On Healing Our Distressed Nervous Systems
The fourth episode in our Wisdom Season
The years of pandemic and lockdown are still working powerfully on us from the inside. But we have trouble acknowledging this, much less metabolizing it. This conversation with Christine Runyan, which took place in the dark middle of those years, helps make sense of our present of still-unfolding epidemic distress — as individuals, as communities, as a species. She has cultivated a reverence for the human nervous system. She tells truths about our bodies that western medicine itself is only fitfully learning to see. This quiet conversation is not just revelatory, but healing and calming. It holds startling prescience about some of what we're navigating now. And it offers self-compassion and simple strategies for finding ease within ourselves — and with each other — as we live forward from here.
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Christine Runyan is a clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the UMass Chan Medical School. She is a certified mindfulness teacher, and she co-founded and co-leads Tend Health, a clinical consulting practice focused on the mental well-being of health care practitioners.
A Special Offering
In a time of stress, uncertainty, and isolation, Christine Runyan turns our attention to what often evades our awareness — the response of our nervous systems. Try this body scan to re-center yourself.
In the World
For Listening and Watching
Krista with Tulaine Montgomery: Say More podcast
A joyful, wide-ranging conversation about spirituality, race, and life with a podcast host Krista loves as an interviewer and a human being. Tulaine Montgomery is the host and an entrepreneur, activist, musician, and CEO of the venture philanthropy firm New Profit. Learn more at tulainemontgomery.com — and listen to the full conversation wherever podcasts are found.
Krista with Ken Burns: UNUM Chat
Krista is honored to join esteemed filmmaker Ken Burns for a discussion about the evolving role of spirituality and religion in modern life, the intersection of personal beliefs with public discourse, and the ways historical events shape contemporary societal issues — and the challenges of maintaining spiritual bonds in a diverse society and the importance of finding common ground in a fragmented world.
Learn more about UNUM — Ken's digital resource drawing on his extensive filmography for educators, students, and citizens — and watch the full conversation on KenBurnsUNUM.com.
As we negotiate this Anthropocene and its decay, we need such advice.
As an individual with diagnosed OCD, which centers around distress in my somatic experience, I always appreciate attention being called to healing the nervous system. How many of our issues would be relieved with increased healing!