For today’s show, I had the unbelievable good fortune to interview Dr. Joan Borysenko. This woman has incredible credentials including a magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr College in 1967; a doctorate in Medical Sciences from the Harvard Medical School, where she completed post-doctoral training in cancer cell biology and a faculty position at the Tufts University College of Medicine in Boston.

After the death of her father from cancer, she became more interested in the person with the illness than in the disease itself, and returned to Harvard Medical School to complete a second postdoctoral fellowship, this time in the new field of behavioral medicine. Under the tutelage of Herbert Benson, M.D., who first identified the relaxation response and brought meditation into medicine, she was awarded a Medical Foundation Fellowship and completed her third post-doctoral fellowship in psychoneuroimmunology (the study of the interaction between psychological processes and the nervous and immune systems of the human body). In the early 1980’s she co-founded a Mind/Body clinic with Dr. Benson and Dr. Ilan Kutz, became licensed as a psychologist, and was appointed instructor in medicine at the Harvard Medical School.

Her years of clinical experience and research culminated in the 1987 publication of the New York Times best seller, Minding the Body, Mending the Mind, which sold over 400,000 copies.  Author or co-author of 13 other books and numerous audio and video programs, including the Public Television special Inner Peace for Busy People, she is the Founding Partner of Mind/Body Health Sciences, LLC located in Boulder, Colorado and the Director of The Claritas Institute Interspiritual Mentor Training Program.

Whew!! Right?!?

I met her when I attended a workshop she was presenting called Writing Down the Light, at the Kripalu Meditation Center in Massachusetts, which was about  transforming pain and trauma and loss into healing. She was SUCH an interesting and hilarious and empathic and smart speaker, that I decided to ask her if she’d do an interview and to my amazement she agreed! In this show is some of what she has to say about mental health, mental illness and stigma in our culture. I’m honored that she took the time to speak with me and hope you’ll find her words as moving and inspiring as I do!

Listen now:

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