(Aka:  Health and Mental Health Care Professionals (Conventional and Complementary-Alternative), Educators, Alcohol and Drug Counselors, Ministers and Spiritual Directors, etc.)  Our list of Who's Who in the definition of Healer just keeps expanding...Pretty Amazing!

• A special thanks to Dr. Dawn Vo-Jutahba, Training Director for The Guidance Center in Long Beach, CA and their vibrant staff!  What an engaging day of training on Compassion Fatigue!  Welcome to many of you who are joining The Healer's Life! this issue!  

• Also, looking forward to speaking at Fusion Academy  ( October 25) to their community of health and mental health care professionals, educators, and parents on the Power of Collaborative Treatment Teaming in Therapeutic Education. And addressing the  Transience and Permanence of Counter-Transference over lifespan - A Woman's Journey as Psychodynamic Psychotherapist at IFPE Conference (October 31-November2)!

This month, I want to guide you to be mindfully mundane.  By this I mean practicing mindfulness during the mundane, routine, necessary-but-not-necessarily-fun aspects of your life.  I am a go-go-go type of person.  I thrive off meeting new people, and reconnecting with old friends and colleagues over coffee, lunch or a good glass of wine.  I thrill in speaking and teaching audiences and meeting individuals and couples in the intimate space of psychological and relational healing.  And I truly enjoy going to soccer games, marching band competitions, and traveling with my  husband and family. Yet as life-giving as these activities can be for me, if I delve fully into each of these areas of functioning without paying attention to my whole being from a quiet, centered, and attuned place, I can find myself quite out of balance, increasingly less effective, less fulfilled, and ultimately exhausted and physically ill; emotionally and spiritually not so well or balanced as well!

Mindfully Mundane...

I have found that practicing being mindful in the mundane can be a powerful rudder to my sometimes unwieldy little speedboat of a self!  (Actually sailing may be a better boat metaphor for me to live!) Being choicefully conscious and present to myself and to the activity in which I am engaged, especially if it is mundane, can be profoundly life-centering and life-giving.  When I am mindful while doing dishes, laundry, or cleaning my home, I often experience a sense of expanded space and time.  This is typically accompanied by an increased capacity to breathe along with improved energy and restored mind-body-spirit-relational functioning.  While practicing mindfulness when driving my car, I can find the drive from home to office and from office to home or other destination to actually be calming and rejuvenating (yes, even in Los Angeles!);  it can result in my consciously choosing a certain CD or download, radio channel, or just silence that meets my current mind-body-spirit-relational needs in that moment.  Even grocery shopping can become a refueling of spirit and emotion, a mental and physical reordering, and yes, even relationally lightening with the discovery of spontaneously kind and sometimes simple and even playful human interactions with strangers as I shop or check out.

Call me crazy, but slowing down and quieting to self during your mundane tasks - those necessary, sometimes unexpected and definitely not glorious tasks that keep your life running in the background - can actually be the key to experiencing more joy, success, fulfillment and profound healing in your life and the very work that is often more overtly valued and in the spotlight - as a professional,  a parent, a son or daughter, a partner and lover.

So go ahead, as you empty the dishwasher tonight, fold that basket of clothes, or repair that leaky faucet, make a choice, quiet inward and be Mindfully Mundane.

Peace, Joy, Restoration and Sweet Discovery to you Oh Healer,