JoS goes public 9/19/08
Last night was my first opportunity to talk at any length about JoS with people who aren’t directly involved with the project. It was a coming out event of sorts, and it was a blast. For the last year or so, I’ve been participating in a brainstorming group of clinicians from the Boston area, called the Collaborative Medicine Working Group. They’re holistically oriented and are finding ways to bring integrative medicine into the mainstream. Each session has an educational component, and yesterday was my turn to present.
The first clue that things would go well came during the preparation phase at home, as I tried to squeeze some of our JoS material into the PowerPoint format. I really enjoyed the process of finding the right visual image to convey the science points, and ended up with a pretty lively 30’ slide show. Much to my delight, the crowd of 20 or so clinicians at the meeting also loved it. Many were already solid Sox fans, but all were attuned to the invisible energies that our film focuses on and that their therapies are based on. They laughed at the right spots, made great suggestions, and asked questions that I had never thought of (after all, that’s one of the reasons for making presentations).
One nurse was struck by the notion of conditioned spaces, where elevated thoughts and emotions trigger enhanced physical responses. She remarked that she works in the opposite kind of place, an Intensive Care Unit, where the atmosphere is truly deadening and fear-laden (a “de-conditioned space”?). We talked of ways to clear her workspace of emotional negativity, and she came away with some practical suggestions about how to do just this (no, not by having the doctors and patients do “The Wave”!). A couple of good connections emerged – with a therapist who’d given massages to Sox wives at the Pan Mass Challenge, another who once led Manny in a private yoga session (it was the morning of the day he went ballistic against the Yankees in the 2003 ALCS and attacked the pitcher! Apparently the yoga released some latent anger that was locked in his sore hamstrings.), and another whose longtime favorite Fenway moment is singing “Sweet Caroline” (she was pleased that the RNG’s validated her experience).
And that was the main theme, how nice it was to have sophisticated equipment validating inner experiences that we’ve all had. How spirit and science can be reunited, and how JoS can function as a Trojan Horse to spread these ideas into the mainstream. I even got four invites to give a similar talk at other medical settings. More proof that we’re on to something!
The first clue that things would go well came during the preparation phase at home, as I tried to squeeze some of our JoS material into the PowerPoint format. I really enjoyed the process of finding the right visual image to convey the science points, and ended up with a pretty lively 30’ slide show. Much to my delight, the crowd of 20 or so clinicians at the meeting also loved it. Many were already solid Sox fans, but all were attuned to the invisible energies that our film focuses on and that their therapies are based on. They laughed at the right spots, made great suggestions, and asked questions that I had never thought of (after all, that’s one of the reasons for making presentations).
One nurse was struck by the notion of conditioned spaces, where elevated thoughts and emotions trigger enhanced physical responses. She remarked that she works in the opposite kind of place, an Intensive Care Unit, where the atmosphere is truly deadening and fear-laden (a “de-conditioned space”?). We talked of ways to clear her workspace of emotional negativity, and she came away with some practical suggestions about how to do just this (no, not by having the doctors and patients do “The Wave”!). A couple of good connections emerged – with a therapist who’d given massages to Sox wives at the Pan Mass Challenge, another who once led Manny in a private yoga session (it was the morning of the day he went ballistic against the Yankees in the 2003 ALCS and attacked the pitcher! Apparently the yoga released some latent anger that was locked in his sore hamstrings.), and another whose longtime favorite Fenway moment is singing “Sweet Caroline” (she was pleased that the RNG’s validated her experience).
And that was the main theme, how nice it was to have sophisticated equipment validating inner experiences that we’ve all had. How spirit and science can be reunited, and how JoS can function as a Trojan Horse to spread these ideas into the mainstream. I even got four invites to give a similar talk at other medical settings. More proof that we’re on to something!
posted by Rick Leskowitz,MD at 10:06 AM
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