ReVisioning Medicine Council
Join us for ReVisioning Medicine on the land for physicians, health and mental health professionals, and healers
The ReVisioning Medicine Council will be held February 17 – 19, 2024, 9:30 am – 9:00 pm PST. Optional clinic day Tuesday February 20, 2024
CMEs Available!
ReVisioning Medicine will meet ON THE LAND again in Topanga. We will meet in a large but cozy yurt which has been home to ReVisioning councils for many years. There are many sacred sites on the land, as well as surrounding acres of land to wander in the adjacent Topanga State Park. (We expect comfortable weather as we have always had but will be prepared to switch to zoom if El Niño flooding prevents our gathering.)
ReVisioning Medicine was launched at the American Holistic Medical Association (AHMA) in 2004. The outlook for medicine then was grim and the AHMA’s focus was restoring the soul of medicine. Today our concerns for medicine and the need for soul have increased.
Many more physicians, nurses and health care practitioners have left their practices because of Covid, exploitation by profit-driven systems, administration demands, and depersonalization as a consequence of imposed economic pressures and the various forms of AI.
Climate change and global violence of all sorts expand the areas we are called to consider when bringing healing, while the institutional requirements narrow our connections with patients.
The suicide rates for Residents and Physicians are alarming and Health Care Workers are striking across the country including Kaiser Permanente. And so we are meeting…
ReVisioning is a gathering like no other. It is the opportunity for deep and open conversations considering these issues and re-imagining this sacred work to which we have been called.
Aware that medical and mental health ways shape and influence culture, we have been contemplating how to restore the healing practice of medicine and how to walk as true healers in the world. We do this by entering deep inquiry and facing difficult questions together while inquiring how we might ally with our original visions of providing true medicine for our communities and how to meet the shifting conditions. ReVisioning Medicine provides an intimate, energizing and safe setting to reflect on how the lives and professions of medicine and healing are changing and how to meet them.
At ReVisioning gatherings, we repeatedly hear undeniable stories which profoundly expand and explore what it truly means to bring healing to the individuals and communities we serve. All of us have experienced such events and have skills that can’t be coded, but many have no permission in the dominant medical culture to explore and follow them. It is important to find opportunities to tell such stories and contemplate their implications in the process of healing individuals, communities, and the Earth. Paying attention to the reality of such events and recognizing the agency of inner knowing and spirit in healing and the wisdom of Indigenous teachings can transform medicine so that it aligns with our original visions of healing. Accordingly, we always have a ‘Volunteer Informant’ who allows us to accompany them on seeking a healing path.
This is an urgent call to confront these issues together, to reinvent and practice healing medicine, to act with integrity, to gather in community, to protect what matters…
The first concerns of ReVisioning are still with us after 20 years:
- We seek a Medicine which does no harm.
- We are committed to helping medical people be medicine people.
- We want to practice medicine as healing as we know it in our minds, hearts and soul.
- We are aware that planetary concerns are also acute medical concerns, and are ours to meet. Climate dissolution, extinction, and the chaos and violence of the current social, political and economic disorder gravely affect our physical, emotional, spiritual and mental health.
- We recognize this is a spiritual call.
ReVisioning 2024 invites us to articulate and share our deepest concerns for medicine and its restoration. We are honored to be involved in this work, and hope you will join us, invite your friends and colleagues and become part of our ReVisioning community.
Peace and Blessings,
Deena Metzger, PhD
Kjersten Gmeiner, MD
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Deena Metzger, PhD leads these Councils with a core group drawn from a team of physicians, psychologists and healers including Kjersten Gmeiner, MD, Richenel Ansano, MA, Naz Motayar, PhD, Marc Weigensberg, MD, Tobi Fishel, PhD, and Cheryl Potts, Native Elder and teacher.
We are honored to be involved in this work, and hope you will join us and become part of our ReVisioning community.
For questions, information, fees, accommodations and to register, please contact Kjersten Gmeiner, MD
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Click here for a complete list of the 19 Inquiries that guide ReVisioning Medicine.
Deena’s Books related to healing: Feral is a novel of a reciprocal healing relationship between a feral woman and the therapist who crosses boundaries to befriend her. Other books: Tree: Essays and Pieces, a journal of surviving breast cancer, Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing.
A Rain of Night Birds, confronts Climate Change and the differences between Indigenous medicine and western medicine. La Vieja: A Journal Of Fire, is concerned with meeting both climate collapse and extinction while imagining restoration of our real lives. Many essays on healing can be found on Ruin and Beauty or Substack.
Note: Kjersten recommends that everyone read the Soul of Medicine, the keynote for the AHMA conference which in its way started this entire path.
Dark Matter: Women Witnessing Issues #6 and #7 include pieces from four of the ReVisioning Conveners. See the essays in the sidebar under “Village Medicine.”
Recommended book by physician and writer activist outside of our circle: Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya, MD and Raj Patel.
