ReVisioning Medicine Council
Join us for ReVisioning Medicine on zoom and on the land for physicians, health and mental health professionals, and healers
February 15th – 18th, 2025
CMEs Available!
ReVisioning Medicine is a gathering like no other. We desperately need to change how healing is done. Convening in heartfelt ways so that Medicine and healing may be restored, we are inspired by the opportunities that come from knowing that medical and mental health ways shape and influence culture. Over 21 years, we have met in a safe community, seeking open conversations, facing difficult questions and listening to the stories that confirm the magic of healing and each other’s wisdom. After Covid and quarantine, we are grateful to be able, to meet on the land again and receive the wisdom of the natural world.
ReVisioning Medicine was launched at the American Holistic Medical Association (AHMA) in 2004 in response to the physicians’ growing awareness of the decline of medical practice experienced by practitioners and patients alike while the need to intervene on behalf of our communities increases in the face of climate collapse and global violence of all sorts.
The growing difficulty in being the healers we originally envisioned results in part from interventions by insurance companies, increasing control from big pharma and corporate pharmacies and the cost-cutting frenzies by for-profit medical corporations and hospitals. Practitioner-patient relationships are limited while time spent charting and administering is increasing. Resources are diminishing as the numbers of physicians and health practitioners also decrease. Being in private practice is a financial and administrative challenge while the opportunities for primary physicians seem to be disappearing. As technology eclipses wisdom, the joy of healing is overcome by the despair of burnout.
All of us have had healing experiences that the dominant medical culture does not permit us to discuss, explore or follow. The opportunity to share these stories and contemplate their implications in the process of healing individuals, communities, and the Earth is essential. Paying attention to the reality of such events and recognizing the agency of inner knowing and spirit in healing as well as the wisdom of Indigenous teachings can restore the wisdom ways of medicine.
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 21 years:
- We seek a Medicine which does no harm.
- We are committed to helping medical people be medicine people.
- We want to practice a Medicine that heals body, mind and soul.
- We understand that climate dissolution, extinction, chaos and violence gravely affect our physical, emotional, spiritual and mental health and so are ours to meet.
- We wish to practice medicine which is relational, caring, respectful, aligned with the natural world, and ethical.
- We recognize this is a spiritual call.
ReVisioning 2025 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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ReVisioning Medicine will meet both ON ZOOM and ON THE LAND in Topanga. There are many sacred sites on the land, as well as surrounding acres of land to wander in the adjacent Topanga State Park and we expect online participants will create their own sacred areas so we will be in alignment. (We expect comfortable weather but will be prepared to switch to Zoom only if Climate Change events prevent our gathering.)
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
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.
