COMMITMENT TO CHANGE

At the general hospital supported by Paul Farmer's team with Partners in Health, we met a wonderful nurse. “Where do you start?” I asked.

She replied, “The basics. We need water shelter and basic medical supplies and transportation”

The nurses are burnt out, they are working and living in appalling conditions and they need so much help. There is so much to do. There are no words. The women need support!

Suddenly there was a scream. Quickly we turned around. Marc Baptiste went to respond, and I asked the nurse there was screaming. She said his baby just died, the mother was in the tent screaming for the loss. The family had been waiting for 3 day's to get seen. God Bless them.

We then met up with Real Medicine Foundation. We saw a clinic they created. Here, my hope returned. It was a vision of hope. It was organized, and hygienic. People were being seen. The dignity was returning. The life was beginning.

I also spent some time with Yele Haiti. One distinctive memory is spending time with a Yele representative, racing through Haiti at what felt like 100 miles an hour to see that they are distributing items.

CONNECT

Partners in Health

www.pih.org

Real Medicine Foundation
www.realmedicinefoundation.org

Yéle Haiti Foundation

www.yelehaiti.org

MOMENTS OF HOPE

The camps nearby a clinic supported by Alison Thompson and Sean Penn broke my aching heart. I didn’t think I could feel more helpless, but the situation there dug even deeper in my heart. And my heart was torn right through. Mothers with their babies were coming up to the clinic, all with great needs. Alison was saying the women really need domestic support, especially protection from being sexually and physically abused, and the children need to have more activities and security.

Where do you begin? I felt anger and confusion in the camp. I called it the Bittersweet Camp. But there is no doubt that this wonderful woman, Alison, and Sean Penn are doing the most extraordinary work. Their intention is to stay for a year to serve the medical needs of the community.  Please help us help them.

The second time we went to see the area, the development was remarkable. A small school had begun to develop. Red Cross was delivering clean water. At last, food was being delivered and bellies were being filled. But the anger was still palapable. Help is needed to teal with the aftermath of trauma.

We also went to the outer cities near Port-au-Prince. Jacmel, by the sea, and Croix des Bouquet were also hit hard. The difference is, there were not as many buildings to begin with.  So it looks like there was less devestation, but the need is still great. The outer cities need tents so badly.

We went to see David Bell's school, the Cine Institute, which has been relocated outside of town. It was a beautiful sight, young kids sharing stories, families of hope and life. There is more hope to rebuild this beautiful town. There is passion, life and power here. I truly fell in love with this amazing place.

As health care reform staggers along in the political realm, let’s feel grateful to those who don’t hesitate to stand up for the health of our children. With actions that speak louder than the words of a partisan political debate, two organizations, HealthCorps, launched by Mehmet Oz, MD and his wife, Lisa Oz, and Urban Zen, the foundation launched by Donna Karan, joined forces to share creative solutions for children’s health concerns. Since 2007, Urban Zen’s Health and Wellbeing Initiative has offered an ongoing series of public forums on wellness and nutrition for health, while HealthCorps’ school-based program has expanded nationwide to empower young people to become agents for healthy change.

A Weekend of Inspiration

The minute I heard of the Women in the World Conference, I wanted to be there. All my senses and emotions were evoked - from the heart to the mind.

I love seeing women supporting women. And these women, from a global perspective, are outstanding. It is impossible to acknowledge all of them, but if I could highlight just a few:

* Tina Brown - Journalist, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Daily Beast. She moderated a discussion on human trafficking, the world's third largest black market.

* Diane Sawyer - Journalist, ABC News Anchor, moderated a discussion on what it takes to undo misogynistic traditions in culture.

* Her Majesty Queen Rania of Jordan - UNICEF advocate, spoke on the urgent need to keep girls around the world in school and help them avoid early marriage and HIV-infection.

* Edna Adan Ismail - Maternal and Child Health Care Activist and

Former Foreign Affairs Minister of Somaliland, shared about her community hospital in Somalia.

Hearing these stories from a global perspective, and issues that we should truly all talk about, was a reminder to continue to find solutions. We at Urban Zen practice this on a day-to-day basis.

Please go to the Women in the World Website and enjoy what I enjoyed. It was an honor to witness the conference. The selection of minds, the intellectual approaches and the creativity of these people were an inspiration, and it would be a joy to return next year.

CONNECT

Women in the World

www.thedailybeast.com/newsmaker/women-in-the-world

Urban Zen Furniture Collection

The first time I went to Bali, I instantly and passionately fell in love. With the lush countryside, of course. But the furniture also captured my heart – and my imagination. Here was style, strong, simple and authentic. The teak did the talking, the artisan hand did the sculpting. I wanted to live this way in every room, in every home, be it city, beach, Parrot Cay. I designed pieces to suit my lifestyle. I met with local artisans and detailed modern proportions and the purest, most elemental, yet highly functional shapes. I brought it all home, and now through Urban Zen, I bring it all to you. Entirely handmade, these pieces are the essence of comfort, the contrast of strong lines and soft pillows. Elemental, timeless, sophisticated, luxurious, they work with any décor or sensibility. There’s a variety of colors/stains, be it natural, aged, golden honey, brown or black lacquer. You’ll love how the pieces entertain, and how they sleep. You’ll love how they seduce your imagination, taking you around the world, while being completely and sensually at home.

Now the journey begins. It is truly a pleasure and honor to be partnering with ABC Home and my dear friend Paulette Cole, to bring you this collection. What a beautiful environment to show something that is so exciting and close to my heart. Two hearts, two visions. Please enjoy.

Farewell, and see you soon. The journey is not over.

My heart is filled with sadness and I wonder why. I'm leaving here, leaving Port au Prince, Haiti. This is a place I have fallen in love with. Love for the people. Love for the passion and the pure fight for life. Love for the determination to continue to find pride and dignity in these terrible condition. It is inspiring here, in a way that is beyond words.

We truly have to do something that will begin to bring the basic necessities for life to these beautiful people. The children are ill, the systems are down, the rainy season is beginning. When the rainy season and then the hurricane season start, and the skies open up, health standards will be harder to maintain, disease and infection could spread more rampantly with the increased vulnerability of people’s bodies in those conditions, all of which could lead to more fatalities. “The prospect of bad weather has aid workers and homeless people scared,” reports The Guardian.

There must been basic needs meet so healing can happen. There is still hunger, sadness and anger.

Thank you Haiti for opening my heart and being kind and passionate.
Thank you Marc Baptiste for protecting me and being my angel. But the rainy season is coming! Please God help them, if families do not get homes they need to be brought to places to stay protected and safe.

Donna Karan is truly committed to continuing the Tent Campaign.

Feb. 26 to 27, 2010

The last weekend of February brought together a group of UZITS at the Integrative Healthcare Symposium, which included many of our curriculum's guest speakers including Dr. Christiane Northrup, Dr. Mark Hyman and Dr. Woodson Merrell. For two days, the Urban Zen Integrative Therapy booth welcomed more than 200 symposium guests as they experienced the calming influence of Reiki and essential oil therapy in the midst of lectures, homeopathic supplements and other alternative treatments. Our visitors agreed that their brief experience with the therapies our UZITS offered was not only restorative but a vital path to the future of integrative healthcare.

CONNECT

Integrative Healthcare Symposium
www.ihsymposium.com

Donna Karan and Sonja Nuttall are thrilled to be empowered and inspired by the beautiful and intelligent women in the Women in the World Conference.

CONNECT

Women in the World
www.thedailybeast.com/newsmaker/women-in-the-world

There's an experiment going on right now--but it isn't being conducted by scientists. It's being conducted by parents. In 30 million kitchens across the U.S. that experiment is called  "What Can My Child Eat?" In families with children with autism and allergies, the result of that experiment can either be a day of relative calm and comfort, or it can produce anything from brain fog, digestive discomfort, and mood swings, to pain, seizures, skin outbreaks, and severe digestive distress.

In today's uncertain world, we can be certain of at least one thing--that science can provide us with the proof that we seek.Or can we?

According to the world-class scientists at the Sages and Scientists Symposium organized by Deepak Chopra and Rustum Roy last week, the foundational laws of science reveal a whole lot. But neither proof, certainty, nor even matter itself are engraved on the checklist. Proof is dependent, certainty, uncertain--and matter? Well, it doesn't exist. At the core of reality, everything is in play, dynamic, interactive, shape changing--and uncertain.
Bad news for a health journalist like me? Maybe. And maybe not. I've spent the last twenty years dutifully pegging each health recommendation, blog, or book to the "latest research which proves that X does Y to Z."

But the more I learned, the more I learned to question whether the "proof" was as air tight as health experts, researchers, and journalists like me assume. While we reassured people that research shows that "this works for that," evidence mounted that medical science's well advertised white-coated certainty--was contradicted by the warnings in the fine print.
What if we could no longer assert the primacy (and certainty of) biomedicine as the ultimate authority of human life? What if its microscopic analysis, though often useful, presumed too much, omitted too much, and at the end of the day would prove to be the scientific equivalent of foot-binding-- a little too narrow?

Last weekend in Carlsbad, California, I got a rare chance to ask and get answers about this. Welcomed by Deepak Chopra, world class international scientists gathered to share with the public the frontier science they usually reserve for dense papers read by their colleagues.

During dazzling exchanges among brilliant scientists of diverse disciplines, it became clear that biomedical science, however helpful, was just one kid on the scientific block-- the child and grandchild of other senior branches of science,--like biology, chemistry, and physics.
But can biomedicine learn to respect its elders--and play better with its peers?
For example, with all the evidence of nonlocal/nonsensory observation, intention, and knowledge, Chopra and other scientists question why biomedicine insists that awareness is just a biochemical secretion.

What about its first cousin, the so-called soft social sciences? Nowadays, cuz's emotionally intelligent questions sound more relevant, such as "How well is this health model working for people, children, families, communities, the economy, and our society?"
"Scientists conduct research as if the laws of nature were fixed," said Vladimir Voeikov, a biologist who came from Moscow where he's the Chairman of Bioorganic Chemistry at a major university. "But in living systems, everything is changing. As a scientist, my goal is to understand the ways that living systems self-organize and regulate for change."
"Science has to go beyond its laboratory confines to reveal the real environmental and social dangers we face now, and to indicate the opportunities to renew ourselves on this planet." posited pioneering systems theorist Ervin Laszlo.

Unfortunately, said Larry Dossey, "We're up against an old science in which consciousness is local, finite, and physical with no direction, and no meaning. One prominent scientist called humans nothing but computers made of meat.""The physical body and world are symbolic representations of qualities of consciousness. They appear outside but are within consciousness," said Deepak Chopra who called for the transformation of awareness as a crucial lever for change.

As Chopra pointed out, in quantum physics, matter fluctuates between a wave and a particle, only "collapsing into manifestation" in response to an observer. Not only do differing levels of awareness lead people to perceive the world differently, but through our awareness and conscious and unconscious layers of intention, we all participate in creating what manifests.

As a result, the absolute, unalterable certainty humans seek cannot be measured, proven, and frozen into a fixed form. But certainty can perhaps be found as "an inner experience of oneness, in which the distinction between object and subject dissolve," Chopra says.
If science's task is to reflect reality, what happens to us and to our planet when instead our science treats dynamic life forms as fixed, dead, separate, and devoid of awareness and organizing intelligence, rather than as mutually interdependent and connected?
Has our quest for absolute certainty led us to parse reality into manageable pieces while myopically overlooking the whole?

"What many call science is really a religion, enforced by the popes and the cardinals of academia. Their quest is for grants, not scientific inquiry," said Rustum Roy, a distinguished material scientist and water researcher at Pennsylvania State University. A long-time champion of cross-disciplinary science, it was Roy who had invited many of his esteemed colleagues to gather at the Symposium.

One was physicist Hans Peter Duerr, a successor to Werner Heisenberg, the discoverer of the famous Uncertainty Principle, a foundation of quantum science."We want it to be either yes, or no. But the truth is always somewhere on the way between yes and no," said Duerr. "What makes humans think that cosmic design can be totally apprehended by the human brain or captured by human logic or language?" Duerr asked. "If you're so sure that you know exactly what something means--you're probably wrong. If you're uncertain about what's going on, you're on the right track."

Can we take in the humility of this deeper scientific view and allow it to shape our science and our lives? Instead of trying to erase uncertainty, what would happen if we were to accept it? Can we let go of proving what's right?  Can not knowing, and being vulnerable pave the way to mutual respect, and interdependence--between people, and between branches of science?

"We are in a transitional period. People are disoriented and suffering. We have to wake up and that means the system itself has to change," Laszlo reminded us. According to Voeikov, "It's not that we must compete with each other-- but we must together develop the most harmonious strategies for life." "We need community to share the complexities of our own evolution," offered Marilyn Schlitz, President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
In this time of transition, Duerr counseled, "The fittest who survive are those who know best how to cooperate."

Demanding a science that gave me and my readers definite answers, I lost the open science that asked questions. At Sages and Scientists, I rediscovered that science and it's still as uncertain as ever.
Go to www.DeepakChopra.com to watch video interviews with these great scientists.

For more on Sages and Scientists, (and health, psychological, and spiritual insight), follow me on Twitter @AlisonRoseLevy, or get my ezine at: www.healthjournalist.com