Dave Kopacz & Chris Smith are joined founder and president of The Doctor as a Humanist – Jonathan McFarland. Chris joins us from a visit to the Driftless Area of Wisconsin (which Jonathan uses as a metaphor for a sense of loss of humanity in contemporary society – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driftless_Area), Dave speaks from his home in Seattle, and Jonathan joins from Mallorca, Spain.
Jonathan gives a brief history of himself as a human being, growing up in Liverpool, UK, surrounded by medicine and the arts. He describes how when his father, a surgeon, had a heart attack and was in the hospital, he had the idea of starting The Doctor as a Humanist (DASH). Jonathan has reached hundreds and thousands of students, educators, doctors, and other health care professionals through DASH. Jonathan clarifies that when he speaks of “doctors,” he means that broadly, to include all in health care – as doctor comes from the root docere, to teach.
We talk about what it means to be a humanist and why medicine needs re-humanizing. We jokingly define a humanist as someone who can’t answer a yes or no question without offering a quote from the arts or literature. They also speak of the possibility that when one is speaking of numbers and quantitative paradigms – the human is not present. Being a Humanist (and Becoming a True Human) are about values, compassion, and interpersonal connection.
Jonathan offers a definition of a humanist, “someone who cares about what is happening in the world around them and cares about the cultures” and the Earth. He touches upon the meanings of dignity and responsibility.
Jonathan mentions a book by Robert McFarlane, The Gift, which is “about the importance of giving books to others.”
We speak of and quote: John Berger, Bob Dylan, Martin Buber, Philip K. Dick, the Greek philosophers, Descartes, Spinoza, Gavin Francis, and many others.
Chris offers the quote from Buber, “All real living is meeting,” which feels like a good description of this incredible meeting between the three speakers today.
Dave and Chris talk about how illness can be a call to creativity. Chris starts out with a story of learning from a young cancer patient. We talk about how illness can break down the everyday mindset, or horizontal, material focus and introduce a vertical, or spiritual dimension in life. To make this shift requires an openness to creativity and also allowing inspiration, grace, or a sense of a gift to be received. This gift of creativity can then be shared with others. We talk about the lives and creative processes of Philip K. Dick and Carl G. Jung. As always, Chris and Dave share stories, humor, ideas, and books. Dave closes with a Daniel Ladinsky rendering of a Hafiz poem, “To Build a Swing.”
To Build a Swing You carry All the ingredients To turn your life into a nightmare─ Don’t mix them! You have all the genius To build a swing in your backyard For God. That sounds Like a hell of a lot more fun. Let’s start laughing, drawing blueprints, Gathering our talented friends. I will help you. With my divine lyre and drum. Hafiz Will sing a thousand words, You can take into your hands, Like golden saws, Sliver hammers, Polished teakwood, Strong silk rope. You carry all the ingredients To turn your existence into joy, Mix them, mix Them!
Hafiz, “To Build a Swing,” Translated/Rendered by Daniel Ladinsky, The Gift, p. 48
Dave Kopacz & Chris Smith talk about different ways of transforming pain into passion in a discussion ranging from the poetry of Mirabai, the life and teachings of St. Francis, creating pockets of positivity, building caring communities, taking charge of your story, Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby, making sure our actions are motivated by caring and uncaring, how fear can be the first shift from caring to a slippery slope of uncaring, and lastly noodling as a metaphor for life.
We offer a range of things that you can do right now to do something positive and shift from shock to action: reading and sharing quotes, different writing practices, building community, finding any of the “hundred objects close by” that can “cure sadness,” and canning tomatoes or apricots. Remember, “Don’t waste your suffering” and let’s all work at creating reservoirs of goodness – we are going to need them!
One more thing you can do positive, right now – go to the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation and contact congrees to reauthorize the Lorna Breeen Act to improve health care worker well-being and to prevent suicide https://drlornabreen.org/reauthorizelba/
A Hundred Objects Close By
Mirabai (translated by Daniel Landinsky)
I know a cure for sadness: Let your hands touch something that makes your eyes smile.
I bet there are a hundred objects close by that can do that.
Look at beauty’s gift to us─ her power is so great she enlivens the earth, the sky, our soul.
Chris Smith and David Kopacz discuss the rewards and pitfalls of practice in yoga, meditation, writing, and life.
Sometimes practice clears a space where imperfections and flaws are seen. We are tempted to try to eliminate those specks of dust and scratches on our window, but accepting our imperfections may actually be the real part of practice. Practice is about reconnecting to our True Humanity, our inner held-back place of goodness, our source of love, compassion, and caring – and we may only reach these through suffering and imperfection.
For instance, we explore the Sanskrit term, samvega, which Stephen Cope describes as “complex state involving disillusionment with mundane life, and a wholehearted longing for a deeper investigation into the inner workings of the mind and self,” (The Wisdom of Yoga, 13).
Or as Karlfried Graf Dürckheim wrote in his book The Way of Transformation: Daily Life as Spiritual Practice, “Thus the aim of practice is not to develop an attitude which allows us to acquire a state of harmony and peace wherein nothing can ever trouble us. On the contrary, practice should teach us to let ourselves be assaulted, perturbed, moved, insulted, broken and battered” (107).
Chris and Dave discuss their own struggles with chronic illness/ongoing medical symptoms and the difficult work of turning personal illness and suffering into fuel for personal growth work.
We talk about:
using suffering as a spiritual practice
cleaning the windshield
“The Garden,” a reading from Chris’ next book, Hope Opens Doors
a workshop Chris is putting on in February, “Chronic Illness & Love”
Sean Mackey’s work on love & pain
finding inner calm and strength, even within chaos & suffering
Makransky & Condon’s Sustainable Compassion Training
making practices creative and fresh
the work of Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow)
spanda – the divine creative pulsation
practice does not make perfekt
being capable of suffering may make us more capable of joy
the benefits of practice are not only for us, but are fully realized when we share with others and the Earth
practice is caring for ourselves and others
We close with a couple of practices, one from Dave’s book, Caring for Self & Others and short one from Chris Smith.
We have video links on YouTube and audio links on Spotify, here is the link to all episodes:
Spiritual Democracy episode 5 of Becoming a True Human podcast with Chris Smith and Dave Kopacz is now available!
Ideas for finding micro-compassion breaks for self & others during these turbulent times.
Chris Smith facilitates a discussion with Dave Kopacz on the concept of Spiritual Democracy, which is a chapter from Dave’s book with Joseph Rael: Becoming Medicine. Spiritual Democracy asks each of us, citizens and politicians alike, to ask ourselves before speaking any words or taking any actions: “Am I starting with the heart? Am I using words to divide or to invite togetherness?”
We talk about Steven Hermann’s books, Spiritual Democracy and Walt Whitman: Shamanism, Spiritual Democracy, and the World Soul. We also discuss Parker Palmer’s Healing the Heart of Democracy and his idea of the two ways that the heart can break: 1) it can break apart, creating shards and wounds in self and others, or 2) it can break open into greater compassion. Chris also brings up Frank Ostaseski’s Five Invitations to be present with ourselves and others in the moment, opening up into fearless receptivity and continuous discovery of our lives during these turbulent times.
We offer practices for doing the work of Spiritual Democracy, including finding space within each breath for micro-compassion for your self and for others.
We hope you enjoy our fourth podcast episode, this one exploring hope.
Chris Smith and Dave Kopacz speak about Chris’ forthcoming book, Hope Opens Doors. As we open one door of hope after another, we discuss the words of Vaclav Havel, Thomas Merton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Rebecca Solnit, and F. Scott Fizgerald.
We talk about hope as a door that opens into rooms of new experience as well as the risk of being “imprisoned” in a room without a door, or a room that refuse to leave and are stagnating in. Yet, there is also the risk of opening the door too much, or opening Pandora’s Box.
Chris tells the following story about hope:
Thomas Merton, the writer and Trappist monk, is sometimes credited with saying, “Peace is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.” If this quote is accurate, it reflects an important insight about hope, too. That is, hope is a “deepening” in the present, if we can be and listen long enough. It’s there. When Pandora was presented with a box and told not to open it, she, of course, removed the lid, releasing suffering and misery throughout the world. When the lid was finally secured, all that remained was hope.
And Chris read a little bit from his book, Hope Opens Doors:
As I was reflecting on this, our grandson, Angelo, was at our home. In the afternoon, we decided to take a walk. Angelo saw a rabbit in a neighbor’s yard and chased it. We ran through shrubs, bushes, and parts of my neighbor’s yard I’d never seen. The rabbit remained out of reach. It was frustrating. As I reflected on this later in the day, a question emerged: why is it the things that matter most often seem out of reach—like a rabbit? And, while it is true for rabbits, it seemed to apply to so many other things, too. For example, peace really matters and yet is out of reach. Health really matters and I recently had my appendix removed.
Hope, then, is often out of reach.
However, this isn’t the final answer. It is partial. Can you guess what’s missing? Though Angelo and I weren’t successful at catching the rabbit, there was, at least, a rabbit. We saw it. This point is often missed. Though peace is often out of reach, there is peace. Though health is sometimes out of reach, health exists. Peace, health, and rabbits. They exist. Just because we can’t contain them when we want doesn’t mean they do not exist.
Hope, then, is often simultaneously out of reach and present. Further, pursuing hope, though we may never be able to hold it in our hands or completely realize it, can still lead to adventure and self-understanding. I would have never seen different parts of my neighbor’s yard if it weren’t for that rabbit and an energetic two-year-old. Angelo and I discovered we like the challenge of chasing something that captures our curiosity. We learned both of us love navigating obstacles like shrubs and bushes. We also learned the rabbit was far better equipped to outrun and escape our best efforts.
Chris spoke about how the inspiration and title for his book came from a dream where he heard the phrase “Hope opens doors.” We then explored how sudden inspirations (as Havel says that hope is “anchored somewhere beyond the horizons” and that it comes to us from “elsewhere,” [Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 181]). I share how this idea of inspiration in the creative process reminded me of Kermit the Frog! I’m working on a book chapter with the working title, “Greening Medicine: The Role of the Medical Humanities,” and I suddenly remembered the Kermit the Frog song, “Bein’ Green,” and its line, “It’s not easy being green.” This song then provided the template for the beginning and end of the book chapter.
We include a guided meditation inspired by Joseph Rael’s teaching that no matter what you do in life, or what is done to you, that Wah-Mah-Chi (the Tiwa word for God, which he translates as Breath-Matter-Movement) holds back a place of goodness in your heart – which is always there, even if you have lost touch with it.
Hope, Chris says, is an “orthogonal perspective,” that to understand hope, we need to look at it from multiple different perspectives. While I agree with Chris on this, I told him that I have always thought that hope was “ornithological!” As this excerpt from Emily Dickinson’s poem, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”
“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers– That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops–at all–”
We hope that you enjoy this podcast on hope, it went longer than we hoped it would, but maybe we are in a time where we all need a little more hope.
This next podcast is one from the archives – a conversation with my friend Jonathan McFarland (president of the Doctor as a Humanist) from July 29, 2023.
Jonathan and I have been comparing our KU (Kopacz Units) & MU (McFarland Units) as both of us have worked our way through phases of health and illness. I can tell that I was not feeling very well during this interchange, it was about a month after I started going back to work, after 2.5 months off for illness, and I was still quite fatigued.
We discuss wide-ranging array of topics, as usual, including:
holding our own
flourishing and thriving (or the lack thereof)
is health is more than the absence of disease?
the work of Doctor as a Humanist
shaking and quaking
the counter-curriculum
listening to the body
lost in the wilderness of the body
lost in the sterile corridors of contemporary medicine
Ivan Illich, Sir William Osler, Arthur Kleinman, CLOSLER, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Karl Marlantes
micro-invalidations in medicine
the project of science and the silencing of the human element
what it feels like to be on the receiving end of reductionistic medicine
doctors as information managers and technicans vs. healers
We close with the summary:
“Medical schools and medical education – and continuing medical education as well – are very good at taking a human being and turning them into a technician, but they’re not very good at helping that technician connect to the human being of themselves, or the patient.” (Kopacz)
I’ve been thinking about how we need to build a community of practitioners discussing the problems of burnout, compassion fatigue, and soul loss. Isolation and loneliness contribute to burnout, and social connection is an antidote to burnout. To this end, we are creating the Becoming A True Human podcast. Who is “we”? Well, for now, it is me and my good friend Chris Smith – therapist, meditation teacher, Whole Health educator, storyteller, author (Be a Good Story), founder of the Academy for Mindfulness consulting, and all-around wise guy (and I mean that in multiple senses of the phrase).
The audio of the episode 1, Lost, is at the bottom of this post.
Chris SmithDave Kopacz
What is burnout? Just what exactly is it that burns out? How can whatever is burned out be re-ignited?
What is compassion fatigue? How does compassion wear out? Should it really be called empathy fatigue? Is the problem that there is too much compassion going out? Or not enough coming in? Or could it be that institutional structures and protocols make us busy with so many things that there is little time left in the clinical encounter for caring?
What is soul loss? Could we think of the soul being the “thing” that burns out? Not necessarily in a religious or metaphysical sense – although it could be if that fits your belief system – but in a metaphorical and psychological sense. If in burnout we lose connection with our souls, how can we reconnect and either go on a quest to find our lost souls, or create a welcoming environment in our bodies and lives so that our souls can return and flourish?
I address these questions in my book, Caring for Self & Others: Transforming Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Soul Loss, but we need to have further discussions around these topics as I feel strongly that we need a kind of ongoing practice, a yoga of burnout, in which we continually work in our own practices as well as in building communities of caring to support each other with this human, all too human dilemma.
Based on the topics we discussed in the first episode we titled this episode “Lost,” even before we realized that we somehow lost video of me and only recorded video for Chris! In this episode we explore topics of burnout as an initiation into becoming a wounded healer, soul loss, yoga for the health of healers, and we end with a meditation exercise and a poem, “Lost” by David Wagoner.
We don’t really know what we are doing with the technology aspect.
Let me tell you a story that illustrates the problem.
My high school friend Jack and I drove across the country after college. We were into the beat poets and writers, reading Kerouac’s On the Road, and envisoned a trip full of excitement and philosophical observations. We had a microcassette recorder and would talk into as we were driving, having many deep discussions and creating a record of what we saw.
Somewhere around South Dakota (having left from Chicago area) I noticed that the wheels of the recorder weren’t moving when we were recording. It was then that I noticed that there was a pause switch that was clicked on and prevented any recordings from being made! All of our bits, routines, observations, and experiences were lost! We were a bit crestfallen and we made half-hearted attempt to resume recording, but something had been lost – the energy, the enthusiasm. I think we eventually gave up on it. Maybe you could say we burned out on the idea after investing so much energy and enthusiasm and not having anything to show for it.
From a mindfulness perspective, there is surely some kind of lesson here – about not being attached to goals or outcomes, about being in the present moment versus memorializing experience, and maybe even that the organizing ego is an illusionary construct for creating a reduced and more manageable limited reality (if you want to take it that far!).
Well…I remembered this story after Chris Smith and I had just had our wide-ranging and enthusiastic discussion as we recoreded it on Zoom, only to realize that I had messed up the settings and we only had Chris’ video and both our audio. Well, crestfallen again! Urgh, technology failure again!
So, I think I have figured out how to share the audio of our video podcast, rather than have video of just Chris and my disembodied voice. Titling this episode, “Lost,” was prescient as we lost the video. Chris also spoke of his caring for self routine and how he purposefully skips some days so as not to get caught up in perfectionism, performance, and productivity. We’ll consider the lost video as a sacrifice to the Divine or the Cosmos, a giveaway, in addition to it being a bumbling failure of technology.
So, welcome to the first episode of the Becoming A True Human podcast – Lost – it highlights the vulnerability and imperfection of being human, that we are all a work in progress and that our work is a yoga practice – yoking mind, emotions, body, soul. The practice of Becoming A True Human is an ongoing practice, we can only do it in the present moment and the next moment we are again lost, at sea, trying to figure it out and Keep It All Together (KIAT). We will attempt to have the next episode as video and hope to post it on the Becoming a True Human YouTube site.
I have been working on this book for ten years – the longest of any book I’ve written. In many ways it is a follow-up of Re-humanizing Medicine (2014) and yet it also is strongly influenced by my work over the past 10 years with Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow). It brings together my work on physician and staff wellness in presentations and workshops, from my work Whole Health at the VA, and my work with The Doctor as a Humanist. Re-humanizing Medicine used a 9-dimensional model of the components of being fully human: body, emotions, mind, heart, creativity, intuition, spirituality, context, and time. In Caring for Self & Others, I’ve added the dimension of Becoming Caring: Caring for All, a kind of holistic leadership for self & others. Within each of the ten different dimensions of being fully human I have developed three different domains that end in an -ing (in honor of Joseph Rael’s emphasis on verb-ing in our conversations). I’ll now give a brief review of the journey of how this book has come into being.
After publishing Re-humanizing Medicine, I realized I needed to develop a set of practices to operationalize what I called the counter-curriculum. The counter-curriculum was a humanizing curriculum, a caring for self curriculum, which focused on how we do things, not just what we do in clinical settings. If our medical education and continuing medical education (CME) trains us to be good clinicians, the counter-curriculum trains us to be good human beings – thus I came to call this Continuing Human Education (CHE). In the age-old balance of being healers and technicians, I recognized that we have really given the education of ourselves as healers short shrift, and have almost exclusively focused on becoming technicians at the expense of our humanity. The loss of our role as healers and the loss of our human presence in medicine leads not only to impoverished clinical care (with patients feeling like they are being processed by protocols rather than cared for by human beings), but it also cut us off from the rejuvenating nature of the healing relationship which nourishes our own humanity as well as the humanity of our patients and clients. I realized that to care for others we must first care for ourselves and that in caring for ourselves we were developing the skills and aptitudes necessary to care for others.
In 2015 I was developing the idea of “Becoming a Whole Person to Treat a Whole Person,” which I presented in various forms at the Australasian Doctors’ Health Conference, and conferences of the Alliance of International Aromatherapists, and the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association.
In 2016, Joseph Rael and I published Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD. That year I deveoped presenations on Healing Circles, Pathways to Healing Moral Injury, and comparing the Medicine Wheel and the Hero’s Journey as pathways of initiation and healing – with presentations at the Mayo Clinic Humanities & Medicine Symposium, and various local settings. I developed a half-day workshop called “Caring for Self: Well-Being in the Workplace” that I gave for HopeWest hospice staff in Grand Junction, CO.
In 2017 I first started using the title of “Caring for Self & Others” in presentations, for instance at Western Sydney University in Australia. I continued developing ideas around Healing Circles and the Hero’s Journey, with presentations at the Australasian Doctors’ Health Conference and the University of the South Pacific in Fiji.
One of the dimensions of being fully human from Re-humanizing Medicine was spirituality and I had a sub-section on mysticism and medicine. My work with Joseph Rael, which has resulted in the publication of four books thus far, has allowed an in-depth exploration of the role of spirituality in healing. Our 2020 publication of Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality was a blending of Joseph Rael’s teachings within a framework of initiation, a review of healing through the lives and writings of visionaries, mystics, and shamans, and a survey of the perrenial philosophy of timeless healing wisdom. My subsequent training as an iRest certified teacher (a Western adaptation of yoga nidra from Kashmiri Shaivism by psychologist Richard Miller) and as a certified yoga teacher (CYT 200), has allowed me to study and explore nondualistic states – which I feel are foundational to breaking down the barriers between self and other – a kind of nondual medicine, as I call it in Caring for Self & Others.
As I have been working with burnout for myself and in staff and clinicians, I started to realize that there were many terms for health care worker suffering, not just burnout, but compassion fatigue, secondary and vicarious traumatization, PTSD, demoralization, moral injury, and even suicide could be an outcome of the burden of caring for others. I have come to use the term the costs of caring to encompass all these different dimensions of staff and clinician suffering. My good friend Greg Serpa and I published a chapter on “Clinician Resilience” in the Integrative Medicine, 5th edition textbook and I started to bring together a number of ideas I had been working on around burnout, moral injury, and the costs of caring, and even the idea of soul loss.
Soul loss is often considered one of the causes of illness in shamanic and indigenous traditions, such as in the work of Joseph Rael. It also has a resonance with the Western traditions that psychiatry and psychotherapy grow out of. The etymology of the word “psychiatry” comes from the Greek words psyche + iatros, soul healer. The Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, frequently wrote of the psyche and also of the soul in his work as a healer and psychotherapist. The more recent, modern tradition of neglects the idea of the a vital essence of a person – yet there is a practical utility in addressing burnout as “soul loss.” In doctors and health care workers, as well as in teachers, and business, burnout is such a serious issue. We talk about burnout, but what is it that burns out? The soul is one answer – not necessarily in a metaphysical or religious sense, although it could be understood that way, but in a metaphorical and evocative way of describing what burnout and compassion fatigue feel like – that one has lost some core aspect of one’s being – a loss of soul. I gave presentations on burnout and soul loss at the Doctor as a Humanist’s on-line international conference, New Realities in the Times of COVID-19 (2020), University of Washington Psychiatry Grand Rounds (2021), and Seattle University’s Giving Voice to Experience Conference (2022).
A key idea in Caring for Self & Others is that suffering can be transformed – this is what healing is all about and this is the primary skill that a healer has, how to transform suffering. Our work as healers, doctors, technicians involves exposure to suffering, therefore we cannot eliminate suffering from our work as the very definition of our work is to engage with suffering. We can minimize the amount of collateral suffering that we experience from working in systems that do not support the full human being of clinicians and staff – that is the moral injury piece that we need to address. However, I think that burnout is inevitable when we are people who work with people, particularly people who work with suffering people. In my conversations during the pandemic, Lucy Houghton and I have been developing the idea of post-burnout growth, which is analogous to post-traumatic growth, in which we use suffering as a stimulus to personal and professional growth. Post-burnout growth captures the idea that burnout is not to be feared, but rather respected as a predictable occupational hazard – just like a firefighter working with fires is sooner or later going to get burned.
The Many Faces of Chenrezig, Image Credit: Enlightenment
The story of Chenrezig as a wounded healer captures this idea of post-burnout growth perfectly. Chenrezig vowed to alleviate all suffering in the world – which is not dissimilar to our own vows, spoken or unspoken, to heal others. If he was not successful in this vow, he pledged that he would shatter into a thousand pieces – a state akin to burnout, compassion fatigue, and soul loss, where we feel injured as a result of our caring. This is, in fact, is what happened – Chenrezig worked diligently, healing many, yet there was still more suffering than he could address and he shattered into a thousand pieces. This is where the story ends for so many health care workers and educators who become embittered, cynical, and maybe even leave their profession. But in the story of Chenrezig, there is a ritual elder, Avalokiteśvara, who sees Chenrezig’s suffering from addressing others suffering. Avalokiteśvara puts Chenrezig back together – not simply as he was before (this is my problem with the way resilience is often used in health care – as a way of going back to the past, or avoiding suffering), but rather as having a thousand eyes to better see suffering and a thousand arms to better touch suffering. Chenrezig becomes more capable of seeing and touching suffering – through post-burnout growth.
This book, Caring for Self & Others: Transforming Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Soul Loss, has grown over the last ten years and I am grateful to all the above mentioned organizations. The book and I have also been shaped by numerous conversations with friends and colleagues and I would particularly like to thank Laura Merrit, Shelly Francis (Creative Courage Press), Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow), Steve Hunt, Jonathan McFarland, Usha Akella (The POV), J. Greg Serpa, Tulika Singh, Chris Smith, Lucy Houghton, Transformational Arts Network and their Power of Words conference, Gretchen Miller (and the editorial staff at the CLOSLER blog), and so, so, so many others. There truly is no self without others.
We’ve gotten some really nice endorsements for the upcoming release of Caring for Self & Others: Transforming Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Soul Loss – which will be released on June 25th and is currently available for pre-order through Amazon. I’ll share some of the comments below:
“It is a healing experience to read the beautiful, self-journey into self-caring through the wounded depth of the dark night of soul. It is through such personal sharing of self that we learn from each other. David Kopacz ‘s book offers readers a gift of hope, courage and self love, that both teach and inspirit us with his soul’s path into self-caring and heart healing.”
Jean Watson, PhD, RN, AHN-BC, FAAN, LL (AAN), Founder Watson Caring Science Institute, Distinguished Prof/Dean Emerita University of Colorado Denver, College of Nursing
“This holistic, imaginative and soulful response to burnout is much needed in today’s world.”
Dr. Dina Glouberman, author of TheJoy of Burnout: How the end of the world can be a new beginning
“As physicians, we may not always acknowledge that we each have a soul. However, we are in a sacred profession that truly holds the soul of our patients. Whatever we call it, there is a place deep within us–almost the elephant in the room–that is our compass guiding us, our North Star. Oftentimes we get lost because we don’t care for our internal compass. That is the essence of what’s lost in healthcare today. If we have the true soulful connection with our Self, it needs to be fed first so that we can be available to everyone else.
When we make self-care and colleague care an unapologetic and unashamed priority, we can give the best care to our patients. David Kopacz invites us to reconnect to our humanity, nurturing our hearts and minds as healers and setting the stage for our systems to heal as well.”
Mukta Panda, MD, author of Resilient Threads: Weaving Joy and Meaning into Well-Being and co-author of The Oath to Self-Care and Well-Being
Caring for Self & Others Transforming Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Soul Loss is a blueprint for authentic happiness. Dr. David Kopacz has gifted us with an insightful guide for self-care. He points to how burnout and compassion fatigue lead to losing our souls and how the loss teaches us a way into depth and spirituality. He suggests ways to sit with equanimity between the wholeness of the sacred and the mundane. This book is an invitation to show up fully and to rediscover there is no split of body/mind or between the self and the collective; it contains perennial wisdom with all its regenerative power.
Marianela Medrano, PhD, What a Word is Worth podcast, and author of Rooting,Diosas de la yuca, and other titles
“David Kopacz, versed in worldwide healing traditions where illness is approached as a loss of soul and healing involves its restoration, offers a complete vision of individual, social, and earth practice where everything contributes to a communion of creation that transforms afflictions into affirmations of life. His personal “dark night” shows the way to a timeless discipline of compassionate creation with others, helping us see that we participate in a process larger than ourselves yet sustained by our unique and personal contributions.”
Shaun McNiff, PhD, author of Art as Medicine, Art Heals, Integrating the Arts in Therapy, Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go, Imagination in Action: Secrets for Unleashing Creative Expression, and other books. Lesley University, Cambridge, MA, 2021 to date: University Professor Emeritus
“Finally, a book that puts together what self-care and healing are really about! Kopacz, an exceptional healer, presents a comprehensive and holistic perspective on ideas and practices that can mitigate the burnout and fatigue that are rampant in healthcare. This is a handbook that will help every practitioner reclaim their role as healer and reconnect with the Soul of their practice. An exquisite, insightful and transformative work!”
Lucia Thornton, ThD, MSN, RN, Past President, American Holistic Nurses Association, Past President, Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine, and author of Whole Person Caring: An Interprofessional Model for Healing and Wellness
“As a clinician who has experienced deep burnout, I adore this book and find it endlessly useful. Dr. Kopacz aptly offers his work as an oxygen mask. He exquisitely supports attention toward the crucial self care healers of all kinds desperately need for thriving lives.”
Kate King, MA, LPC, ATR-BC, author of The Radiant Life Project
“Caring for Self & Others: Transforming Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Soul Loss demands to be read with our heads and our hearts. David Kopacz challenges us to care for ourselves, others and the systems we work in. The book is filled with exercises and meditations that can help us in this work. David also shares his journey and how he was employed the ideas and exercises in his own life that reveal the depth of his commitment to caring.”
John (Jack) Miller, Professor at the University of Toronto and author of Education and the Soul, Love and Compassion: Exploring Their Role in Education, and A Holistic Educator’s Journey: Seeking Wholeness in America, Canada, Japan and AsiaThe Holistic Curriculum
“Caring for Self & Others charts a path through the inevitable downturns and struggles of our lives by using our very suffering as material for transformation and growth. It elaborates a practice of caring that leads us from our individual pain into service to others by breaking down the mental barriers that lead us to believe that there is a self separate from others. This is perennial wisdom for the soul.”
Stephen Cope, Scholar Emeritus, Kripalu Center, bestselling author of The Great Work of Your Life, The Wisdom of Yoga: A Seeker’s Guide to Extraordinary Living, and The Dharma in Difficult Times: Finding Your Calling in Times of Loss, Change, Struggle, and Doubt
“Caring for Self and Others speaks directly to us in these uncertain and difficult times; a book that we must read. The author uses his own experience both as a doctor and patient to deeply delve into the different kinds of caring: for the body, for emotion, for mind, heart. It is a book full of wisdom gained by the author’s insight and continuous growing curiosity about life and the importance of caring and healing. This book is written for you; that is, anyone with an interest in the world around us who knows that to live well (or thrive), we need to care for ourselves and others. David Kopacz both explains why we need to care but also gives practical ways of doing so.”
Jonathan McFarland, MA, President and Founder of The Doctor as a Humanist and co-editor of Health Humanities for Quality of Care in Times of COVID -19, Associate Professor, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Caring for Self & Others: Transforming Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Soul Loss will be published by Creative Courage Press – thanks to Shelly Francis for all the support in the publication process!
Being Fully Human 