ReVisioning Medicine Council
Join Us For our 20th Anniversary ReVisioning Medicine Council For Physicians, Health and Mental Health Professionals and Healers.
The ReVisioning Medicine Council will be held online via Zoom, February 18 – 20, 2023, 9:00 A.M. – 9:00 P.M. PST.
For twenty years, aware that medical and mental health ways shape and influence culture, we at Revisioning Medicine have been contemplating how to reimagine and restore the healing practice of medicine. We do this by entering deep inquiry and facing difficult questions together. Accordingly, we have each been able to change our practices to ally with our original visions of providing true medicine for our communities.
The last years have been particularly difficult for physicians, therapists and healers as the COVID and political pandemics have undermined one’s ability to provide for one’s patients with heart and vision. The two poles of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the abortion ban which has led to criminalizing patients and physicians in many states, and California AB 2098, which designates the dissemination of misinformation or disinformation related to the COVID virus as unprofessional conduct, have created serious crises. Additionally, robotics, electronic medical care, and AI have infiltrated the professions, as they have our lives, without the kind of community deliberation one would hope would precede such dramatic reshaping.
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. We come together to learn to practice our healing professions in a deeper, more authentic way, and to personally become the healers we dream of being.
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. We believe that all of us have experienced such stories but have not had 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. We believe that paying attention to the reality of such events, recognizing the agency of spirit in healing, and the wisdom of Indigenous teachings, can transform medicine so that it aligns with our original visions of healing.
Discussing such events and changes is how we will begin our time together, so that we can be encouraged by what is possible and consider what is being asked of each of us going forward. ReVisioning Medicine is more essential than ever to meet the increasing urgency of these times exacerbated by dangerous political actions, national and international violence, and by the extreme environmental conditions we are facing.
Given the times and the increasing difficulties in medical practice and healing, and the dire consequences of climate dissolution on our physical and mental health, we recognize the necessity to confront these issues together. This is an urgent call 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 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 2023 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
Click here for a complete list of the 19 Inquiries that guide ReVisioning Medicine.
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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, Sharon Simone, EdM, 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.
To express interest or for information or to register please contact Kjersten Gmeiner, MD
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Recommended Reading
Recent Essays by Deena – The Real Story of Healing, Extinction Illness: Grave Affliction and Possibility and Slam Dunk: – Covid-19. Other essays on ReVisioning Medicine and healing can be found at Deena’s website and her blog including The Soul of Medicine (Deena’s address to the AHMA in 2004).
Deena’s Books related to healing: Feral, a novel of a reciprocal healing relationship between a feral woman and the therapist who befriends her may well be the most appropriate book for this February’s meeting. Other books: Tree: Essays and Pieces, a journal of surviving breast cancer, Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing, and From Grief Into Vision: A Council. Her new novel, 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.
Note: Kjersten recommends that everyone read the Soul of Medicine, 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.”
The current issue, #9, of Dark Matter: Women Witnessing is a response to Deena’s essay, “Extinction Illness, Grave Affliction and Possibility,” from the January issue of Tikkun.
