A Conversation with Joan Borysenko , Ph.D.
Originally appeared in Healing Garden Journal, March 2004

Joan Borysenko is one of those great teachers who is deeply loved and respected by those she shares herself with. Just one quick peruse through any of her books makes you feel as if she is sitting in the chair next to you, sharing a cup of tea. She has a unique softness that comes from ‘doing the journey’ well, yet she also has the bright, quick mind of a scientist who looks at the world in visionary ways.

Her doctorate in medical sciences from Harvard speaks to her passion about demystifying the mind/body connection. One of her first books, Minding the Body, Mending the Mind, considered a classic today, opened new doors of understanding around holistic well-being for millions of readers. Joan is also the co-founder and former director of the mind/body clinical programs at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard.

Not one to rest on her laurels, Joan continued to explore the worlds of science and religion in her writing. Over the years and 10 books later, Joan admits that “we’ve all grown up together,” that is why so many people, especially women, connect with her on an intimate level. She tells it all in her very honest and poignant books, offering other seekers permission to do the work of self-realization just as she has done. A Woman’s Journey to God recounts her journey of making peace with her Jewish roots, offering the reader vast opportunity to explore their own, and then synthesize all life experience into their own unique spirituality. Her two most recent works, Inner Peace for Busy Women and Inner Peace for Busy People offer wonderful advice on how to meditate, how to engage in peaceful practices and, most importantly, live with great joy and passion.

Today, Joan Borysenko travels the world as a speaker and consultant in women’s health and spirituality, integrative medicine, and the mind/body connection. She lives in Colorado with her beloved and is the mother of two grown sons.

We began our interview with asking Joan what she was most passionate about these days...

I have a great passion for healing, which as I grow older, I understand to be harmony at its deepest level—the energy that you have, the passion that you have, to give to the world, finding its way out there. As you are transforming internally, it can move out externally and meld with other people’s. And when that happens, then you will draw into your life the right people, the right projects. This gives you the kind of “juice” that brings harmony into your body enabling you to function at your very best so that you can live with great joy.

When I look at the teachings from different spiritual traditions, psychology, the new physics, I am beginning to recognize how much this sense of harmony, creativity, beauty and friendship come together in your life. I’m 58 now and, for me, impermanence is no longer an abstract Buddhist concept. Oh, definitely, impermanence...as my face is dropping to my kneecaps! It’s all impermanent. When I begin to realize that what I am going to leave behind me is an imprint of the harmony I’ve created in my life. That is what I leave to my children, my friends, my work. This all sounds dreadfully abstract but somehow that sense of harmony and understanding of the energies of the universe (and what harmony really is) has become key to my understanding of healing.

Joan continued to share her deeply held passion (which originated in childhood) for studying the world’s great religious traditions and their scriptures, noting how each tradition takes us on the inner journey to self-realization in its own unique way. Common to all religions is the need for community to provide support for the journey.

We have a personal longing for sangha, for community—a group to be with, study with and move along the path with. How lucky for this group I am coming to be with in Traverse City in April has that! Many people don’t have that. In our spiritual journeys many of us have moved beyond a particular, group, lineage or temple, and there is a deep ache for sisterhood and brotherhood, for fellowship along the way.

I’ve been asking myself how can I be responsive to that need in others and in myself? To address this longing for community. So what I am working on this year is to develop a way to unite the people I work with around the country to form a virtual sangha. It will be a sort of spiritual school— a way for people to connect with others where they live and also on the internet. I envision we’ll also offer a couple of retreats a year. This is all very exciting for me.

Joan’s recent books, Inner Peace for Busy People and Inner Peace for Busy Women offer amazingly straightforward approaches, complete with techniques and daily practices, for accessing inner peace within ourselves. It all seems so simple when Joan describes it, but one can’t help wondering, when we look around us at the state of the world and also at our individual stress levels, why so many of us still struggle with making the commitment to do the practice, find the time or create the nurturing space to use the tools that have been provided for us. Our personal and collective busyness just seems to overtake us. What is it in us that keeps us from doing what we can?

If I knew the answer to that I could depart this planet and say ‘Ah ha, I’ve figured it out!’ I’ve struggled with that same question. What is it when we know for sure that if we do the practice—I will feel better; I’ll get over my snit and be in my center; I’ll come into the moment—there comes this period of busyness and it all gets forgotten. It happens myself on a repeated basis. Again, we come back to the idea of community. It is much easier to do these things when you have a community, when there is something to tap into. We’re all working on these things. We all have difficulties. I am fortunate right now because I have my beloved and we can practice together. That is an enormous help and I know I do better personally when I can do that . I do not know the answer to your question except that it must be something programmed deeply in our brain that survival circuits get attended to first. These are deeply biological things. It’s not that we don’t want to do the work, but it’s a deep brain stem thing that before you get to the spiritual, other things have to get taken care of first (not unlike Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs). Unfortunately in busy modern life, it begins to look to us like if the dishwasher isn’t unloaded, I can’t get to my meditation. This sounds bizarre but I think that’s what it’s based on—biological circuitry for survival.

There is a certain magnificence in seeing how the body is programmed for the species to continue. It might be a good thing to view it that way so that when you feel like you’re a spiritual slug, you feel “normal.” Maybe even holding that in mind is a good thing. Saying ‘Ok, that is how my body is wired. My desire to get going and get on with my day is a good thing and I acknowledge it and ,in spite of that, I am going to choose to override the circuit. The greatest help for that, again, is the sangha.

Without community, our spiritual practice can get very dry. What you encounter in meditation is what you encounter in the rest of your life; you encounter your stuff, the places where there are rough edges, all the difficulties. We ask ourselves, ‘If I’m sitting in meditation, why am I not feeling better, why don’t I feel bliss or feel much of anything, or why are my emotions eating me up? Being able to be with others who are also experiencing these feelings is a big help.

I ran a Body/Mind clinic for 10 years. A big part of that was meditation practice. People loved being in a group doing meditation together. Hearing what others had to say was a great relief. You begin to feel ‘My God, I am not a flop at this.’ Others are having similar experiences. Once the group was over we discovered that (6 months later) only 1/4 of the people reported that they had been able to consistently continue on their own. They wanted refresher groups to keep them going.

Despite the fact that we may be “programmed” to be with others in community, and even though we know we grow best when we are in fellowship with others, we seem to be continually moving towards greater isolation, primarily in our workplaces, family lives and neighborhoods.

This greatly concerns me too. What I believe is that we, as a society, are in an incredibly, highly creative period of chaos. Our previous ways of work or of running family are all changing. We’re all very scattered. Out of the chaos the next level has not really reconstituted itself yet. What happens in periods of chaos is that people generally feel rootless and we are feeling a lot of that now. People looking around for the homing signal—asking where is it? What is beginning to happen is that all of a sudden the value of things, things that we have taken for granted before now, becomes a real value. For example, we value our ability to have flexible workplaces. It’s nice to work at home but it’s not so good to be isolated, with no one to share with. Where is the balance? We’re at this place in a lot of ways. I wrote about that in Inner Peace for Busy Women. We are seeing the ends of churches and temples, yet a burgeoning interfaith movement is cropping up everywhere. This is what I am seeing. There is something new coming out of this period of disconnection and chaos. The period of chaos is necessary for new forms to come onto the scene.

For many, these days seems very confusing and unpredictable. For some, even quite dark and overwhelming, too much to handle, both globally and individually. The negativity we see in the media alone can cause even greater feelings of helplessness or isolation.

We must remember that we are rebirthing ourselves. And it is very, very important that we keep looking for the sources of light as the future begins to take shape, because if we lose our hope in a positive future, we lose our chance of manifesting a positive future. There are many points of light out there. For example, Bill Gates is giving huge grants to schools for computers so that schools can be small communities again, instead of big impersonal places. That is definitively a point of light; even education has to remake itself. All of these things, our institutions, have to remake themselves, and I think they are and I’m very excited.

This is a challenging time because our society is really at a place where many of us have been as individuals (in our spiritual journeys)—in that place of ‘Don’t know’—and that is scary. We all prefer to know where we were and where we are going, and hanging out in the great unknown is extremely hard. It’s a discipline all by itself. Our doubts, fears, uncertainties and longing are just there and we have to tolerate them. Those are the kinds of feelings we are not taught how to tolerate. Since pioneer days, we’ve been taught to get things done, we function, we know what comes next, we produce, we perform. We are now in a place where we’ve been unschooled. We do not know how to do this and we hate it. It’s yuck!

That is why it is so important to stay focused on points of light, so we don’t lose hope in challenging times. This is absolutely crucial because it’s very easy to narrow the focus of your attention. I’ll give you a great example. One time in my life I thought I wanted to build a fence around my house. Suddenly, everywhere I went I saw fences around houses. My focus had shifted to see only fences. If we begin to focus our attention on what is wrong, (saying ‘This is wrong, that is wrong’), we begin to lose energy. When we lose energy, we lose our capacity to imagine and when we lose the ability to imagine what is possible, then we are stuck in a rut. The ability to orient toward possibility happens when we see, for example, The Berlin Wall fall. Who thought that was possible or would even happen? A very good social, psychological, spiritual discipline is to orient yourself toward what is possible. Develop fence consciousness. Possibility consciousness. This isn’t Pollyanna thinking, but things are changing, do change. Think about where you feel hopeless, helpless, and then look for a couple of points of light you can orient towards.

Everyone can use one final bit of advice now and then, so we asked Joan what hers would be for our readers.

I always come back to the same thing. Over the years I have found that if you can commit to doing something in the morning, every morning, just one small thing, it can make all the difference in the world. For example, if you said a small prayer for one minute each day, that begins to bear fruit. Because when you get yourself to say that one prayer, it begins to draw you into that other world, that place of “home,” and it opens the door a crack. That is all we really need. For the door to be open just a crack to let the light in. So don’t worry if you can’t do an hour of meditation or Qigong or anything. I bet it would be possible for you to do a prayer for one minute. My favorite morning prayer is this. I hope you’ll try it...

Morning Blessing

This morning I greet mother earth, father sky
And the life-force in all its creation

This morning I greet my brothers and sisters
Here and in all creation

This morning I greet the seen world in its beauty
The unseen world in its mystery
And the cycles of creation and dissolution

This morning I greet the breath that breathes me
The compassion that sustains me
And the love in my heart

This is a prayer
For the freedom of all beings