And then if it doesn't, well, okay.

Like, it would have been nice if it did. But knowing that there are, okay, so there are a dozen other things that are now the next series of experiments, and something will. And my sense is it gives you this sense of forgiveness and willingness to continue to explore, you know, sort of a longer path. You're mentioning forgiveness is really important piece as well, because the first place where forgiveness is most important, it's not on that terrible person who did X, Y, or Z to you. It's forgiving yourself, having a little compassion for yourself as you start to take care of yourself and forgiving yourself. If you don't like X kind of meditation or X kind of guided imagery that somebody else thinks is wonderful. So having that compassion and then out of that, it becomes a calm enough and present enough and you've got to do some experiments with yourself before you're in a place where you want to really deal with forgiveness. as constructive as this lens of let me run a series of experiments to figure out the blend of things that will work for me is when you are in a place of feeling

the embodied effect of trauma and very likely some level of anxiety at the same time. I mean, it seems like there would also be a tension that I can understand because you just want to be out of that feeling. And the idea of not being able to take a pill or just doing one thing that works, but actually, oh, let me take a longer-term lens. There are a series of things I can do. It can't be the fun answer that you just want. I think we're all just in search of like give me the thing or tell me the thing that's going to make me feel better now. Yeah. But, you know, one of the things, and I completely understand that.

One of the things about this method though, is that many of the techniques will give you at least a taste of that right away. I was just doing this workshop in Northern California in Shasta, this county that was terribly burnt out by the wildfires. And I don't know, there may be 100 people in this training program that we're doing. And I got everybody up first morning, got everybody up shaking and dancing. And a number of people said, oh, I feel more relaxed. I feel more energized. I was feeling so wound up, so terrible.

Before, they see the difference right away. It may not be gone completely. I think the difference or the distinction between the differences, if you will, of taking a pill and doing shaking and dancing is you're doing the shaking and dancing. Somebody else is handing you the pill. And so it requires a little effort, but the reward is so much greater because it's not only the physiological relaxation that you get from the technique. It's the sense I can make a difference. You used the word agency before. I can do something for myself. And this is the beginning. This is the beginning of the end of the despair of the hopelessness and helplessness that we so often feel when we've been traumatized. Hopelessness and helplessness are the hallmarks of depression. They're there with people who are anxious. They're there with chronic illness of pretty much every kind. So once you start to have a sense that I can do something to help myself, everything can start to turn around. So you do get some immediate gratification. Yeah. No, definitely. The one other thing I want to touch on with you and ask about is this notion of not just healing as an individual in isolation, but in community.

And the role of that, the importance of it, how it changes things? Yeah, it's a great question. I'm writing a self-care book, so I'm writing a book for people to read, but I also make the suggestion several times, share what you're learning with other people. Do it with somebody else. Do these techniques with other people and share what you're learning, what your experiences are, what's coming up for you with somebody else. One of the crucial things in healing and dealing with trauma of any kind, and pretty much everybody recognizes this, is what the social psychologists call social support, which means other people. That's a fancy name. Human beings. Yeah, you and me. And it makes such a difference when you're going through a difficult time to have somebody you can share some piece of what's happening with.

And what you discover likely is they've had something very similar. We're all human. We've all been through these things. I started to learn this when I was in medical school, when I started opening up really for the first time to other people my age. And I'd talk about some of the issues that were challenging me. And at first they were shocked. Oh, you seem so cool. Like you have it all together. Well, I don't. And they would say, well, as a matter of fact, neither do I. And here's what's happening with me. And I've seen this. So it's great to be able to share with other people.

At the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, our model is small groups are really the best way to learn self-care. It's great. You can learn all the techniques from the transformation from the book, but it's wonderful to be in a group. There's a sense of we're in it together, a kind of energetic sense that we're here. There are other people in this with me. I'm not by myself. And then there's the amazing discovery that other people are not exactly who you thought they were and that all the preconceptions and prejudices you had when you first sat down with them, you know, a few groups later, you've sat with them for a few hours. Oh, you're really not like that. So there's a sense of not only of feeling supported and

learning from each other, there's a sense of moving through prejudices, getting over your projections onto other people, and then also a sense of your experience being useful to other people. Because as you talk about, oh, I did the soft belly breathing and it was hard for me because I had all these thoughts come to me. And somebody else who's in the group said, oh, I had a lot of thoughts come to me. I thought I was the only one who had these thoughts that kept coming. So you're not only receiving help, you're not only creating a community, but you're also being of use to other people that your struggles are actually illuminating to others. Yeah. No, I think it's so important. Um, years I taught yoga. And we opened our yoga center eight weeks after 9-11 in Hell's Kitchen in New York City.

And, you know, what started as, you know, what I thought would be a celebration and community and joy turned into something profoundly different. And, you know, we were also, our location was two avenues away from the pier where many of the first responders and the aid workers were staging. And we would just send people down and just say, come. And, you know, people were just wandering around the city, talk about mass trauma, not knowing what to do. And we just kind of opened our doors and said, like, do yoga, sit, meditate, cry, whatever you need to do. This is a place just for people to be with each other and breathe and feel for this particular season. And what I witnessed there in the months following

was just stunning. Sure, people were doing, quote, asana, the physical yoga practice. But what I realized was that was such a smaller part of what was happening between people in a room over this, you know, like, 90-minute window of time. There was something very different that was unfolding. There was a deepening, an opening. There was a relationship, and there was a sense of slow but noticeable healing.

That's great. Well, you were able to create that safe space, and you were willing to invite people to share themselves. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen in most yoga studios. Some it does, but too often, once again, that whole show must go on. We've got to do all these asanas. Yeah, it has become very performative, I think, in a lot of ways. As opposed to allowing people to relax in the postures and seeing what happens. And then giving them a time to share.

I don't know how many yoga classes to afterwards. What happened? What came up? Anything you'd like to share. We train a number of yoga teachers in our Center for Mind Body Medicine programs and many of them bring the attitude and the approach that you had naturally

in this crisis that you brought to your students they come through our program and they learn how to do that with other people and their classes are very very different afterwards because they're giving that space for people

to share. It's beautiful, that coming together. And there's so little of it that happens in our society here in the United States in this. Yeah. And I feel like it's needed more than ever now, here and around the world. Yes. And not just to complain, not just to yell and scream. A little of that's fine. But what's actually going on inside you? Not just your opinion, but who are you? What's happening to you? We all need that space. abused in her childhood and raped by her father and physically abused.

She went through a number of therapies. One of the things she said that was most important about her work with us, she said, nobody tried to fix me. It was great learning all these techniques. It was wonderful being in a group, but I'd been in groups before. But this is the first group where nobody tried to fix me, where they just allowed me to make my own discoveries and share what I needed to share. I didn't feel like there was something wrong with me. Up until then, even with, you know, good therapies and supportive groups, I still kept feeling like there's something wrong with me. And the whole idea is we're all here, we're all human, and we're all trying to find greater balance and to live our lives in a more fulfilling way.

And we've all had difficulties along the way, and we need to create places where we can share that experience. Yeah, that's powerful. So as we start to come full circle in this container of the Good Life Project, sort of exploring this central question of what it means to live a good life, when I offer out that phrase, to live a good life, what comes up? Ah, to live a good life. I would say to enjoy every minute of it is the most important thing. To appreciate and celebrate each moment to me when i'm doing that i feel like i'm living a good life and that in doing that i'm able to respond to the person

who's there in front of me to open my heart to that person i'm able to appreciate all the gifts that i've been given the fact that I've been given a body to live the fact that I can still breathe the air and it also um puts me in touch with what I need to do with what else I may need to do if I'm really appreciating each moment that I'm also aware of the pain and the suffering and the injustice that's there in the world. And I can find a way, I'm informed about it continually, and I'm schooled in how to respond to it by my interactions with people, by my interactions with the environment. So I really focus on just helping people, you know, enjoy and live in the moment and celebrate those moments, whether it's eating or walking or having a conversation or seeing a patient. Yeah. Thank you.

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