Trauma-informed medicine and spirituality, IFS, and how relationships impact your health
We've heard that the body keeps the score, the body bears the burden, the body says no if we can't - and so forth. But what if the body is more like a portal, a gateway, a threshold we can choose to step over and walk through, a trailhead to a path we can choose to walk down with curiosity? What if our bodies can help us gain insight, wisdom, and healing knowledge about our lives, our relationships, and the state of the ecosystem within which our bodies live?
As a physician, Internal Family Systems (IFS) practitioner and teacher, author of 7 books, and radical remission researcher specializing in trauma-informed medicine and spirituality as it relates to the body, my intention is to offer grounded hope, inspiration, food for thought, sacred inquiries, embodiment and trauma healing practices and tools, and opportunities for crowd-sourcing big problems in medicine, therapy, and spirituality. Some of what we co-create together may be used by a center at Harvard to help support improving care for chronically ill trauma survivors and those who struggle with mental illness. Your wisdom is welcomed and needed here, not just as an observer but as a voice for helping me and others understand how to better support healing in the world.
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About Lissa Rankin, MD
Lissa is a conventionally trained OB/GYN physician who gave up clinical practice in 2010 to teach and write full time.
She has published 7 books, including the New York Times bestseller Mind Over Medicine and her latest book, Sacred Medicine, which talks extensively about the spiritual bypassing tendencies in the world of New Age spirituality and energy healing, while ferreting out spiritual and trauma healing practices that actually help.
Lissa has starred in two National Public Television specials, her TEDx talks have been viewed over 5 million times, and she leads workshops, both online and at retreat centers like Esalen, 1440, Omega, and Kripalu.
Lissa also founded the Whole Health Medicine Institute, where she and a team of luminary faculty train physicians and other healthcare providers about “Whole Health,” the “6 Steps to Healing Yourself,” and the importance of healing trauma as a necessary adjunct to any conventional medical treatment in patients with chronic or life-threatening illness.
Her latest project is Heal At Last, a non-profit project committed to addressing the health equity issues around cutting-edge trauma healing and trauma-informed medicine, which is often a luxury good not available to those who need it most.
Lissa lives bi-coastally, part-time in the San Francisco Bay Area with her daughter Mira, her housemate April, and her puppy Gaia and part-time in Boston with her partner Jeffrey Rediger.
For more, visit www.lissarankin.com.
