Healer's Art wellness and humanism course available to faculty physicians begins tomorrow
The Healer’s Art course is returning to VUMC this spring, running through February and March 2020. This course has been offered for the past several years to medical students as an evening elective, and now, due to generous support from the VUMC Health and Wellness team, it will have an expanded offering this spring to include any interested physician faculty as well.
Overview and Description:
The Healer’s Art is an innovative discovery model course in values-clarification and professionalism now offered annually at 90+ U.S. medical schools as well as medical schools around the world. Designed in 1991 by Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, the course offers a safe learning environment for a personal in-depth exploration of the time-honored values of service, healing relationship, reverence for life, and compassionate care.
The Healer’s Art course utilizes principles of adult education, contemplative studies, humanistic and transpersonal psychology, cognitive psychology, formation education, creative arts, and storytelling to present and explore human dimensions of medicine rarely discussed in our work in medicine. Topics covered include deep listening, presence, acceptance, loss, grief, healing, relationship, encounters with awe and mystery, and self-care practices. The curriculum enables us to uncover and strengthen the altruistic values, sense of calling, and intention to serve that have led us to medicine, creating a firm foundation for meeting the challenging demands of contemporary medical practice.
This course enables the formation of a genuine community of inquiry that encourages an in-depth sharing of experiences, beliefs, aspirations, and personal truths. This discovery model transcends the divisiveness of expertise to explore service as a way of life. The process-based curriculum takes an interactive, contemplative, and didactic approach to explore the personal and universal meaning in the daily work of medicine.
Eligible Faculty:
Any VUMC faculty physicians are eligible to attend.
Course Structure/Schedule:
This course consists of five evening sessions, Wednesdays from 6:30 p.m.-9:30 p.m.*, which will take place at Eskind Biomedical Library on the main VUH campus.
*The first session this year will start at 7:30pm to accommodate a medical school event on the same evening. All others will start at 6:30pm.
The five session dates and topics are:
February 12th, 2020, 7:30pm-9:30pm: Session 1, Discovering and Nurturing Your Wholeness (note, this first session only will start at 7:30pm to accommodate a medical school event also occurring that date).
February 26, 2020: Session 2, Honoring Grief and Loss, Part One
March 4, 2020: Session 3, Honoring Grief and Loss, Part Two
March 11, 2020: Session 4, Beyond Analysis: Mystery and Awe
March 25, 2020: Session 5, Care of the Soul: Service as a Way of Life
NOTE: Attendance is mandatory for all sessions, due to the importance of community-building for the small group sessions during the span of the course. Please check the dates carefully below before you sign up to make sure you can attend all the sessions.
More Information:
Link, including introductory video: http://www.rishiprograms.org/healers-art/
To sign up, or for other questions, contact the course director, Andy Wooldridge (andrew.wooldridge@vumc.org, 323-447-0899)