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.

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.

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Integrative Healthcare Symposium
www.ihsymposium.com

"We can't walk away from this and lead our daily lives as if nothing had happened," Donna Karan immediately thought when she heard about the tragic earthquake in Haiti. "This is a wake-up call, a call to community, to caring, to something greater than ourselves."

Andre Harrell, an entertainment industry executive and founder of Uptown Records, heard the same call. "From the first moment I heard about the crisis in Haiti, I felt a sense of responsibility -- and the question: 'What can I do to help?' It sounds a little mystical but I felt like the universe was speaking to me," he said.

Harrell went through a typical day for him--high level meetings uptown, midtown and downtown in Manhattan. Later at the Boom Boom room, he connected with his friend, Andre Balazs at Balazs' elegant Standard Hotel. "We're great friends and I felt the urgency of finding a way to support him in supporting Haiti," Balazs explained. "This is an opportunity to take advantage of a tragedy to focus the world's attention on an ongoing crisis, and create a sustainable solution."

Before long, the two Andres reached out to Donna Karan, whose Urban Zen Center is just a few blocks away from the Standard.

"We have the passion to support Haiti, we have the dream of making a difference, but the question is how do we make it happen?" Karan asked when the powerhouse creative trio met to discuss partnering to bring together the New York art, music, fashion and entertainment worlds to kick off a benefit called Hope, Help, and Relief Haiti, slated for next Monday, February 8th.

Read rest of article on Huffington Post and comment here.

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As resources and volunteers head to Haiti, I learned that among the medical personnel who have traveled there to serve are Urban Zen presenter and good friend, Dr. Mark Hyman, MD, and his lovely wife, Pier Boutin, also a physician. Traveling with them are a medical team.

The dedicated pair arrived in Port Au Prince on Friday night, and according to a report sent to a colleague, which I'll quote here, they found "the conditions to be absolutely horrific, a scene of death, devastation, and chaos."

“Human poverty is hugely susceptible to nature's depredations, and Haiti, one of the world's poorest countries, has again and again been the victim of demonically destructive wind, rain and flood,” wrote Amy Wilentz who has lived in and written about Haiti.

“In the developed world, such vulnerability would lead quickly to measures for the public safety. But Haitians cannot expect what Paul Farmer, an anthropologist and physician who has worked there for more than two decades, calls 'protection from the foreseeable.'”

I consider myself solution oriented. I was fifteen when this actually dawned on me.

I spent many of my earlier years in and out of doctor’s offices — allergies, asthma, bronchitis and pneumonia. I had regular allergy shots and filled my young body with three inhalers, pills and my “all time favorite” prednisone (a steroid), all to help me breathe. If you know what it’s like not to be able to breathe then you know that you will do ANYTHING you can to open up those airways! And drugs it was! I was young so my parents were calling the shots, not me — until I was fifteen.

I had the good fortune to spend my summers in Montauk, New York, a small beach community at the very tip of the Southern fork of Long Island. My summer job—cooking in the local health food store (a uncommon treasure back in the 1980’s). I was surrounded by the purest foods and food products I had ever laid eyes on — I was a kid in a candy store, but it wasn’t candy I was seeing or buying! It was then that I came upon Food and Healing by Annemarie Colbin—how what you eat determines your health, well-being and quality of life. Needless to say, this was the beginning of a new beginning for me.

I always track the latest health research, the newest recommendations by doctors and experts, the best health books and products. So this year I decided that the most helpful thing I could provide is healthy gifts, that contribute to my loved ones' wellbeing.

So here's my healthy gift list--and I welcome hearing your favorite healthy gift ideas too!

Overall Health

• Why Your Health Matters by Andrew Weil--a must-read on transforming our health care system

• Soul of Healing Affirmation CD by Deepak Chopra--Hear the master of healing bless every organ and cell in the body

• Psychosomatic Wellness CD by Candace Pert - uses healing sound frequencies based on research

• Conscious Breathing CD by Andrew Weil (HealthJourneys.com)

Transforming from Within;

• Smiling at Fear by Chogyam Trungpa (Shambhala 2009)

• The Art of Happiness: Tenth Anniversary Edition by the Dalai Lama (Riverhead, 2009)

• Living Deeply by Marilyn Schlitz et al (IONS/New Harbinger 2008)

• Be the Change by Deb and Ed Shapiro (Sterling 2009)

• Spontaneous Evolution CD series by Bruce Lipton

Noetic Healing Wisdom

• The Power of Premonition by Larry Dossey, MD (Dutton, 2009)

• Morphic Resonance by Rupert Sheldrake (Park Street Press, 2009)

• Ancestral Blueprints by Lisa Iversen (Family Constellations West Press, 2009)

When future generations tell the tale they will recall a time when humanity, our future, and the earth itself were at stake--due to human folly. "But then--" as in a fairy tale, or a folk legend, "a hero came forth to save us.." our great-grandchildren will tell their children.

But the hero wasn't a knight in shining armor, nor all-seeing officers at an omnipotent military command central--no, the hero, or heroes, who came from every corner of the earth, speaking eight languages and representing thirteen different traditions--were thirteen grandmothers, indigenous healers, called forth by dreams and prophecy to join together in common--and uncommon prayer for the earth and its people.

This counsel of thirteen elder wise women have circled the globe, meeting with the Dalai Lama, leading healing ceremonies and prayer circles in India, Nepal, the Amazon, Alaska, Mexico, and Nicaragua; and at a recent Bioneers Conference in California. This week they came to New York City for a weekend of events. On Friday night, the film, For the Next Seven Generations in which filmmaker Carole Hart documents their extraordinary work, made its New York debut at the Urban Zen Center, the welcoming downtown gathering place, founded by Donna Karan. Over the following days, the Jivamukti Yoga Center will host a number of the grandmothers in two evenings of prayers and healing.

In welcoming the grandmothers and introducing the film, Donna Karan revealed that, "To be able to celebrate this film and be with the Grandmothers is a dream come true for me. Urban Zen nurtures the wisdom of the past (in wisdom and indigenous traditions), the present (in health and wellbeing), and the future (through empowering our children). The Grandmothers remind us to celebrate the spirit of Mother Earth."

When your sole surviving parent is in her eighties, you think about thanks in an entirely different way - one day, one holiday, one small blessing at a time. Because you never know whether that person, that familiar face, that ongoing, deepening, shared conversation will be going on over the sweet potatoes and creamed onions next year at this time.

"I never thought I would live this long," Mom says, "I never wanted to be an old person. I don't like old people."

Well, unlike Mom, I do.

There are a few special older people whom I really love and am grateful for. Mom is one of them. A brilliant and vibrant man with whom I am blessed to work is another. Plus a few approaching the cusp of elderhood, who have so touched my heart and my life, that I stand in the world and walk on paths they have cleared with a steadiness of gait and sureness of direction that I could not imagine feeling without their having made the way.

Despite their aches and pains, the slower gait, the lost keys, lost words, lost memories Despite their soul sadness as they contemplate the world facing the little ones. Despite their occasional and worrisome medical encounters, the eternal health "what-if" scenarios that play like a buzz in the background, despite the uncertainty you push aside about whether you will have one more day, one more holiday, one more year, or one more decade with these special elders. Despite all of it, you learn about life, its preciousness, and the need for daily gratitude from those who march ahead of you on lifespan's forward moving curve...

When people continue to grow and evolve and serve and care over a lifetime, they are able to share the precious gift of elder wisdom, which traditional societies prized above any other form of accumulation. In a society where novelty and constant self-reinvention are the norm, where tips, items, and info flow towards us, striking the shore of instant awareness, and disappearing moments later, like an endless sea of flotsam, I am thankful for the more slowly distilled elixir of a lifetime that Mom and some of the elders serve up.

Over Thanksgiving, with a few friends, I trouped over to Mom's home, high atop a hill, overlooking a misty heathery landscape where two ponds, visibly, vividly blue in summertime, now seemed pale, and mirage like through the autumnal veils of fog. Down in the dunes, cranberry bogs served up the their harvest of autumnal fruits - as we hung out with Mom, peeled onions, skinned sweet potatoes, chopped apples, and watched Charlie Rose, her favorite program. Thanks to extra hands, and friends, and fellowship, we were all prepped for the day of cooking and conversation on Thanksgiving.

And with that day, when the moment for blog writing faced me, there was nothing more important to share, no agenda or teaching more urgent, than to simply open up the space to feel the simple gratitude for another day with loved ones, another meal, another conversation, a sharing, a moment of laughter at ourselves, a tablespoon of tart orange cranberry relish, and another holiday with you, Mom.

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