Hi all! First off - I'm offering Mindful Self-Compassion workshops. I am happy to offer you a sliding scale. Let's do this. Details at the end of the email. Hope you're having a good summer. I'm 'laying flat' and enjoying time with my mom, friends, music, nature, and peace and quiet. A highlight this year has been seeing jazz superstar Esperanza Spalding in concert a couple of times, the last time with Gustavo Dudamel and an international youth orchestra that had just been together for 2 weeks before the concert at th ...Continue Reading

Hi all, A short message and just one essay this last month. If you missed last month's newsletter, it's available in the archive here. Just published this last weekend. MOSF 17.9: “Can I Withhold Care from a Bigot?” A Brown Psychiatrist’s Perspective This 3500 word essay expands on an ethical dilemma posed in the New York Times to NYU professor of ethics and law Kwame Anthony Appiah. His response was right on, but also underestimated the potential for damage to caregivers and caregiving teams from dealing with a hostil ...Continue Reading

Hi all, Morning meditation, 6/7/22: "Resting. Motion. Inertia. Trajectory. Trajectory of bullets aimed at children’s faces. How to change. How to change. This killing machine of America, callous and cruel, numbed, uncaring, careless, reveling in unrestrained power. Bodies, casually dropped on the streets, casual-ties of causality. Historical rampages played out on new victims, every day new victims. New tears. From Newtown to Buffalo, Kings and Kennedys, X’s and Arbery’s, veins and arteries, Buffalo to Uvalde, bu ...Continue Reading

"That's just like, your opinion, man!"   Happy spring! Like many of you, I was appalled by the unmasking behavior we saw last week on airplanes. My joke was "who knew that the first thing we'd see when the masks came off would be the a$$holes?" Sigh. So I wrote this article, to try to bring us closer to compassion and sensitivity to individuality and vulnerability. To Mask or Not to Mask When Masking is Not Mandatory | Psychology Today, April 26, 2022   And then I was appalled by watchin ...Continue Reading

Where were you on Sunday night? Where did you "go" after The Slap - if you were watching? I wrote this article for Psychology Today on Sunday night - but because they view the words 'trauma' and 'dissociation' as clinical, DSM terms, they declined to publish. No worries, I'm grateful to be publishing at East Wind. Trauma has passed into the common parlance - and I'll have a lot more to say about this topic in future posts. MOSF 17.4: Will, Jada, Chris and Trauma: Oscars So Dissociated  (March 29, 2 ...Continue Reading

Dear all, I was moved by Ilya Kaminsky's 2013 poem today. He is a Ukrainian American, so this is making the rounds at this tense time of heartbreak. His book is on my list of must reads. If only the poets of heart could be heard, around the world. Ilya Kaminsky reads “We Lived Happily During the War” I've had two blog posts at Psychology Today in the last month: Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” and the Myth of Self-Regulation | Psychology Today Asian American Elders Report Low Support, Life Satisfaction | Psychology Toda ...Continue Reading

MOSF 17.2: THE EXILES: The tank man or the tank? Hi all, I've been thinking a lot about hope this month - hope as a combination of goals, willpower, agency, and pathways, an active principle we must cultivate in order to find our true wholeness, and feel our way into interdependence. Hope for me extends far beyond my own individual success, of course, but also in the triumph of moral and inclusive conscience. How ironic that power structures effectively act as barriers to hope, when power is constructed as we ...Continue Reading

Hi all, Hope this message finds you and yours safe and well. This has been an extraordinarily different 2 years than any in my lifetime. We haven't had the same markers - of travel, celebrations, or achievements. While I've more or less found my jam of regularity, there have been periods of stagnation, despair, anxiety, "languishing" and all the rest. This, despite progressing on my creative journey with a film and many essays for East Wind and Psychology Today. I've made new "pandemic friends", and ...Continue Reading

Hi all, Hope you all had a restful long weekend! I've been noodling on some issues - here are my latest articles - 2 short and one long. From East Wind eZine: *MOSF 16.9: An Ugly Truth: Social Media, the American Psyche, and Preventing Civil War – East Wind ezine* A 5K word read, a coda to my book Facebuddha. With particular emphasis on BIPOC communities, hate speech, and how our political situation can be seen as an outgrowth of social media incentives for virality. "We need to check social media, particularly F ...Continue Reading

My (mailserver) bad! It turns out many of my messages - perhaps over years - have not gone out due to a glitch! (You can always check out the archive, link below.) Gives me a chance to send you the link to my movie, now available on Vimeo. I need a couple thousand purchases to break even on production costs and split further proceeds with all the crew. (Fingers crossed!!) I hope you might rent or buy, and please spread the word. The Bandaged Place: From AIDS to COVID and Racial Justice Winner of "Best Film (F ...Continue Reading