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Joan Borysenko, Ph.D.
Celebrate Daily the Gifts of Change

by Mary Grace McCord

Several times a month Joan Borysenko trades in her crisp Rocky Mountain air and treehouse hideaway for days or weeks of planes, cabs and gritty cities. Such is the life of a seasoned road warrior.

Still practically newlywed, her blended family of six grown kids also includes an animal menagerie and precious grandchildren from toddler to teenage. What is it that regularly sends this blissful peacenik off to schools and into TV studios, from sweat lodges to sanctuaries, health conferences and meditation centers?

It’s the same passion that transformed Dr. Borysenko’s first career, as a whiz-kid cancer researcher at Harvard throughout her 20s; then into the psychology of chronic stress and AIDS advocacy during her 30s.

Becoming a prolific author by her early 40s and an innovating pioneer in psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), Joan’s book titles include Minding the Body, Mending the Mind; Guilt Is the Teacher, Love Is the Lesson; Fire in the Soul: A New Psychology of Spiritual Optimism; The Power of the Mind to Heal; A Woman’s Journey to God; and Paths to God.

She has written how-to programs on meditation, journaling, prayer and mindful exercise, narrated audio books that celebrate healing miracles, and she candidly shares with millions of fans her innumerable insights gleaned through six decades of personal struggles and triumphs.

A dozen books later, Saying Yes to Change was co-written in 2005 by Joan and her new
husband, Gordon Dveirin, Ed.D. After deciding during their honeymoon to merge their literary gifts and to birth a very different kind of child, their 2006 addition is perhaps most remarkable for its wise simplicity.

During these past two summers Joan has taught a one-week course for ministers, theology students and personal seekers who’ve discovered the exhilarating stillness of Unity Village seminary campus in Kansas City, MO. The “UV” gardens, chapels, labyrinth, libraries, holistic cafeteria, cool streams and over-arching bridges offer an inspiring setting for spirit-led workshops by metaphysical masters such as Matthew Fox and Marianne Williamson, as well as Joan Borysenko.

AIHT thanks Dr. Borysenko for shining her bright-light energies into Vibrations for our extra special holiday treat, the gift of Saying Yes to Change.

Vibrations: This husband-and-wife literary collaboration has been called “Peanuts meets Kierkegaard.” Why?

Borysenko: (With an appreciative laugh) Gordon is an organizational development consultant. Professionally his role is to act as a catalyst or change agent within corporations by “stirring the pot” to facilitate true communication when a company has gotten stuck in a rut and its leadership decides a new vision is in order.

My own training began with medical science. Becoming a teacher, author and columnist, my gifts are in ‘boiling down psychoneuroimmunology’ into stories that resonate for various cultures: from Judaism and Christianity to Eastern Sufi and Western Native American, Buddhism and Hinduism. Writing a monthly column on holistic mind, body and spirit health in Prevention magazine since 2004, I’ve developed a practical writing style that my editors have called entertaining and irreverent.

So Gordon and I blend the influences of Yin and Yang, right-brain and left-brain, peas and carrots….

Vibrations: Irreverent is an interesting word, given that your books have laid open the psycho-spiritual wounds in your life that include a nervous psychosis in your childhood that followed a violent trauma for your dad. Growing up, your own version of teen angst included a guilt-bearing parent, devastating cancer and a suicide in the family, topped off by your own hyper-critical inner monologue that you’ve described as “frequent wailings of self-defeating ‘awfulization’ ” that are akin to the cerebral petulance of a Woody Allen film character.

Borysenko: Each of us faces changes and challenges in our own unique way, and transitions are what many fear so deeply that we may even try to outwit and sneak away (from change). But this is unauthentic; it off-balances the body, mind and soul.

Vibrations: Figuratively and literally, we all wear masks. You’ve told the story of being an oncology researcher who so wanted to help humanity, but who also felt so conflicted when realizing that sterile lab work in highly controlled settings was not your heart’s desire.

	Sharing Many Gifts At the end of her Unity Village seminar series and AIHT interview, Joan Borysenko presented Vibrations editor Mary Grace McCord with three mementoes: a crystal heart touchstone for creativity, a chakra candle for inspired meditation, and a healing Web site to share with our worldwide family. Within many ancient traditions, candle lighting is a sacred ritual. Its action expresses far more than words, when a flickering flame warms its energies amongst all other natural elements. We hope you “en-joy” the modern, calming ritual of lighting a virtual candle as well: www.gratefulness.org

Borysenko: Shifting to practical and cost-effective holistic care for indigent people with HIV/AIDS would later offer me new opportunities for different kinds of creativity, but at that time the general energies (within those situations) seemed so heavy and hopeless. Back in the early 80s, the medical community just hadn’t come up with many things that helped in significant ways.

Training to be a psychologist, I wanted to help reground people and help them learn to sense their power and check in with their intuition so that they could make better choices based on personal wisdom. Self-love is what heals the psyche, even when or if the body’s injury cannot finally be healed.

Vibrations: Saying yes to change isn’t ultimately about digesting somebody else’s wisdom, but rather finding, listening in and then acting on your own voice, ideas, mindset and preferences. You’ve described the wilderness of life changes as “a pathless journey in which only you can find your own way in, out and through.”

Borysenko: Transitional situations may include the grief of serious loss as well as heroically choosing to courageously keep the faith. The initiatory rite of passage is when your old story is ending but the new reality is yet to unfold. It’s that quiet space between life as you once knew it and new vistas of what now may be.

Vibrations: Of what dreams may come…?

Borysenko: These are the seeds of transformation, seeds of essential harmony embedded within us that grow and evolve amidst life-shattering crisis and change.

Our great attitudinal meltdowns generally come on the heels of divorce and other betrayals, illness, grief and sudden loss. Warm dreams and a sweet new awareness may actually arise from the same kinds of nightmares from which you wake up screaming.

Sometimes we think we’d give anything for some plain old monotony but the truth is that everything is always in transition. Accepting impermanence and the option of transformation are both central to growth, in gaining wisdom.

Vibrations: You new book suggests that we take a curious perspective, and ask ourselves the revealing questions relating to “exactly how is it that I’ve landed here in this position, in this way and at this time?”…And then, where do we go from here?

Borysenko: Accepting personal responsibility for what and how we feel can become the express lane, on our path, so that we can finally wake up and stop running in place. Periodic troubles are not the exception, they’re the rule. Openheartedness, a genuine interest in others, and outward-beyond curiosity are characteristics of emotional intelligence. When our heart handles whatever happens out in the world, “come what may,” the real measure of life mastery isn’t about what happens externally; it’s about how we “deal,” on the inside, whether anybody else is watching us or not.

…I wanted to help reground people and help them learn to sense their power and check in with their intuition so that they could make better choices based on personal wisdom.

Vibrations: Within the verses of “To everything there is a season,” Ecclesiastes reminds us to accept impermanence—as does the Buddhist ritual of sand painting, in which artists painstakingly create an elaborate miniature sand Mandala, with the final intention being to whisk it all away after the intricate designs are complete.

Borysenko: Within our book’s initiatory rite of passage, change is the mother of all new life and new growth. Change is the story that always brings us safely home, in this life and in all the other lives. It’s what keeps us all connected, across continents and cultures.

Through the wisdom of self-reflection, friends on this journey together can re-interpret the changing, blurring scenery of shadows and light, streams and meadows. We could always choose to reinvent ourselves in ways that are more insightful, even delightful. During holidays and all year long, embrace new change as if this were the last day and the only day. It’s quite a package, learning how to say yes to change.

		The pain of loss associated with change results in the temporary loss of our habitual identity, or false self. The false self is an idealized image of who we are, adopted in childhood to ease the fear associated with possible rejection and lack of love. When this ego self shatters during intense periods of change, a period of great opportunity opens up. It’s easier to become vulnerable and real, which can lead to a taste of true nature. When loss makes it clear that the false self can’t make us happy, but that our true nature is always accessible, motivation to work toward self-realization increases. This is one of the most precious gifts of change. For more information: www.joanborysenko.com or www.hayhouse.com © Excerpt reprinted with authors’ permission