On Saturday, August 21, 2010, Donna Karan was honored at the Ellen’s Run Gala held by the Ellen Hermanson Foundation for her vision in the field of integrative cancer care for patients and their families.

Fellow honorees Steven Klein and sister, Hope Klein, hosted the event in their Bridgehampton home. Co-chair Christy Brinkley looked amazing in an Urban Zen creation.

Donna was deeply moved by the Ellen Hermanson Foundation’s nomination. Established in 1997, the foundation carries on the important work of journalist Ellen Hermanson, who was a forceful voice for breast cancer patients and their families. Hermanson educated her readers about the importance of early detection, the challenges of living with breast cancer, the very real, but little-discussed or understood issue of pain management, and the debilitating effects of breast cancer on the entire family.

The Ellen Hermanson Foundation primarily serves breast cancer patients on the East End of Long Island where breast cancer diagnosis and mortality rates are among the highest in the state. Urban Zen and Donna Karan are truly honored to have been apart of such an empowering evening.

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Ellen Hermanson Foundation  |  www.ellensrun.org

Dean Ornish, M.D., is the founder and president of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California and is a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. For over 32 years, Dr. Ornish has directed clinical research demonstrating, for the first time, that comprehensive lifestyle changes may begin to reverse even severe coronary heart disease, without drugs or surgery.

We are honored that Dr. Dean Ornish was a part of the Well-Being Forum in 2009 and would like to share this clip of Dean Ornish, M.D.. In this clip, Ornish discusses healing, integrative medicine practices and empowering patients. We are happy to see he is continuing his great work within the medical world.

Donna Karan recently hosted a screening of The Big C, Showtime's newest drama about a suburban mother (played by Laura Linney) diagnosed with cancer, trying to find humor in the disease. When Showtime asked Andrew Saffir of the Cinema Society to organize the premiere in the Hamptons, he says, "One person, and only one person, came to mind: the amazing Donna Karan." Donna started the Urban Zen Foundation a few years to, and in the words of Andrew, "has made great strides in supporting cancer treatment and care and well-being, in part with her integrated therapist program, among others."

For those very reasons, the outdoor screening, a private event at Donna's South Hampton home, was a natural for Donna. During her welcome speech, she introduced the Urban Zen Integrative Therapy Program to a full house packed with guests such as Laura Linney; Matt Blank, Chairman & CEO, Showtime; Sarah Jessica Parker, Martha Stewart, Edie Falco, Calvin Klein and Gaborey Sidibe.  "Without question, at one point or another in our lifetime, each of us will be a patient as will our loved ones," Donna says.

The Urban Zen Integrative Therapy program was created to help create an optimal healing experience fo patients, loved ones, doctors and nurses. Each Integrative Therapy student undergoes a 12-month, 500-hour curriculum, including clinical rotations. Urban Zen Foundation is proud and honored to assist patients, loved ones and care givers on the path to wellness.

May 4^th was a gala celebration and a milestone for both Urban Zen Foundation and the Continuum Center for Health and Healing (CCHH) as Donna Karan was honored for her generosity and steadfast dedication to well-being, patients and integrative medicine and the CCHH celebrated its 10^th anniversary.

Donna stood before hundreds of guests as she shared her personal experiences as the “loved one” of several cancer patients, including her late husband Stephan Weiss. Her moving remarks touched upon the universal nature of caring and loss, reminding the audience that in our lifetime, we will all become a patient or the loved one of a patient. By addressing the needs of the patient as well as the disease by integrating eastern healing techniques with western science, hospital care will not only treat the disease but guide patients and their loved ones towards well-being through the simple practices these modalities offer.

The evening’s presentation opened with chair yoga led by Shana Kuhn-Siegel, a UZIT and the UZ yoga coordinator at BIMC, creating an atmosphere of calm and openness. After Donna’s moving acceptance remarks, guests were treated to a live performance of soulful and inspiring music performed by Elvis Costello.

The evening was a defining moment for Urban Zen. Our well-being programs, inspired and guided by Donna, have gained significant momentum. Last year, Dr. Woodson Merrell, founder of CCHH and Chairman of Integrative Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center, partnered with Donna and Urban Zen to introduce an Optimum Healing Environment. This pilot program has several components, including research, the renovation of hospital space to create The Sanctuary, a serene space for patients, loved ones and staff as well as the introduction of Urban Zen Integrative Therapists on 9 Dazian, where UZITS have cared for oncology patients.

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"The way we think about medicine is all wrong." Mark Hyman told participants at a half day seminar he offered last week at the Urban Zen Center in downtown New York-- where Donna Karan's Urban Zen Foundation holds a series of health seminars

"We used to have acute diseases and infectious diseases, but now we have long-latency deficiency diseases. If you don't have adequate minerals for thirty years, ultimately you get osteoporosis," he said. "But why wait that long? Shouldn't we do something now?"

Hyman questions why conventional doctors fail to offer immediate nutritional interventions that could stem a full blow disease before it happens. Instead "They tell patients, let's wait and watch. Why wait until you're sick, and then place you on a costly medication--often with side effects--for life? It doesn't make sense."

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.

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

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

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Donna Karan, founder of the Urban Zen Foundation, is speaking at TEDMED 09.TEDMED (Technology, Education, Design, Medicine), celebrates conversations that highlight the intersection between all things medical and healthcare related. The conference taps into the today’s most pressing issues and tomorrow’s most innovative solutions. This year, speakers include Dean Ornish, Jesse Dylan, Martha Stewart, Annie Wojcicki, Andrew Weil and Goldie Hawn, with presentations and discussions that focus on areas such as public health, wellbeing, science and health related technology, and intelligent design. It is the perfect medium for Donna to share her story and speak on patient care. We could not be more excited to be a part of this event and to take one more step towards realizing our mission of caring for the patient and making an impact on the healthcare system.

Please visit www.urbanzen.org to view the talk after October 30, and contact us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it if you would like more information.

Ninety nurses from fifteen different states from across the country participated in a weekend of healing and self-care for themselves. It is so often in our medical system that the caregivers do not take care of themselves. Urban Zen was excited to host this magical weekend along with the Nightingale Initiative for Global Health and the EarthRose Institute.

The nurses learned how to focus on their intention, how to develop a self-care plan from a integral and holistic model of nursing, how to use nutritional healing with their patients, how to create optimum healing environments, and how to use aromatherapy with their patients. Threaded into the weekend were yoga, breathing, qigong and imagery exercises.

The heartfelt thanks Urban Zen has received since the weekend has made our vision clearer that we are on the right path in helping nurses get back in touch with their dreams of helping others.