fire in the soul â€“ positive spiritual practices for healing

Fire in the Soul – Positive Spiritual Practices for

Healing

A Webinar Session withRuth Buczynski, PhD

and Joan Borysenko, PhD

nicabm www.nicabm.com

The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine

○

○

○

http://www.nicabm.com

Fire in the Soul – Positive Spiritual Practices for Healing 2

The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicinewww.nicabm.com

○

○

○

Fire in the Soul – Positive Spiritual Practices for Healing

ContentsThe Dark Night of the Soul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

From Dark Night to Opportunity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

The Three Stages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

No Longer – Not Yet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Three Skills for Making It Through the Liminal Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Why Forgiveness Is Essential for Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

The Basic Steps to Forgiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Gratitude as a Form of Mindfulness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Integrating Spirituality into Clinical Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

How To Recognize Burnout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

TalkBack Segment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

About the Speakers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24



○

○

○

Fire in the Soul – Positive Spiritual Practices for Healing

with Ruth Buczynski, PhD and Joan Borysenko, PhD

Dr. Buczynski: Hello everyone and welcome. I’m so glad you’re here for our series on Spirituality and Healing.

I am Dr. Ruth Buczynski, a Licensed Psychologist in the State of Connecticut and the President of the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine.

Wherever you’re calling in from, we just want to say we’re glad you’re here. This is such an important topic and it’s important to get together our whole community of practitioners from around the world to share these ideas and to participate in the TalkBack segment as well as the Comment Board. So thanks for being here; we’re glad you’re here.

My guest tonight is Dr. Joan Borysenko. Joan’s a Harvard trained medical scientist. She’s a cell biologist as well as a psychologist and, in fact, as I was saying this morning to the staff, Joan is bilingual. She is extremely fluent in cell biology - we can be talking about the brain and the next minute, we can switch into Milton Erickson in hypnosis – whatever the topic, she’s just as fluent.

So welcome, it’s good to have you here!

Dr. Borysenko: Thank you, Ruth, I’m glad that you asked me for this series because the part of my fluency that I really enjoy the most is my fluency, not only of world religions, but the spiritual process that underlies each one, its similarity to psychology, and how it has a bearing on healing. So I’m excited.

Dr. Buczynski: Good, good! Now, Joan is the author of many, many books I know I’ve mentioned before that she came upon the world with Minding the Body, Mending the Mind, and I’m going to invent the year, but I think it was around 1987 or ’88. Is that correct?

Dr. Borysenko: It was in ’87! That was excellent.

Dr. Buczynski: At the time, she was the director of the Mind Body Clinic at, I believe, the Deaconess Hospital, where she worked with Herb Benson…and that was right as we had this new disease that seemed to take over and everyone was so terrified about AIDS. We knew so little about it at the time and Joan’s clinic was one of the first to take care of so many AIDS patients as well as people with many other diseases.

Joan, besides Minding the Body, Mending the Mind, then wrote Guilt is the Teacher, Love is the Lesson and Fire in the Soul: A New Psychology of Spiritual Optimism. Her most recent book is Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive.

So, again Joan, let me say welcome; it’s good to have you here!

Dr. Borysenko: Always Ruth, thank you so much for having me back. I treasure this chance to really connect with you to a worldwide community of practitioners. It’s a great service you do!

“We knew so little about AIDS at the time and Joan’s clinic was one of the first to take care of so many patients...”



○

○

○

The Dark Night of the Soul

Dr. Buczynski: Thanks, thanks! Let’s jump right into the dark night of the soul. I’m sure that everyone on the call has experienced times that we might refer to in this way - I know I certainly have. But the concept is a pretty old idea, where does it come from?

Dr. Borysenko: Yes, the term dark night of the soul comes from the 15th Century and…it comes from St. John of the Cross, who with his spiritual director, St. Theresa, really looked at: What is our relationship to a larger whole - whether you call that the ground of being or God?

He looked at our great sense of belonging and connectedness and what St. John said is that there are times in one’s spiritual life where you lose connection with the ground of being and he called that the dark night of the soul.

Today we use it in a broader term. I’d like to really look at what it is to lose connection to the divine as part of what we’re talking about Ruth, but I think we often use it just to say, “It’s a time when the bottom has fallen out of our lives, and we feel like we’re in free-fall and there’s nothing to grab on to.”

So that’s definitely a dark night, and that’s actually the reason why I wrote Fire in the Soul. You made reference to the fact that right when the AIDS epidemic started in the early 1980’s, we started to see a lot of young men with AIDS in our clinic at the Deaconess Hospital and before that at the Beth Israel in Boston - now they’re the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. These spiritual questions are what came up right away for those young men.

Dr. Buczynski: Tell me more - can you recall the first young man that made a big impression on you?

Dr. Borysenko: Absolutely, I actually wrote about him in the last chapter of Minding the Body, Mending the Mind and I changed his name, of course, as we do for any identifying characteristic.

I called him Sam, and he was a young lawyer in Boston. Actually, I got a call from someone in our psychiatry department who said, “Look, we’ve got a young man who’s hospitalized here and he’s asking for a peace of mind consult. We’ve never heard of such a thing, but we know you do stress management and you do meditation. We thought maybe you were the stress of mind consult.”

So I went to see Sam one snowy night with this snow dropping outside the window. I was all gowned and gloved because the AIDS virus had not yet been discovered, and we didn’t know what caused it. We thought it could be airborne.

I sat by his bed, and when you’re facing death, one of the things that happens is it’s no time for nonsense. People drop their masks very quickly, and you can make truly a heart-to-heart connection and talk about issues of meaning.

For him, right away, he wanted to talk about spiritual matters. He wanted to reflect on what the meaning of his life had been.

“...there are times in one’s spiritual life where you lose connection with the ground of being...”

“...spiritual questions came up right away for these young men.”

“...when facing death...people drop their masks very quickly, and you can make a truly heart-to-heart connection.”



○

○

○

He knew that he was going to die quickly. He had had several friends who had died already from this mystery disease, and he wanted to make his life meaningful.

So we started there, and because of Sam, I started really one of the first AIDS groups in Boston and we had a mind-body process for people with AIDS.

But frequently, what they were really most interested in were the big questions: where did I come from - where am I going - is there a God - and one of the most important, why am I ill?

It was from them that I learned to ask all my patients, no matter what illness - whether it was a chronic illness or a stress related illness or cancer or AIDS - I’d ask them all the same question and it was this: “A lot of people have a theory about why they are sick and I don’t know you well, but I’d like to know, do you have a theory? Of course, some people don’t, but what’s your story?”

I found that the great majority of people, I would say well over 90% of them, had very distinct theories about why they were ill.

In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, what I heard most frequently, and this is heartbreaking still for me, Ruth, but they would say, “I think that I have made God angry at me. It says in the Bible that it’s an abomination to be gay.” I would also say, by the way, it says in the Bible that it’s an abomination to eat shellfish - it’s there in the same category.

But they would say, “I must have offended God and therefore we have been given this terrible plague - this terrible disease.” Of course, the unspoken corollary of that was, “What’s going to happen next is that I’ll go to hell and I’ll burn there for eternity.

Just in terms of stress management - our belief, the ideas that we have about the universe – makes that a pretty toxic one.

Dr. Buczynski: That was very poignant because, at the time as you mentioned, this was a new disease. We didn’t know what it was about and we had rampant fear and homophobia. Of course, we still have fear and homophobia, but not to the extent that we had back in the early 80’s, but those questions are relevant

even outside of AIDS and…

Dr. Borysenko: Absolutely!

Dr. Buczynski: The issue is that people sometimes take on the illness as their fault.

Dr. Borysenko: That’s right, and that speaks directly, by the way, to Martin Seligman’s idea of what pessimism and helplessness are because it has to do with your basic explanatory style.

As Seligman would say, when a really bad thing happens, how do you explain it to yourself? With somebody who is pessimistic and who will quickly become helpless (and we know the clinical literature and scientific literature on helplessness - we can go through the mechanisms if you’d like) it can lead to rapid cardiac death very easily, stroke, and immuno-depression; it’s not anything that you would want to have happen.

“...well over 90% of them had very distinct theories about why they were ill.”

“...people sometimes take on the illness as their fault.”



○

○

○

But what Seligman says is the explanatory style of a person who is pessimistic and easily made helpless by circumstance is this: they explain what happened with what he calls the three P’s. Personal is the first one - they take it personally. They blame themselves; it’s their own fault.

The second one is pervasive - not only did I do something terrible that made me sick, but I’ve messed up my whole life. The third one is permanent. In other words, it’s not something that’s going to go away - if you mess up your life as a general principle, it’s going to continue.

So, his summary of the pessimistic explanatory story – it is all my own fault, I mess up everything that I do, and it’s the story of my life – is what I heard so often.

From Dark Night to Opportunity

Dr. Buczynski: Joan, sometimes people, especially when they’re looking back on a dark night of the soul, think of it as a time of opportunity. Certainly it’s not something that you necessarily say when you’re going through it, but upon reflection, you can see it and think that really was a time of opportunity.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

Dr. Borysenko: Yes, I think that for many people a dark night of the soul is an invitation to transformation. Their previous life has crashed; it’s like a rite of passage that has three parts. Your life crashes, you separate from what was, you go through a period of wandering in the wilderness - that’s called the Liminal Time – and then you’re at the threshold of something new.

In that time after the dark night, in the Liminal Time, either you can despair and become helpless and depressed, or you can transform and you’ll find allies. You take a look at yourself; you see what works in your life, and what hasn’t worked.

You become more open, more curious, more expansive, and you undergo some kind of transformation so that at the end of that dark night process, you make a return to your community, not as good as you were before - it’s different from resilience – but transformed with something even more precious to add to the community of life. It’s that essence of transformation that’s so wonderful about the dark night of the soul.

That’s why it’s so useful for the therapists around the world who are watching this to understand the dark night of the soul, the three parts of the rite of passage - separation from what was, the Liminal Stage between no longer and not yet, and then the return transformed.

I’ve used that with many patients - cancer patients, patient’s with any kind of chronic illness - to say that this is the time

for becoming your true self. What happens to people is this: we all put on masks because we all want the same thing - we want to be lovable.

“...for many people a dark night of the soul is an invitation to transformation.”

“...you return transformed with something even more precious to add to the community of life.”

“Personal, pervasive, and permanent is the explanatory style of a person who is easily made helpless by circumstance.”



○

○

○

It starts when we’re little and we put on masks: what would mommy like? What would daddy like? Little by little, over time, we lose track of who we really are.

The process of transformation after a dark night is peeling off some of those masks to reveal the really magnificent uniqueness of who

we have been all along, and I consider that really the heart of healing. In the spiritual traditions, they talk about taking off the false self and finding the true self.

There’s a great Christian mystic whose name is Meister-Eckhart who said that God is not found by addition, not by stuff we do, but by subtraction - clearing away all the stuff that keeps us out of touch with our own unique precious beauty and what we have to offer the family of humankind.

Dr. Buczynski: Sometimes I think of the false self, and it’s accurate to think of it as a false self, but it could imply to people that we’re saying that it’s a lie and really it’s not so much a lie as it is our public-pretty-self that we put together to put out there…

Dr. Borysenko: Yes, actually, it’s really a way of surviving. It’s something that we can really be proud of because within each of us is the capacity to be resilient, to be able to get through our circumstance and we learn to do that.

However, it’s not the clearest version of who we are. I’ll give you an example of that. For me, the big-false-self that had gotten in my way so much of my life was to feel like I had to please everybody all the time, and I was very afraid of people’s anger or disapproval if I didn’t do that.

The result was that when I made decisions, they didn’t come from clarity; they didn’t come from, “This is something that will be good for me or good for my family or the best thing for my career.”

Decisions (from that false self) put me way off the mark. That’s what I mean by the false self. At some point, it really served me, but at another point, it was time (to move away from that).

Again, frequently, it’s in these transformative periods of illness, psychological and physical, that we recognize the limitations of the false self and we’re finally able, especially when we have a little help from a supportive environment, to unearth our really most authentic expression.

The Three Stages

Dr. Buczynski: You talked about three stages, can you just tell us those three stages again?

Dr. Borysenko: Yes, first there’s separation from the known and the second is the Liminal Phase. Here you’re at the threshold of transformation, but this takes time, so it’s the time between no longer and not yet.

“Little by little, over time, we lose track of who we really are.”

“...taking off the false self and finding the true self is the heart of healing.”

“...in transformative periods of illness... we recognize the limitations of the false self and we’re finally able...to unearth our most authentic expression.”



○

○

○

You can think of the archetype of, for example, the Jews fleeing from Egypt where they don’t get to go across the Red Sea to the Promised Land. They wander for two generations and it takes that long for a transformation to occur so that the whole group can then enter the Promised Land.

Dr. Buczynski: And what’s the third stage?

Dr. Borysenko: The third stage is return. You return transformed. The idea here is that through the transformation, you can actually give back something very valuable to your family, to your community, to the world at large.

No Longer – Not Yet

Dr. Buczynski: Let’s focus a little bit on that no longer, not yet part. That’s such a difficult stage to be at and I’m thinking that even on this call, we’re trying to learn how we can help our patients, and yet many times practitioners have their own dark nights and their own times when they feel called to something, but they’re not quite ready or they haven’t taken the risk yet and they’re in that stage of no longer, not yet.

Dr. Borysenko: Right.

Dr. Buczynski: Tell me more about what that’s like.

Dr. Borysenko: Yes, I’m so glad you asked that Ruth. You always ask the very best questions. Being between no longer and not yet means you can’t go back to what was. It’s gone!

I’ll give you a personal example. I knew I really burned out seriously when I was at Harvard and running a mind/body clinic - just attending to all the AIDS patients over the course of the epidemic. So many of them were dying who had become good friends. The sheer number of patients that I saw and the fact that I had a couple of teenage kids at home, a long commute…I bet a lot of your practitioners are in that place of trying to balance all that as well.

I knew I had to leave, but often we know well before we’re able to stage an exit and get to something else.

So, this is what happened. I was running an AIDS group one night and I said, “None of us knows the time of our death.”

Then I said, “I could have an accident on my way home and die before you.” And I did have an accident, but I didn’t die. I had a head-on collision and ended up in the hospital for five days.

This is what I mean by something happening that separates you from what was. I couldn’t go back to being the Joan that was burned out. I really realized that this was it – I was in the time between no longer and not yet. I could not go back to Harvard and I did not know what I would do next.

So it takes, first of all, some patience. Right away, when you’re separated from something, during the first stage, it’s so uncomfortable for people to not know where they’re going next that the urge to make premature closure is the most common thing.

“...often we know well before we’re able to stage an exit that we need to leave.”

“... it’s so uncomfortable for people to not know where they’re going next...”



○

○

○

Let’s say somebody gets a divorce. Very often they’ll marry on the rebound because they want to recreate the safety that marriage has and it’s often a big mistake.

So the first thing that you need to make it through that time between no longer and not yet is the realization that it requires patience. It’s okay to be in the unknown.

When you look at what spirituality is and guidance is - I’d say that a lot of practitioners who are listening in on this call will say at some point you just know - you have a knowing about what’s next. There are synchronicities or a guidance of some sort and that’s what happens in the time between no longer and not yet.

If you just rush to safety, you don’t have a chance to allow the future that wants to emerge to come so that you can co-create and cooperate with it.

And by the way, getting through these Liminal Times between no longer and not yet requires the same skills that the research on resilience tells us that we require.

Three Skills for Making It Through the Liminal Times

So, let me go through some of those skills. The research literature on resilience, by the way, is enormous. It spans everything from children who have had difficult childhoods to prisoners of war to people who have recovered from terrible illnesses…

Dr. Buczynski: Holocaust survivors?

Dr. Borysenko: Holocaust survivors - the whole gamut, but here are the top three skills: realism, (and I’ll go through this), a sense of faith in something (which is the ability to make meaning - that your situation is uniquely meaningful), and the third is mindful curiosity (which allows creativity).

So, let’s just go through those. First, you have to be realistic. Let’s say that you’ve decided to leave your job, which I did. You have to be realistic. How are you going to make a living until you decide where it is that you want to land next?

I was careful to be realistic when I gave notice for my work. I had a book contract for another book. It gave me some latitude so that’s very important. There’s an old saying, and it’s a sailor’s term…for a day when the winds are bad for sailing, “An optimist thinks they’ll change, a pessimist complains about them, and a realist adjusts the sails.”

What we do know, by the way, from the research on resilience, is that it doesn’t pay to be an optimist. I know that sounds crazy, but it pays to be a realist.

The second skill is faith, and I’d like to look at what faith really means. On the one hand, for some people, it’s religious faith.

“If you just rush to safety, you don’t have a chance to allow the future to emerge...to co-create and cooperate with it.”

“...for a day when the winds are bad for sailing, ‘An optimist thinks they’ll change, a pessimist complains about them, and a realist adjusts the sails.’”



○

○

○

Let’s look at John McCain. In 2008, he ran for President of the United States. It doesn’t matter what your politics are, what we know about him is that the man is resilient. Can you imagine being a POW for five years? One of the reasons for his resilience, I believe, is that he has a tremendous faith - he’s a man of faith.

People of faith believe that there is a reason for things. Let’s look at another very resilient person, Viktor Frankl. I think many of the practitioners watching have read Man’s Search for Meaning.

We know that the meaning we give to our experience changes it all. So, in the middle of the Liminal phase, if you’re thinking to yourself, “I’m an initiate in a rite of passage - I’m in the middle of a journey of transformation to my most authentic self when I can be of greatest service to those around me,” that is very different from saying, “Oh no, this is terrible. I have no job and the market is awful.”

You can see that these are very different and they’ll have very different effects on your physical body and very different effects on your mental health.

So that’s what I mean by faith, our capacity to create meaning.

The third skill I mentioned is mindful curiosity. That’s what allows us to be open, spacious, and flexible - to notice the cues of what is happening and be our most creative self.

I know that you’ve had many programs, Ruth, on mindfulness and it’s an incredibly important skill to get through that time between no longer and not yet.

I’ll mention two other things very quickly. We need social support in that time. We need to know who our mentors are, who our allies are, and then we also have to have a great sense of humor. It turns out that a sense of humor and a sense of absurdity helps us to not take things so seriously. It helps us to maintain our flexibility.

Why Forgiveness Is Essential for Health

Dr. Buczynski: I’d like to change our thinking for a moment and talk about forgiveness. We often think of forgiveness as something that’s really essential for health. What are your thoughts on why it’s so important?

Dr. Borysenko: Forgiveness, first of all, is one of the eight spiritual qualities that psychiatrist George Vaillant has talked about. I love his approach to spirituality.

He’s a Harvard psychiatrist, as you know Ruth, and he inherited something called the Grant Study. He has seven years of research (on 70 years of research) on students who matriculated in Harvard Medical School. He followed them every year and they look at every psychological characteristic, psychological characteristics, and their success in the world.

“...it doesn’t pay to be an optimist...but it pays to be a realist.”

“...mindful curiosity...allows us to be open, spacious, and flexible - to notice the cues and be our most creative self.”



○

○

○

One of the things that Vaillant has looked at is the nature of spirituality. He says it’s not a belief system. It has nothing to do with that. It is a constellation of eight positive emotions: forgiveness, gratitude, equanimity – that sense of inner peace, awe, wonder, joy, compassion, and love.

And I would say that this is also what makes for a mature human being. In a way spirituality and maturity are one.

When you look at forgiveness, I would say that first of all, the medical case for forgiveness is very compelling. There is an enormous volume of research indicating that holding a grudge is a source of chronic stress with all of the stress related ills that accompany that.

Holding a grudge is bad for you – bad for your physical and mental health.

Forgiveness sets you free. A lot of people just misunderstand what forgiveness is so I just want to make that clear. Forgiveness is not about giving a free ride to somebody who has offended you or if you are the person who’s done something wrong, it’s not about giving a free ride to yourself.

Forgiveness is about your inner freedom. So let’s look at, for example, my family – 12 of my family members died in Auschwitz. I watched my mother hold onto a grudge against the Germans and I watched how that affected her health.

I myself hope that this never happens again, but if I hold a grudge for the rest of my life, I’m the one who’s going to suffer. I’m the one who’s going to feel anger and have that make my platelets

clump and stick to the sides of my blood vessels and increase my risk of heart disease. Besides which, most Germans had nothing to do with it at all.

So forgiveness is about setting yourself free. I always tell people you can forgive somebody who’s offended you while calling the police and testifying against them in court, but it has to do with your own inner freedom.

So, I want to cite a piece of research for you about this Ruth. This is very, very important. This was a piece of research, and I wish I had the citation in front of me, but I can get it to you…

It was maybe four or five years ago and the research looked at women who had recently left abusing relationships. It put the women who had left their abusers into two groups: one was a forgiveness training group and the other was an assertiveness training group.

I think maybe we would think these women need assertiveness training - that’s going to set them free, but it turned out that the women in the forgiveness group did much better.

I’ll describe what the intervention was in a moment, but they had less post-traumatic stress which is very important because a lot of women who leave abusive relationships do have PTSD. They ranked better on physical scores - scores of physical health, mental health and well-being, and they were more motivated to make positive changes in their life.

“...the nature of spirituality...is a constellation of eight positive emotions...”

“...an enormous volume of research indicates that holding a grudge is a source of chronic stress.”

“Forgiveness is about your inner freedom.”



○

○

○

Now, what could have caused this? What was the forgiveness intervention? A very large part of it came out of the studies at the Forgiveness Research Center at Stanford by a psychologist named Frederic Luskin.

One of the primary things that doctor Luskin suggests is this: the first thing you need to do to forgive is to be honest with yourself about the toll that holding a grudge is having on your life. Is it keeping you hostage? Are you always thinking about your grudge? Does it keep you out of the moment? Does it make you angry? Does it disempower you? What does it do?

So, you need to inquire deeply into that. Then secondly, if you find that, “Yes, that grudge is holding me back and I want to make a change,” you have to look at your grievance story.

Usually we have the same story we tell ourselves. If you’re an abused woman, you’re probably going to be reviewing it this way – “That low-down dirty dog - look what he did to me and this is what happened and that’s what happened…and I hate him.” It’s all of those things.

Instead, they asked women to look for things that were positive that they had learned through the relationship. For example, one of these was mobilizing enough strength to leave it. “I developed the strength to leave; I have learned these things about myself; I have learned these things about other people.”

In other words, this became an invitation to transformation so that the women, in terms of their rite of passage and separation - going through the time between no longer and not yet, could return transformed with new strengths.

That gives a woman a chance to actually realize at a cellular level what that transformation is and I think that’s what forgiveness is all about. It’s about transformation and attaining higher degrees of functioning and freedom.

The Basic Steps to Forgiveness

Dr. Buczynski: There were some steps to forgiveness, I think there were five steps to forgiveness, can you walk us through those or…

Dr. Borysenko: There are some basic steps for forgiveness, two of them we’ve already looked at. One is to really look at your situation - what does holding a grudge do to you? The second step, for sure, is looking at your grievance story and changing that story. That I think is really important.

A third step is the development of empathy and compassion – this is really so important. If you look at people who’ve been abusers, almost always they themselves have been abused - it’s what they know.

“...to forgive, you need to be honest with yourself about the toll that holding a grudge is having on your life.”

“Instead of being victims, they became heroines of a new story...”

“...forgiveness is...about transformation and attaining higher degrees of functioning and freedom.”



○

○

○

If you begin to recognize that and not take it personally, but to have empathy for the pain they are experiencing - the incompleteness of people who behave in that way, it strengthens the changing of your own story. So, the third step involves empathy for the forgiver.

Another thing that I find to be a very important part of forgiveness… is something that serves your amygdala because it’s symbolic. You have to two kinds of memory. There’s verbal memory, in the hippocampus, and then you have another kind of memory, iconic memory, that comes in the amygdala. You know, for example, when you get a flashback to a difficult situation it’s iconic.

So, you want, when you’re forgiving, perhaps to substitute a different icon - a different symbol in the amygdala, and I’ve always found that ritual is a very good way to do that. In other words, you’re making a new association to the old story.

Here’s one kind of ritual, for example, that I’ve found so useful in some circumstances (and this is interesting because you cooperate with the client in figuring this out). If you’re helping somebody come to forgiveness - let’s say, somebody has had a very rough relationship with their mother and if you have a difficult relationship with somebody, you’re attached to them through a cord of anger.

I have them bring in a picture of the mother and actually attach a cord to them - you can tie it on to a button or you can tape it on, but at the other end of the cord is a picture of the mother.

Then, after all this work, they actually cut the cord and set themselves free. I’ll say one other thing about this: let’s say that you have come to some peace with a mother who was difficult or with a father who was abusive - maybe you’ve been a victim of incest or abuse - forgiving somebody does not mean that you have to invite them to Sunday dinner.

You can forgive somebody and never talk to them again - it’s up to you. It has nothing to do with (being with them), but it has just everything to do with freedom.

So once you cut that cord, it’s up to you to decide whether you’re going to interact with that mother or not.

The last step, I think, in forgiveness is really to recognize that you have done something very heroic, very transformative, and very important. Then you have to let go of what has been done and celebrate who you have become. Have a real celebration of your transformation - that’s important.

Often, people don’t celebrate, but this is a wonderful thing to do even if you throw yourself a forgiveness party.

Gratitude as a Form of Mindfulness

Dr. Buczynski: Interesting idea. Moving from forgiveness I’d like to talk about gratitude. Let’s take a look at gratitude as a form of mindfulness in a way.

Dr. Borysenko: Yes, yes, absolutely! Gratitude is one of the positive emotions in that constellation George Vaillant defines as spiritual in nature.

“...once you cut that cord...you let go of what has been done and celebrate who you’ve become.”

“...when you’re forgiving...you’re making a new assocation to the old story.”



○

○

○

There’s a whole body of research literature on gratitude. Robert Enright is a researcher that some of the practitioners might enjoy Googling and if you do, you’ll come up with very good research literature.

From the research, we find that people who keep a daily gratitude journal have less stress; they have more well-being, more inner peace, and they’re more motivated to carry out changes that are beneficial in their life – for example, they’re more likely to exercise.

The same is true for people who keep weekly gratitude journals. I learned an exercise many, many years ago from a person who I want to discuss. From Brother David Steindl-Rast, I learned about why gratitude brings forth mindfulness. He has a fabulous website called gratefulness.org, and this site is really worth checking out.

He is both a Cistercian monk and a Zen teacher for 40 years or so. He’s one of these people whose religion is a way to spirituality, and he recognizes that so are other religious as well as Zen practice – there are many ways to get to this maturation of spirit that we call spirituality.

So here’s what I learned from him. He said, “Choose one thing every night before you go to bed to be grateful for and it has to be something that you’ve never thought of feeling grateful for before.”

Right away, that eliminates all the usual thoughts - “I’m grateful that I have a roof over my head or good food to eat or a wonderful family or these great kids…”

Instead, you have to be curious all day long to think about what you’re going to be grateful for that night. It becomes embodied; it becomes real; it leaves the realm of mental ideas and it becomes cellular.

Maybe you’re out for a walk and the breeze that day is one of these wonderful warm breezes where you feel like you’re just swimming through the air and you say to yourself, “Oh, that feels so wonderful. That’s what I’ll remember tonight.”

And you do it! In very short order, because you know that you’ve made a commitment to be grateful for something new every night, it makes you open, curious and mindful all the day.

I’ve found that of all the practices that I’ve done, and I’ve done many, Ruth, I’ve been on this path a long time, this one gratitude exercise has been the most transformational thing I’ve ever done in terms of teaching mindfulness and bringing me joy.

Dr. Buczynski: That’s very sweet and I can see where that would be a mindfulness practice.

Dr. Borysenko: Yes, it’s one that’s not talked about so much. I mean, we all know the kind of wonderful practice that John Kabat-Zinn has taught us - mindful eating of that raisin and getting every bit of it.

“...there are many ways to get to this maturation of spirit that we call spirituality.”

“...making a commitment to be grateful for something new every night, makes you open, curious, and mindful all day.”

“...people who keep a daily gratitude journal have less stress...and they’re more motivated to carry out changes beneficial to their lives...”



○

○

○

But, I think in spirituality, your whole life becomes mindful.

Instead of fixating on one thing – “I’ll be happy when this happens, when it’s 5:00pm, or when I get my degree, or when this patient gets better” – mindfulness really turns you into life – life as a journey so that you can be grateful for things as they unfold. It just brings such depth and richness to life.

Integrating Spirituality into Clinical Practice

Dr. Buczynski: I’m going to switch us now to integrating spirituality into clinical practice. When you’ve worked with patients who are critically ill with life-threatening illnesses the subject of God, I imagine, frequently comes up and the whole idea of their narrative about God. Can you talk some about that?

Dr. Borysenko: Yes, absolutely. First of all, ideas about God are implanted very early in our life. For example, when the AIDS epidemic was happening and I had AIDS patients who felt like they’d been given AIDS as a punishment from God, very frequently these were people who had left their childhood religion early on. They may not have stayed with these beliefs, but the beliefs were still alive for them.

When we’re highly stressed, or when something bad happens, for sure, we tend to regress sometimes to the beliefs of our childhood and they come up again. This was something that came up over and over and over again during the time of the AIDS epidemic - the early time when people died very quickly before it was a treatable or manageable illness.

Of course, as psychologists, we’re really not trained to deal with those kinds of things, and yet I realized we have to deal with

them because you can just imagine the stress.

I think the worst stress of all is to think that you have disappointed God - you’ve taken the wrong path in your life, you’ve missed the boat, you’re going to go to hell, and there’s no hope for you.

For example, I asked one of my young AIDS patients, “Doesn’t your God forgive? Isn’t that a quality of God?” And he said, “Yes, God forgives if you change your life, but I love my lover. He is the love of my life and I cannot possibly renounce him, and therefore, I’m going to go to hell.”

There’s a lot of food for thought in what he said. Something that we looked at together is this: how can love ever be sinful? I’m a psychologist, and what he needed is to talk to the original hand that wounded him, which was his religious tradition.

At that time, of course, I knew all the chaplains in our hospital and I came to know many other chaplains in the community. I knew people of the same religion, but some of them were much more universal, much more believing in a God of love or a God that is certainly beyond our concept to “pigeon hole.”

“...in spirituality, your whole life becomes mindful.”

“When we’re highly stressed, or something bad happens...we tend to regress to the beliefs of our childhood.”

“...the worst stress of all is to think that you have disappointed God...and there’s no hope for you.”



○

○

○

How, after all, as human beings could we possibly name the absolute? How could we know those qualities? There were people like that versus people who were very literal - God is this way or that way and won’t forgive.

I would send my patients on to have consults with these chaplains who I considered true spiritual beings and I found that very, very important.

But we spent a lot of sessions together and I know a lot of psychologists…or other forms of therapists who don’t feel comfortable discussing matters of faith. They don’t feel comfortable discussing matters of religion. So I think it’s very

important if a practitioner is not comfortable discussing these things that they have somebody to refer out to because it’s very important.

One of the great sadnesses I have with many traditional therapy training programs is that they leave out these kinds of questions about God.

Dr. Buczynski: So how would you language that? What would you say if you were working with a patient?

Dr. Borysenko: First of all, I would certainly ask them the question if they are ill - if they are looking to harvest the meaning from their life, which I think we do, if we have a life-threatening illness. The big questions come right up: why was I born? What was I supposed to do here? Was there a purpose to fulfill? What is it to be a good human being?

I would say to them, “This is really a time when we harvest the wisdom of our lifetime. Talk to me about the wisdom.” I would open up the container to say, “What are your ideas? What do you think happens when you die?” Some people are very much at peace with that. They have very particular ideas. Some are not.

So I would follow that thread as it organically unfolds. This, for me, as a therapist, has been one of the greatest privileges of my life: to bear witness to this kind of retrospection of a lifetime and its meaning.

How To Recognize Burnout

Dr. Buczynski: We don’t have a lot of time left, but I want to spend just a little bit of time thinking about burnout. For me, it’s a spiritual issue because it comes right back to the whole idea of how we treat ourselves and whether or not we take care of ourselves.

First, can we just talk about burnout a little bit? How can we recognize if that’s something that we have?

Dr. Borysenko: It’s a very good question, and I’ll do that by reviewing a little bit of the work of Christina Maslach who is a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkley. She is the one who published and validated the Maslach Burnout Inventory. I think it includes 22 items, but there are three scales and these are the scales that measure burnout…

“...many traditional therapy training programs...leave out questions about God.”

“...one of the greatest privileges of my life has been to bear witness to the retrospection of a lifetime and its meaning.”



○

○

○

On the first scale are questions that look at emotional exhaustion and physical depletion. If you’re feeling emotionally exhausted, if listening to one more story will put you into overwhelm, and if you’re feeling physically depleted, you may, in fact, be burning out.

I would add to that the stress-related symptoms. They’re having trouble sleeping, for example, or substance abuse. Do you now need half a bottle of wine to feel comfortable at night or are you abusing prescription drugs or marijuana?

It’s only human nature, when you’re miserable, to try to make yourself feel better and that’s a definitive symptom of burnout - that emotional exhaustion, physical depletion, and trying to make yourself feel better.

A second set of symptoms for burnout have to do with loss of empathy. Christina Maslach calls it depersonalization and in order to really be a good practitioner, whether you’re an acupuncturist, a therapist, or whatever it is that you’re doing, you have to have that capacity for empathy.

Dan Siegel calls it mindsight - to be able to look at your own self, look into somebody else empathetically, and really sense what’s going on there.

With burnout, you lose all that. It’s like when your patient cancels and you jump for joy. You know, “Oh-oh! It’s starting in.” Sometimes people call that compassion fatigue, but compassion fatigue is a little different. Compassion fatigue is actually secondary post-traumatic stress disorder that you get from hearing too many difficult stories, but it can burn you out. That’s part of that.

The third kind of symptom of burnout is that you just think the quality of your work has gone down. You don’t feel the kind of mastery that you once did; your productivity is low.

Those are the three major constellations and there are 12 stages to burnout that where identified in the 1970’s by two psychologists: Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North.

Of course, Ruth, we all know that nobody ever goes through all the stages of anything and they’re never orderly, but it starts with simply working too hard, not taking time off. You have to unplug.

Everybody should have at least one day a week. That’s what Sabbath as about - to refresh yourself, to feel connected to family, to friends, to nature, to the things that rejuvenate us. Without that, life just loses its savor and we start to burn out.

I unplug regularly for at least two days a week and sometimes in between and it’s the absolute of what I need to rejuvenate.

Another aspect of burnout, other than working too hard, is something you mentioned. We start not to take care of ourselves: “Uh-oh, when’s the last time I had my teeth cleaned?” or “Gosh, I need to have my hair

“...if listening to one more story will put you into overwhelm and you’re feeling physically depleted, you may be burning out.”

“A second set of symptoms for burnout have to do with loss of empathy.”

“The third symptom of burnout is that you just think the quality of your work has gone down.”

“You should have at least one day a week...to refresh yourself...”



○

○

○

done. It’s looking ragged. I’ve just been so busy that I didn’t get to it.” Or “I really need some acupuncture or massage. I can feel it, but I’m last on my own list.”

That’s what another stage of burnout can be. As you start to lose your values, you’re really in trouble. So, for example, if being with your family was a prime value and there’s no time for them, you’ve got trouble.

As you can imagine, you start to develop physical symptoms, emotional symptoms possibly, abuse dependence on drugs or substances or even sex. It ends up in something that very much resembles depression: you lose your motivation and you lose your savor for life.

I would say that it’s a spiritual crisis because when we define spirituality all of those good things - gratitude and forgiveness and joy and peace and just the juiciness of life, all that goes missing and you’re dry.

So, I would say that it’s the greatest crisis of all for any professional. It’s a true, dark night of the soul - that feeling of being fried, being burned out.

Any dark night of the soul contains within it the seeds of transformation. When you recognize your life is not sustainable in the way that you’re living it, then hopefully the result of burning out is that you actually begin to live in a much more joyful, mindful, juicy way that I call heaven on earth.

Dr. Buczynski: Good! Thank you. I’m afraid we’re out of time. To everyone on the call, we’ll have a TalkBack Segment soon, so stay tuned for that.

We’ll be sending you an email and in that email you will be given the links to Joan’s books on Amazon. You can look them up and there might be some that you would recommend even to your patients.

We’ll also give you a link to the Comment Board. This is our community comment board, our community dial-on board. Please go there and talk about what stood out to you tonight. How are you going to use what you heard? When you do, please put in your first and your last name, your occupation and your city or state or country and talk about how you’re going to use what you heard tonight.

Joan, thank you so much. As always, thanks for being here, for being my friend, and being a friend to so many of us. Thank you for all of your wisdom and for all of those years when you were one of the pioneers working with those with AIDS. Thank you for your courage!

Dr. Borysenko: Thank you! Thank you so much Ruth. I love having this opportunity.

Dr. Buczynski: To everyone, take good care and goodnight, and to Joan, a special goodnight to you.

“...the greatest crisis for any professional...is feeling fried, being burned out.”

“When you recognize that your life is not sustainable as it is...then the result of burnout can be to live in a much more joyful, mindful, juicy way...”



○

○

○

TalkBack Segment with Joan Borysenko, PhD and Bill O’Hanlon, LMFT

Ruth Buczynski: We’re going to start the TalkBack Segment now. I always look forward to this in every series, and I know that more and more people, as they’re getting used to having it, are also finding this to be very, very valuable.

For this series, we have two people on our TalkBack Segment. First, I’d like to introduce Dr. Joan Borysenko. She’s a licensed psychologist and author of many, many books. I’m going to pick this, Fire in the Soul, as possibly the one that might be the most relevant to this series although you could say that’s debatable.

Also, Bill O’Hanlon is here with us and he’s the author of many, many books, and The Change Your Life Book might be most relevant for this series. So, welcome to both of you - it’s good to be back with you again!

Bill O’Hanlon: Thanks, I’m excited.

Joan Borysenko: Thank you!

Ruth Buczynski: This might be a bit awkward, Joan, because you were on one of the calls that we’re going to be talking about and asking - What did you think of the call? Did you agree with this speaker…?

But let’s jump in and start with the usual question: What stood out to you in the call?

Bill O’Hanlon: Do you want me to go first? I’ve always said that Joan can talk about the practical side of anything so I know her comments on her own call will give us more to think about.

But what stood out for me really as I was listening and watching this call is that I think both Joan and I have had a similar path, in that I learned (the basics) in school, but my clients and my patients have taught me the most.

In my own life, there’s been that combination – what my training taught me and what I’ve heard from my clients and patients – what they’ve taught me. I think that’s what you were talking about, Joan, when you were telling about your experiences with the AIDS patients - when that disease first emerged. That experience just led you in a certain direction…

Those extreme circumstances that our clients sometimes bring to us can teach us the most even though, when we’re students, we’re afraid that someone’s going to come in with something really serious and we’re going to mess it up. But it’s really from those people that we probably learn the most.

Joan Borysenko: That’s absolutely true, Bill. I think I was just so amazed the first time that I got that consult that I talked about - the young lawyer who wanted a peace of mind consult and the psychiatry department called and said, “We don’t have anybody here who knows anything about peace of mind. You work with Herb Benson. You guys know something about meditation. Can you come and be with him?”

I remember what it was like for me to say, “How can I go and be with someone who’s facing death like this when we know nothing about AIDS? I don’t have any advice that I can give him.”

“Those extreme circumstances that our clients sometimes bring to us can teach us the most...”



○

○

○

I will always remember learning from this particular person because I sat with him; I sat by his bedside. It was such a beautiful lesson that it’s your presence that’s healing, not what you have to say. You don’t have to be smart; you don’t have to guide the conversation.

If you can come into your own center of peace, then you can learn from whatever the situation is, and what’s most appropriate can flow through you because you’ve now connected with that person soul-to-soul.

Learning that lesson has taken a lot of the fear away, and I find that when you’re not relating to someone out of fear – “Oh, I don’t know anything about spirituality and what’s the right thing to say” – and relating by just being present, life simply uses you to its best advantage.

Ruth Buczynski: So Bill, Joan brought up the issue that some people think that their illness is their fault or that the illness is God being mad at them. Have you any ideas on how to heal that narrative?

Bill O’Hanlon: I was really relating to what Joan said because I’ve had some people tell me that same thing about psychological, emotional or mental illnesses as well as physical illnesses. What I start with is not the leap of, “Oh, stop blaming yourself - it’s not your fault” because they usually don’t buy that.

Instead, what I pitch at first is this: “Let’s just move up to I don’t know and you don’t know – let’s just be neutral. Let’s not go to the negative side or the positive side.”

I think there was a book called Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich some years ago that was criticizing this kind of positive thinking in America. She was complaining that when she got sick, everyone was saying, “You’ve got to think positively!” Now, a lot of our patients, clients, are not thinking positively. They’re thinking negatively - they’re self-blaming.

So I try to just get them up to, “I don’t know…Let’s just go neutral on that.” I think that’s progress.

Ruth Buczynski: Joan, you said that after the Dark Night, there is some liminal time (the threshold between previous and new) where you can either despair or transform. What are some ways that you could help our patients with transforming?

Joan Borysenko: Liminal time is much under appreciated. I think that we’re all in it!

Ruth Borysenko: It’s the same for us and patients alike. Liminal time is when something in our life has crashed and we haven’t yet made it to the next station. We’re in a time of transition - that’s where most of us live.

It’s very important to break that transitional time down. I think what’s most important is simply that I don’t know attitude that Bill just talked about. Let’s not jump to meanings. “Is this positive? Is this negative? Was I given this as some kind of challenge by the universe to evolve?” Forget it!

“It was such a beautiful lesson - it’s your presence that is healing, not what you have to say.”

“...by just being present, life simply uses you to its best advantage.”

“Let’s just move to: I don’t know and you don’t know - let’s just be neutral.”



○

○

○

The fact is, this is where you are and if you can be simply patient - and that’s a really big word - open to what’s unfolding without prematurely giving it a valence, that’s very, very important, and we’re really not taught to be patient.

So I work with myself and other people on just that: How can we be present to life as it unfolds especially without prematurely wanting closure?

If you’re sick, for example, you want to race right through liminal time and be well and have your life be just what it was before, but that precludes transformation because the idea is you’re going to be different. The life that you return to is going to be different. You’re going to have new eyes!

We can just gently ask people questions…that get to answers about this is where I want to get to or this is what I want to do. These are questions that would help them just let go, slow down, be patient with life as it unfolds, and that is very important.

It’s also very important, I think, to help people to identify mentors and allies in the process of transformation. For example, and you know this Bill, with alcoholics - if you go back to the bar and you hang out with the same friends, you’re going to get the same results.

So, you have to change - you have to recognize the difference between an enemy and an ally and work toward

being with people who are nurturing to be with. That’s a very big thing for people to take a look at and to say, “What’s the company I’m keeping with other people and with myself?

Ruth Buczynski: Bill, here’s another thing that I want to ask you about. Joan talked about pessimistic people - people with pessimistic attitudes. They’re more likely to become helpless. We know that from Marty Seligman’s research on learned helplessness and how that kind of pessimism can have an effect on their health. Do you have some thoughts on how we can help or other exercises that we could recommend or interventions that we could use that would help patients to reduce pessimism?

Bill O’Hanlon: You know, Marty Seligman admits - he confesses that he’s sort of a pessimistic person. He’s kind of cranky, negative, by nature and he said, “Once I learned this research, I got a little worried about that and started applying these ideas that we learned through research.” These are simple things to do.

The one, very simple one, is the Oprah strategy: every night, or every morning if you want to do it that way, you list three things that you’re grateful for.

He’s found that if you do this just for a few weeks and develop a habit of doing it, you develop a habit of doing more optimistic, positive kinds of practices like sending a gratitude letter to somebody that you’ve never thanked. If you do it for six months, it becomes even more powerful.

“If you’re sick, you want to race right through liminal time... and have your life be just what it was before, but that precludes transformation...”

“It’s also very important...to help people identify mentors and allies in the process of transformation.”

“...if you...develop a habit of doing more optimistic, positive kinds of practices...there are corresponding changes in your depression levels and your health.”



○

○

○

If you practice these things for weeks, your place on that scale of pessimism to optimism moves up and then hopefully there are those corresponding changes in your depression levels and your health. It’s good for the immune system.

Ruth Buczynski: Here’s the last thing that I guess I want to get into, Joan. You said that being a realist might be more beneficial actually than being an optimist, at least beneficial for your health. How can we help people, our patients, and even ourselves, approach the struggles and challenges that we have with a realistic attitude?

Joan Borysenko: I think it’s the art of being present to what’s really true for you in the moment. For example, if somebody says to me, “I’m really frightened,” it doesn’t behoove me to tell them why they shouldn’t be frightened.

The question really is one of inquiry to say to them, “All right, you’re frightened. Tell me about being frightened. Where is it in your body? As you just breathe and you’re present to the feelings of being frightened, what actually comes up for you?”

Usually two things will happen. One of them is that people will heave a sigh of relief because they know you’re a safe person and they can be real with you. They can tell you what’s happening and you will continue to just allow them to process that - to feel into that.

Almost always what will happen is that they’ll be some sort of a breakthrough, a moving through of the fear and the fright, or the difficulty that they were experiencing and there will be a sense of, “Oh, I’ve had an insight or I’m not frightened anymore or I’m feeling peaceful now.” That feeling can be said in many different ways.

That’s a tremendous skill of transformation - to be able to be present to what is, completely realistic with what is - and not to think that you have to change it. As you were saying, Bill, Barbara Ehrenreich has a great book, Bright-Sided. It doesn’t help to pretend that everything’s fine when it isn’t.

Ruth Buczynski: I’m afraid that we’re out of time already. That seemed to go by so quickly.

Everyone on the call, I’ll be sending you an email shortly and that will have a link to the Comment Board and also a link to all of Joan’s books as the author, as the person that we interviewed this week.

In a couple of hours, I will be sending you a link if you’re a Gold Member to the call, both the video and the audio, and by Friday, I’ll send you the transcript.

If you’re not a Gold Member, you can sign up right below and get in and you’ll get that later in just a few hours just like the other Gold Members.

There is a special bonus that we’re giving and it ends tonight at midnight so if you’re going to sign up for a Gold Membership do it now and that way you’ll get that too!

“...people will heave a sigh of relief because they know you’re a safe person and they can be real with you.”

“A tremendous skill of transformation is being present to what is...and not thinking that you have to change it.”



○

○

○

Next week, my guest will be Rachel Remen, and we’re going to be confronting a pretty challenging topic and that is the unknown.

We’re going to be looking at the importance of mystery in medicine and dealing with the unknown and how so many of us, because we come from a science practice background, we like to get rid of the unknown, but with the unknown, first of all, it’s impossible to do that, and second, the unknown offers a lot of fruitfulness.

So that’s next week - you won’t want to miss that session with Rachel Remen.

Take good care everyone and to the two of you, goodnight and I’ll see you next week!

Bill O’Hanlon: Thanks Ruth!

Joan Borysenko: Goodnight Ruth! Bye everybody.



○

○

○

About The Speaker:

Joan Z. Borysenko, PhD, has been described as a respected scientist, gifted therapist, and unabashed mystic. Trained at Harvard Medical School, she was an instructor in medicine until 1988.

Currently the President of Mind/Body Health Sciences, Inc., she is an internationally known speaker and consultant in women’s health and spirituality, integrative medicine and the mind/body connection. Joan also has a regular 2 to 3 page column she writes in Prevention every month. She is the author of nine books, including New York Times bestsellers.

Find out more about this and related programs at: www.nicabm.com

Featured Books by Speaker: Joan Borysenko, PhD

Minding the Body, Mending the Mind

Click HEREto Purchase Now!

Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive

Click HEREto Purchase Now!

http://www.nicabm.com/?loc=deccon09a/presenters/&menu=presenters&bot=1&top=30&speaker=Bill_O%27Hanlon,_LMFT

http://www.nicabm.com

http://www.amazon.com/Minding-Body-Mending-Mind-Borysenko/dp/0738211168/ref%3Dsr_1_1%3Fs%3Dbooks%26ie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1341584150%26sr%3D1-1%26keywords%3Dminding%2Bthe%2Bbody%2Bmending%2Bthe%2Bmind

http://www.amazon.com/Fried-Why-You-Burn-Revive/dp/1401925510/ref%3Dsr_1_1%3Fie%3DUTF8%26qid%3D1341584082%26sr%3D8-1%26keywords%3Dfried%253A%2Bwhy%2Byou%2Bburn%2Bout%2Band%2Bhow%2Bto%2Brevive



○

○

○

About The TalkBack Speakers:

See bio on previous page

Bill O'Hanlon, LMFT, is a dynamic, inspirational speaker and prolific author (over 30 books so far) who helps motivate people and organizations to determine what they are meant to be doing and to remove the barriers to succeeding at those goals.

Originally trained as a psychotherapist, Bill has become known for his collaborative and respectful approach, irreverent humor, storytelling, clear and accessible presentation style, and his infectious enthusiasm for whatever he is doing. He teaches seminars, leads trainings, writes books, coaches people and offers websites, podcasts, blogs, web-based courses, teleclasses and audio and video programs.

Since 1989, Ruth has combined her commitment to mind/body medicine with a savvy business model. As president of The National Institute for the Clinical Application for Behavioral Medicine, she’s been a leader in bringing innovative training and professional development programs to thousands of health and mental health care practitioners throughout the world.

Successfully sponsoring distance-learning programs and annual conferences for over 20 years, she’s now expanded into the “cloud.” During the past 4 years, she’s developed intelligent and thoughtfully researched teleseminars, and most recently webinars, which continue to grow exponentially.



fire in the soul â€“ positive spiritual practices for healing

Documents