CMBM's Program Acknowledgement

A Message from The Center for Mind-Body Medicine’s Founder and Executive Director, James S. Gordon, MD

Welcome to you All 

We come together in this training in a time of crisis, a time that the Chinese written character tells us is one of both danger and opportunity. This crisis, this pandemic which has devastated our planet, has brought death and loss into all of our lives. Virtually everyone has felt unsettled and uncertain. On far more days than usual, many of us have been depressed and anxious, irritable and sleep-deprived. And because of the limitations that this crisis has imposed on us, we have sometimes been lonely as well as isolated, and are only able in this training to be with each other virtually.

This pandemic has brought us a heightened awareness of our individual vulnerability. The disproportionate numbers of deaths of people of color from COVID-19 is confronting us with the significantly greater vulnerability of those people who have suffered from historical injustices and inequities. Our growing understanding of this historical trauma is summoning us to recognize and reckon with its causes as well as its consequences: the genocidal dispossession of indigenous people from the ancestral lands on which we now live, the soul-destroying legacy of slavery and economic exploitation, and the persistence of fear and hatred toward and ignorance of those who are different from us.

The calamities so many of us have endured, the challenges we’ve had to meet, and the threats to which we’ve become far more sensitive are also giving us the opportunity to learn more deeply about the ways we and our ancestors have suffered, and perhaps also caused suffering; see ourselves more clearly; to recognize, address, and heal the wounds of collective as well as individual oppression.

We come together in this training informed by a growing, hopeful understanding that our planet’s wisdom traditions have offered us, that this time of crisis, of collective trauma, gives us the opportunity to reconsider our values and actions and that it can open the door to individual and collective healing and transformation.

In this training, we will go inside ourselves to discover and consult with our own inner wisdom; we will share what we’re learning and learn from what every other person shares; and we will likely discover, along with the surprise of our similarities, the wonder of our differences. We will, as well, be preparing ourselves to better help and heal all those whom we serve.

This is the path to which we at The Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM) are committed. It is also an ancient, indeed an Aboriginal, way, a path of individual transformation, of commitment to connection and to caring for one another.

We are in debt to ancestors who walked this path and wound its lessons into our DNA. When we come together in the small group circles of sharing and communion that are the heart of this training, we are living the lessons of our planet’s indigenous people. And, like them, we are committed to learning to live in harmony with ourselves and one another, to discovering a deeper connection between our own human nature and the natural world which lives within us and sustains us.

The tools and techniques we teach in this program—among them slow, deep breathing; shaking and dancing; images we invite and drawings and genograms we create—are modern versions of the world’s wisdom instruments. Instruments that generous indigenous people on every continent have taught us to enjoy and use, that the physicians and healers of traditional Chinese, Indian, and Greek medicine have shared, and that sages and healers who are not easily gendered have brought from the edges of their communities to the center of our lives. 

Over the last thirty years, we at CMBM have learned to use these tools and techniques and to explore and support them with research and the results of that research. We continue to learn to live the healing truths and synergy of this new marriage between modern science and ancient wisdom, between understanding and caring for ourselves and sharing ourselves and what we’re discovering with each other.

Here and now, we joyfully commit ourselves to honoring each person who has come to this training. We commit ourselves to discovering, delighting in, and learning from our differences, and also to celebrating our commonalities. We know that each of us is, above all else, simply human, and that in both sorrow and joy we are all, as indigenous people have long told us, related to one another.

Best,
Jim