Tag Archives: Parabola Magazine

Recent Podcasts & Articles

Posted on by

I’ve been doing a few podcasts lately – which is always a fun chance to talk about some of the work I have been doing. I’ll include a few photos from the past year to remind us of the world within which we all live & work.

Yellow Warbler in crab apple tree, Seattle, WA

I spoke with Andrea Nakayama on her 15-Minute Matrix Podcast on “Mapping the Costs of Caring,” looking at burnout, compassion fatigue, moral injury, and soul loss in health care workers. Here is an excerpt speaking about the similarities of burnout and soul loss:

The soul is the thing that makes us alive and vital and engaged and connected around the world. When we lose that, we lose all those kinds of things that connect us to ourselves and to others…How do we bring the soul back? It would be what things make the soul happy, what kinds of things bring you joy? And so how can you build this into your life? I think the distinction is you could start with self-care to support the ego, in the sense of your personality, but I think of the healer, the role of the healers, to be honest with delving into what can be the breakdown of the ego, and then the rebuilding back as a healer.

Yellow-Rumped Warbler in crab apple tree, Seattle, WA

I had a very nice dialogue with Lewis Mehl-Madrona and Glenn Aparicio Parry on his Circle of Original Thinking Podcast, “Integrating Healing Traditions with Lewis Mehl-Madrona and David Kopacz.” Definitely check this out, such an honor to have a generous time to speak with Lewis & Glenn. Check out their great books as well!

The print edition of Parabola Magazine, Fall 2023 featured “This Vibrating Land,” an excerpt from an interview that I did with Glenn Aparicio Parry that we featured on The POV interview website.

I also had a book review “Lessons from A Field Guide to Getting Lost“ by Rebecca Solnit on CLOSLER as well as an essay “Building Cultures of Caring.” Here’s an excerpt:

Perhaps burnout is a symptom of a larger problem. Perhaps we’ve cut ourselves off from a root of support in our work, we have lost touch with a spiritual and humanistic dimension of who we are and that when one suffers, all suffer. We have lost touch with our interconnection, our non-duality. What did Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. draw upon when working with the immense suffering in the world? Gandhi spoke of satyagraha as “the Force which is born of Truth and Love,” and Dr. King, spoke of this as “soul force.” Perhaps we should consider developing some kind of non-dual medicine, some kind of practice of non-separation in our healing work.  

Whiskey Creek, Washington

A longer interview and dialogue was an invitation to speak on The Soul Space, entitled “Hero’s Journey & Resilience in the Face of Suffering,” (7/1/22).

Last, but not least – I had a chance to catch up with former Seattle VA Primary Care Mental Health Integration teammate Dr. Nicola De Paul on “Burnout, Moral Injury, and Radical Caring” on her Menders: Love & Leadership in Health Systems Podcast. Check out our dialogue as well Nicola’s discussions with other great thinkers working to bring Love & Leadership into Health Systems!

I also recently had the privilege of interviewing Richard C. Miller, PhD, the developer of iRest, Integrative Restoration, a form of yoga nidra. Here is the link to part I where we talk about his development of iRest and early influences, including J. Krishnamurti. Part II will be published soon on the interview site that Usha Akella and I developed, The POV.

If you have some down time, please check out any of these articles and podcasts that may be of interest to you, as well as look up some of the other great interviews on these podcasts!

Pacific Coast, Washington State

“The Gates of Paradise: Shamanic Memories from an Indian Visionary” – in Parabola (Summer 2022)

Posted on by

Thanks to Parabola Magazine for excerpting a passage from our latest book, Becoming Who You Are: Beautiful Painted Arrow’s Life & Lessons for Children Ages 10-100.

The excerpt is entitled “The Gates of Paradise: Shamanic Memories from an Indian Visionary,” and is availabe online in Parabola Summer 2022 Edition with the theme of Ancestors. It is currently available online, but the whole issue is worth reading, with an articles on P. L. Travers, Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, and many different topics on the theme of Ancestors.

The article also features two of Joseph Rael’s paintings, “Sage Woman becomes visible to – bless “the People,” and “Crystal Chamber,” which I’ll include below.

We are very happy that this book is getting some notice as it is an autobiography of Joseph’s life specifically aimed at passing on wisdom to the next generation, how fitting that it is in the Ancestors issue of Parabola: The Search for Meaning. The book was also recognized as a winner of the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People.

New Interview with Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) in Parabola magazine!

Posted on by

I interviewed Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) for The-POV, the new interview site that Usha Akella and I have started. Parabola magazine has picked up this interview and published it in their Spring 2021 issue entitled “Wellness.” The interview is called “A Bridge Across the River.”

Please support Parabola magazine and pick up a copy of the Spring 2021 Issue!

Review of 2018

Posted on by

IMG_20181225_124232371_HDR

Photo credit: Mary Pat Traxler

On this first day of the New Year, January 1st, 2019, I thought I would take a look back at this past year. 2018 was filled with a lot of travel. We took a trip to England, Wales, and Iceland in May that I have blogged about. I have continued my work as a Whole Health Education Champion with the national VA Office of Patient Centered Care & Cultural Transformation and teaching programs took me to Madison, WI; Portland, OR; Nashville, TN; St. Cloud, MN; and three times to the Boston area (including an evening visit to Walden Pond). My mother had a couple of surgeries, which went well, but took me back to Illinois three times during the year.

As far as writing goes, I continued to work on the next book with Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow). My sister and I took a trip to visit him in October.

David Kopacz & Joseph Rael, photo credit: Karen Kopacz
David Kopacz & Joseph Rael, photo credit: Karen Kopacz
Joseph Rael & David Kopacz, photo credit: Karen Kopacz

We finished the book on the Winter Solstice and I am now gathering a few endorsements for the book and we will be starting the publication process now. The new book is called Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into A Living Spirituality. Here is a copy of the table of contents, and the cover we are working with.

Cover Screen Shot

Joseph Rael’s painting, cover for Becoming Medicine

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abbreviations
Foreword by Lewis Mehl-Madrona
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Secret Journey
Part I: Separation (Seeking)
Chapter 1.         Becoming Medicine
Chapter 2          Circle Medicine
Chapter 3          Separation
Chapter 4          Becoming a Visionary
Chapter 5          Becoming a Shaman
Chapter 6          Becoming a Mystic
Part II: Initiation (Finding/Receiving)
Chapter 7          Story Medicine
Chapter 8          Entering the Doorway
Chapter 9          Guhā: Cave of the Heart
Chapter 10        Enlightenment & Endarkenment
Chapter 11         Initiation
Chapter 0          Na-yo ti-ay we-ah (We Do Not Exist)
Part III: Return (Giving)
Chapter 12        Returning to the Land
Chapter 13        We Are All Pangeans; We Are All Related
Chapter 14        Spiritual Democracy
Chapter 15        Refounding
Chapter 16        A Living Spirituality
Chapter 17        Returning to the Garden of Paradise
Chapter 18        Secret Journey to the Secret Garden
List of Sound Chambers

We had an excerpt from Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD published in Parabola magazine, which was very exciting. We’ve also given permission for the book cover to appear in a movie about someone healing from PTSD and we’ll give more information about that as it becomes available. We had an article called “Sage—the Wise One,” published in the International Journal of Professional Holistic Aromatherapy. I gave a workshop for Muckleshoot Indian Tribe Behavioral Health on “Circle Medicine for Healing Trauma.”

journey-home-cover-large

Mary Pat and I took a very restful trip to the Pacific coast near Copalis Beach just last week and I’ll post a few of those photos.

Moonlight Morning
Copalis Rock
Tangled Tree
Sunset Over Copalis Beach
A Little Seeker

Corbin and I took a hike up Fletcher Canyon near Quinault. We couldn’t go far because there were a lot of trees down. We scrambled over a few before turning back after about an hour of walking up hill.

Gnarly Log
Corbin on the Trail
Bunch Falls
Looking Back Down the Trail
Are You Sure We Can Get Over This?
Now What?

We stopped on the way back to take in the world’s largest Sitka Spruce tree, estimated to be 1000 years old.

DSCN5704

1000 year old Sitka Spruce

One morning, I heard a raucous cacophony of crows cawing. I quickly ran out to see what was happening. I saw a flutter of movement on the ground and an eagle flew off, leaving a stunned crow. I watched over the crow for a few minutes, eventually he flew off, a bit unsteadily, and then the eagle gave up and flew off in the other direction. These aren’t shots of that seen, but other photos of an eagle and some crows.

Who knows what 2019 will bring, likely lots of changes, as well as the publication of Becoming Medicine!

“Coming Home to Peace” excerpt from Walking the Medicine Wheel published in Parabola Magazine, Fall 2018

Posted on by

Parabola Magazine has just published an abridged version of the “Coming Home to Peace” chapter from the book that Joseph Rael and I wrote, Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD.

journey-home-cover-large

I am so excited and honored that our work is being featured in this great magazine. I first read Parabola when I was in college. It is the journal of The Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition and always has great features on topics around “the search for meaning,” with past contributors including Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and Jacob Needleman. This current issue revolves around “The Journey Home,” and it is fitting to have our piece on the struggle of veterans to find their way home after military service. This issue features Parker Palmer, whose Center for Courage and Renewal has recognized my last two books as selections of their most courageous books of 2014 and 2016. I have also written guest blogs for their organization: “Recovering Hope, Poetry, and Connection in Health Care” and “Finding the Held-back Place of Goodness in the Broken Hearts of Veterans.” It is great to see Joseph’s and my work sharing space in Parabola with an excerpt from Parker Palmer’s new book, The Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity & Getting Old. Another author I have great respect for is featured in this issue, Kabir Helminski, with an excerpt from his book, Holistic Islam: Sufism, Transformation & the Challenge of Our Time. Peter Kingsley, author of Reality and A Story Waiting to Pierce You, has also been interviewed by Parabola in the past.

How exciting and rewarding it is to have Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD – this work of the heart that Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) and I have done together – honored in this way, being published in a magazine that has inspired me since my days in college.

front-cover-final

I am also happy that we are able to promote the work of so many others in this Parabola essay. Ed Tick, John Wesley Fischer, Jonathan Shay, Bryan Doerries, Claude Anshin Thomas, Judith Herman, and Robert Jay Lifton are all cited and credited for their work. I am also happy that Buchanan Rehabilitation Centre, where I worked in New Zealand, is mentioned in the piece, as that is a place very dear to my heart.

Here is a quote from the article:

“We can assist returning veterans through creating an initiation and rehabilitation framework. In essence, we as a society, need to have some framework for accepting, understanding, and transforming veterans’ pain. Transformation means that we take something that exists in one state and transform it into another state. For instance, wee take something that is manifesting its energy in a ‘negative’ way and transform it so that it manifests in a positive way,” (Parabola, 88).

I wish we had a little more of Joseph’s words in this piece, but this was a section putting our work in the context of the work of others. Joseph says that we need to help veterans find the “held-back place of goodness” in their hearts. If you want to hear Joseph in his own words, you can watch one of the videos on the website for Walking the Medicine Wheel.

The Parabola editors choose one of our paintings from the book for the article. The painting below is my rendition of Joseph’s medicine wheel that I added some universal spiritual symbols to in the center.

Cosmic Medicine Wheel.jpg2

Cosmic Medicine Wheel, David R. Kopacz, © 2016

This issue of Parabola is not out on the newsstand yet, but you can see the cover and some of the current issue on their website and it should be on the newsstand soon!