Hope You’ll Come Say Hi at One of My Upcoming Talks

Hi Friends: First I want to say a heartfelt thank you to the hundreds of women who reached out to me, offering to be interviewed for my next book, THE ANGEL AND THE ASSASSIN: The Tiny Cell That Changed the Course of Medicine, and Gives us a Radically New Way of Looking at Human Well-Being, which will be published by Ballantine Books (Random House) in 2019. Your emails and stories, moved me. I’m on a mission to de-stigmatize brain-related health challenges, and you’ve once again proven you’re the best readers on the planet. (I do have all the interviewees I need at this point, and thank you all for offering to help. You’re amazing.) I hope the book, when it comes out, helps every one of you. I’m setting out to show — based on hundreds of hours of interviews with neuroscientists and thousands of research papers — how and why symptoms of depression, anxiety, learning disabilities, OCD, memory issues, and Alzheimer’s are unequivocally related to tiny, overlooked (and all too often, overactive) brain immune cells – called microglia – which function as the “white blood cells of the brain.” When these little cells get agitated by triggers like toxins, infections, stressors, physical or emotional trauma, they can destroy brain synapses and circuitry, causing “neuroinflammation” and “neurodegeneration,” the same way that your white blood cells cause inflammation in your body. This truly amazing discovery – and the new understanding that the brain is an immune organ, ruled by these little immune cells — is one of the most revolutionary discoveries in the history of science, and it’s changing everything, including leading to exciting new avenues for treating seemingly intractable life-altering disorders. To report this book, I’ve been traveling all over the country. What I’m finding is pretty much blowing my mind. (For updates, sign up for my blog and newsletter (scroll down on the right hand column of this page!) Meanwhile, I’ll be giving several exciting lectures this fall and I hope some of you will be able to come say hi. (Psst… if you’re a UK reader, I’ll be in London soon to deliver the keynote for an international conference on chronic pain, held by the amazing group, SIRPA, at the Royal Society of Medicine (details below). Please join us and say hi!) Here are a few of the upcoming venues where I’ll be giving keynotes and doing booksignings: October 2-3, 2017 Keynote Speaker, Booksigning and Workshop, Children’s Trust of South Carolina 2017 Prevention Conference: Embracing Prevention, Empowering Communities Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center 1101 Lincoln Street, Columbia, S.C. Register here. October 15, 2017 Keynote Speaker, SIRPA Chronic Pain Conference Chronic Pain: The Role of Emotions Royal Society of Medicine London, England Award-winning science journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa who will discuss the decades of research linking adverse childhood experiences to ill-health, including chronic pain, in later life. To learn more about the role of Adverse Childhood Experiences and emotions in chronic pain, register here. October 19th, 2017 Keynote Speaker Stony Brook Children’s Hospital School Intervention Program, Helping Children with Chronic Illnesses Thrive I’ll be talking about Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology – and how we can help kids facing chronic conditions and medical adversity achieve resiliency and well-being. Stony Brook, New York Register here.   November 14th, 2017 1 p.m. EST, I’ll be giving a live interactive chat & talk on Survival of the Nurtured: Well-Being, Self-Care, and ACEs, as part of ACEs Connection 2017 Parenting With ACEs Fall Chat Series (Members of ACEs Connection can Join Parenting with ACEs Community & go there at time/day of chat. If you’re not a Member of ACEs Connection, you can become a Member (free). Join ACEs Connection a day or more before chat. Then, join the Parenting with ACEs Community (PWA) & go there at time/day of chat. See “featured chat” at top of PWA page.) Be sure to check out the other speakers, too — the amazing Sebern Fisher, and Belleruth Naparstek.) Also, I thought I’d share this essay one more time; it recently went viral with over 2 million hits worldwide. If it resonates with you, feel free to share on social media. It’s about the importance of the medical profession becoming trauma-informed to better help patients: Childhood Trauma Leads to Lifelong Chronic Illness – So Why isn’t the Medical Community Helping Patients? Hope to see you at one of the above events. And you can always find me on Facebook or Twitter. Here’s to your healing, Donna

Want to Be Part of My Next Book Project?

Hello friends: For my next book, I’m interviewing women and young adults experiencing mood, anxiety and/or learning/cognitive issues, who are curious about the concept that brain based symptoms have neurobiological, immunological, physical roots. If you are, or know, a woman in mid-life, for whom this resonates, and are in an extended family that faces depression, anxiety, mood and learning/cognitive issues, and would like to share your experiences and possibly have me report on your journey of discovery, please message me (or have them message me) by commenting below, or, contact me privately, here. If you have a family history of mental health and autoimmune disorders, this is also relevant. Interviewees can absolutely be disguised. In this book, called THE ANGEL AND THE ASSASSIN: The Tiny Cell That Changed the Course of Medicine, and Gives us a Radically New Way of Looking at Human Well-Being, which will be published by Ballantine Books (a division of Random House) in 2019, I’m looking at groundbreaking, recent scientific discoveries at top labs around the country showing unequivocally that symptoms of depression, anxiety, learning disabilities, OCD, memory issues, and Alzheimer’s emerge because of overactive brain immune cells – called microglia – which function as the “white blood cells of the brain.” In the face of 21st Century triggers — from stress to toxins – these little cells get agitated and destroy neurons and synapses, causing “neuroinflammation” and “neurodegeneration,” the same way that your white blood cells cause inflammation in your body. This discovery – and the new understanding that the brain is an immune organ, ruled by immune cells (just like all the other organs in the human body) is one of the most exciting and important discoveries in the history of science, and is leading to exciting new avenues for treating seemingly intractable life-altering disorders. The fact that our brain is an immune organ and is affected by our immune health on a cellular level is not often addressed, yet this fact can have a profound effect on how individuals view their suffering, and the treatment they seek. My goal is to de-stigmatize these diseases by taking you into cutting edge labs where neuroscientists are showing that brain based disorders are due to physical changes that lead to disease symptoms – and show what we can do to heal. Thanks!! If this whole idea captures your imagination, and you and or your family are affected by these disorders – let me know!!! In other recent news, I so enjoyed lecturing at this year’s Learning & The Brain Conference, in Arlington, Virginia. (Learning & The Brain teams up with Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and other leading institutes to provide the latest findings on brain health and brain resiliency). I loved talking to an amazing group of educators about Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology – and how important mentors, adults and teachers are in helping kids achieve resiliency and well-being. In my fall lecture series I’ll be speaking at venues including the amazing SIRPA international conference on chronic pain in London in October 2017;  Stonybrook Children’s Hospital, in Stonybrook, New York; and the South Carolina Children’s Trust, among other venues. Don’t forget — reach out if my newest book resonates with you — I’d really love to talk to you! Comment below, or, if you prefer, contact me privately. Or, ping me on Facebook! Thanks so much! Donna P.S. In case it’s helpful, fyi, I’m told that this weekend Childhood Disrupted is at its all time lowest price on Amazon — under $10. Save Save Save

Come Join Me For Talks & Booksignings in July 2015 on Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal!

Hope you can come join me on Tuesday July 7th at 7:00 at Baltimore’s lovely Ivy Bookshop for a talk, chat, and booksigning! Tuesday, July 7th, 2015 7:00 p.m. Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal — a Discussion & Book Signing with Donna Jackson Nakazawa http://www.theivybookshop.com/ Or, come join me on Friday, July 17th at the Annapolis Bookstore for a talk, chat, and booksigning! Friday, July 17, 2015 7:00 p.m. Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal — a Discussion & Book Signing with Donna Jackson Nakazawa Front Page Hope to see you at one of these!

Talking on NPR about The Last Best Cure

I really enjoyed a great discussion today with Dan Rodricks, the host of the NPR show, Midday, on WYPR, Baltimore’s Public Radio station. Dan is smart, genuine, and asks great questions. We really delved into why I wrote The Last Best Cure, the science behind it, and how I hope it can help readers with chronic conditions. You can listen to the entire show by clicking on the podcast at this link: http://wypr.org/post/last-best-cure. This photo has nothing to do with this show — I am just reposting it here because I like it and it makes me smile!

The Ones Who’ve Helped us Along the Way

Yesterday I was struggling to manage a few swirling mind states — you know, those fears, resentments and regrets that well up, or at least they do for me. I just could not find any inner compassion for my own life mistakes. My suffering was mind-wrought, and doing me no good, but even knowing all that I could not manage my thoughts. Then I remembered a type of meditation that has helped me get unstuck in the past. It is taught by many but my favorite version is by John Makransky. It’s called “Identifying Benefactors and Receiving Love.” So I got it out again, that tape, as a rescue remedy (you can listen to his free 13 minute audio version at this link). It’s pretty healing stuff. Here’s how a “receiving benefactors” meditation works, in case you feel inclined to give it a try. Makransky asks us to first think of people in our lives whom we might think of as benefactors, those who have wished for our “deep well-being and happiness.”  Often, these are, he says, the people we most liked to be around at earlier points in our lives.  A dear aunt or grandparent, a friend of our parents, a teacher or professor or coach, someone whom it feels good to remember because we knew in our hearts that they wanted the absolute best for us.  We felt safe by their side. Thinking of my Own Benefactors I think of my Dad, of course I think of him. I think of how one day, when I was 11, a year or so before he died, we were sailing. As I took the tiller on that blue-green Chesapeake day, my Dad turned to my mother and asked — despite my buck teeth, my horn-rimmed tortoise shell glasses, my frizzy blond hair that inspired my brothers to call me “lampshade head” — “Isn’t she just so beautiful?”  As if he saw something incandescent beneath my profound gawkiness. Someone who believes we are beautiful, even when we are gawky and awkward, and who knows we need to hear it precisely because we are gawky and awkward, that is a benefactor. I think, too, of my father’s mother, whom we called GranMary. GranMary always called me “my darling girl,” no matter how old I was.  The last time I saw her shortly before her death, she patted my hand between her palms, and, caught in a moment of dementia, asked, “You are going to Jay’s play tonight, aren’t you?”  She was talking about my father, who had been dead for 30 years.  She was reliving one of those buoyant, excited moments of mothering: the opening night of the school play her son had written and directed — albeit half a century after the fact.  “Jay and I have been rehearsing his lines all afternoon!” she said with pride, leaning toward me, our knees touching between the sofa where she sat and the ottoman on which I perched.  “He has his lines down,” she said proudly, patting my knee. I recall how she turned and glanced around the room, as if expecting her son to come through the front door of her assisted living apartment.  How she somehow seemed to know who I was and yet not understand that I was also her dead son’s now grown daughter. “My darling girl.  You are coming to Jay’s play?  Oh, you must!” I wanted to go to my Dad’s play, yes.  See him as a 17-year-old, directing, acting, taking his curtain call via some kind of magical time reversal.  Or see him on any single day of his life – still alive.  But there is no such magical clock.  I think of how much my father’s mother loved him, how it broke her heart to lose her son without warning.  “The worst thing,” she once told me, in her earlier, lucid years, “is to lose your child while you still live.  It’s an unnatural pain.”  How she loved us all.  How she would tell us at the end of every family party or dinner or day, just that: “I love you all.” I think, too, of the aunt who comforted me through the years after my father’s death. My Aunt Nan wasn’t related to me, she was my parents’ best friend and our neighbor. When he died, the summer I was twelve, I began spending Saturday mornings at her house, making pancakes, and school day afternoons climbing the pine trees in the field in front of her driveway. We’d run around in her yellow Volkswagen Beetle; the same one in which she’d driven me to kindergarten seven years earlier — she’d also been my kindergarten teacher. She’d leave surprises for me in the mailbox, knowing I picked up the mail when I got off the bus. One day there was a small toy Leprechaun sitting in the mailbox, his pliable legs and arms crossed, as if he’d been waiting patiently for me. Years later, when I moved to New York, Aunt Nan tirelessly helped me to find my first walk up apartment. She’d moved to Connecticut, and on weekends I’d recover on her couch in the country in front of her fireplace. We often had a cup of tea together as she listened, patiently, dearly, to my stories of work and love in the city. One day I gave her a porcelain tea cup. When she died a year ago, her daughter said she had wanted me to have that tea cup back, and gave it to me. I keep it on my desk beside me and I always think of her when I see it, every single day. I think of my mother’s mother Gammer; how she was there to hold me with open arms the day my mother broke the news to my brothers and me that my dad had died.  I think of the New Year’s Eves I would spend with Gammer well into my twenties if I didn’t have a

Distressing Thoughts and Stressing Our Cells

What is the direct relationship between letting our mind drift — ruminating about the past, worrying about the future, focusing on distressing thoughts, what’s going wrong, what isn’t fair, or what we’re afraid will happen next — and our cellular and physical well-being? Although we can’t peer inside our cells in real time and see how mindful calm versus a racing mind have radically different health impacts, a new study published in the journal Health Psychology, sheds new light on the question. Researchers at U.C. Davis Center for the Study of Mind & Brain have conducted the first study which shows the direct relationship between using our mental resources to manage ruminating thoughts and stay with our immediate experience — and lowering our levels of the inflammatory stress hormone cortisol. High levels of cortisol, a hormone produced by the adrenal gland, are, as we know, associated with physical or emotional stress. Prolonged release of the hormone contributes to wide-ranging, adverse effects — and are linked to every physical and mental disease imaginable. Sometimes it helps me to remember what “stress” really is.  Stress is really a euphemism for our thoughts. Our racing, self-flagellating, ruminating, resentful, could-have, should-have, wish-I-had, wish-I-hadn’t thoughts that catch us in their trance. Or what I call, in The Last Best Cure, the “Pain Channel.” All too often we can’t get out of the Pain Channel’s trance. We can’t turn the Pain Channel off. We keep tuning into what it has to say, and as we do, those thoughts help promote the production of stress hormones and cytokines that are, in turn, linked to higher rates of depression, heart disease, autoimmune disease, you name it. Other research tells us that in the lab, the negative cellular impact of stress hormones look a lot like the negative impacts of the toxic chemicals I wrote about in The Autoimmune Epidemic. So, here is my reminder equation. Stressed State of Mind =  Pain Channel. Pain Channel = damaging stress chemicals circulating in our body. Damaging Stress Chemicals = what scientists call the “Negative Floating Brain.” “Negative Floating Brain” = greater likelihood of emotional and physical health challenges. Greater Health Challenges = more likelihood of being in a Stressed State. This is not to say that our state of mind creates disease. That’s far too simplistic.There is so much at play — genetics, diet, environmental toxins. But stress chemicals certainly add to our “barrel” of factors that work against physical and emotional healing. And even if moving away from the “Pain Channel” and the Negative Floating Brain doesn’t necessarily mean we overcome whatever physical challenge we face — turning down the “Pain Channel” volume can’t help but make us feel better, whatever chronic condition we’re up against. (For more on how I see that, see my OpEd for PBS’s online magazine, Next Avenue, called, “I’m Not Cured but I am Healed.”) (I really think the title should be, more accurately, “I’m not Cured, but I am Healing.”) The practices that help us walk away from the Pain Channel and the Negative Floating Brain really do make a difference, and they are worth our time and our commitment. For me, as a science writer, reminding myself of the science every day helps me remake the commitment to meditate, focus on mindful breathing, loving kindness, down dogging, laughter, nature walking…all of it. The science is my guide. Post-doctoral researcher Tonya Jacobs PhD says that in the above study, researchers taught study participants attentional skills such as mindful breathing, observing mental events, and practicing cultivating benevolent mental states, including loving kindness, compassion, empathic joy and equanimity. Individuals whose mindfulness scores increased showed a decrease in inflammatory disease-promoting levels of cortisol. “The more a person reported directing their cognitive resources to immediate sensory experience and the task at hand, the lower their resting cortisol,” Jacobs says. She adds that training the mind to focus on immediate experience may reduce the propensity to ruminate about the past or worry about the future, the thought processes that have been linked to cortisol release. We are all walking around listening to the Pain Channel way too much of the time. And we know that the negative floating brain damages our immune system and our cellular health. The question is, what are we going to do about it? In hopes that they might prove helpful, here are two upcoming offerings. The first is being offered by the phenomenal health advocate Elisa Rodriguez, who is launching one of the first The Last Best Cure Virtual Book Clubs to discuss and encourage us all on the journey … I’ll be joining in for a one hour discussion. I’ll also be sending signed bookplates to participants. To learn more, see Elisa’s video here. I’ve spoken with her several times now, and wow, she is just amazing. The beauty of The Last Best Cure Virtual Book Club is that you can join from wherever you are, and Elisa has found a way to make it easy and accessible to all. The second is an upcoming retreat by my own beloved teacher, Trish Magyari, whose work I feature in The Last Best Cure. Magyari will be teaching a one day “Befriending Yourself” Mindfulness Retreat” on Saturday June 15 at Baltimore Yoga Village in Mount Washington (Baltimore, Maryland) from 1-5pm. Trish is a life-changing teacher. If you can take this opportunity to work with her, do. I hope to hear from you about your own efforts to stay on the path.  What is working for you today?  

The Last Best Cure Virtual Book Club Tour

I’ve received a number of so sweet requests to come talk to book clubs who are reading The Last Best Cure, or join in small group chats, and answer questions about both the book and my journey. I treasure meeting my readers — there is nothing, really, that I love more about what I do than that moment of connection when I meet readers face to face. You all humble me, in the way you meet your own challenges with such grace and dignity and humility and determination. Yes, women with chronic conditions may be fatigued, but I find my readers to be an extraordinary force of nature. Like many of you who have chronic conditions, lots of travel can be hard on my system. That, coupled with my keen desire to be fully present on the homefront with my teenagers as much as possible (my oldest leaves for college in the fall!) means I can’t plane hop as much as I’d like to to meet the wonderful groups of amazing women who are gathering to talk about The Last Best Cure from Albany to Chicago to Vancouver. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be there. So, here’s my offer. If you are planning to read The Last Best Cure for your book club, and gather a group of say 10 women or more who are reading the book, I’ll “drop in” by Skype or speaker phone or whatever works best for you — and we can have that “small group chat.” I’d love to. And since it’s nice to have signed books, I’ll send signed The Last Best Cure “Book Club Bookplates” to book clubs (like all bookplates, they adhere to the page) so you’ll have author signed copies. Let me know what you think of my virtual book club tour idea! Any ideas to improve upon this concept? I’d love to hear.  If you reach out to me and let me know you’d like to schedule a date, we can follow up by email.

How We Handle the Wear and Tear of Today’s Stress Predicts Whether We’ll Be Depressed Ten Years From Now

The way we manage our emotional responses to the stresses we meet in day-to-day life  — to what is happening right now, right here, in our life — predicts whether we’ll suffer from depression and anxiety ten years from now, says a new study in today’s Psychological Science. Researchers examined the relationship between how we handle daily stress and our mental well-being ten years later. They found that our longterm emotional health has less to do with what happens to us than with how we react to what happens to us. The better we are at managing our emotional responses and thoughts today — to whatever problem we’re facing at work or at home or with our kids — the better mental health we’ll enjoy ten years from today. The better brain we’ll own. When we respond with a lot of negativity and reactivity to our day-to-day stressors we’re more likely to be clinically depressed ten years later and experience feelings of “worthlessness, hopelessness, nervousness and anxiety.” We take those negative emotions with us, wherever we go. These findings, based on a study of 711 men and women between 25 and 74, show that mental health outcomes aren’t only affected by major life events — they are also affected by the “chronic nature of our negative emotions in response to daily stressors.” We know there are so many ways to manage our thoughts and get off the distress highway — and stay on the path. Mindfulness, lovingkindness meditation, noting our moment to moment habits of mind, breath work, yoga, seeking out acupuncture. In The Last Best Cure I spent an entire year learning from the best experts on the planet how to redirect my thoughts, calm my mind and quiet my stress response. And every day I continue to learn. Reading studies like these helps me to re-commit to these practices everyday. Because that’s what it takes. It’s not instant. It takes work. Discipline. But it’s also fun. It’s a relief to step away from our daily wear-and-tear stress-reactions and ruminations. A half-hour spent mindfully breathing or in walking meditation or yoga sure beats a half hour spent ruminating and rehashing the should haves and what ifs that are worrying me today, and it will pay off long into my future. Don’t we owe ourselves that small but priceless investment in who we are, and in who we hope to become?

Babies Get It, Grade Schoolers Get It, So Why is it So Hard For Us?

Several studies over the past few years have found that kids as young as 18 months old possess deep feelings of compassion. One study found that when toddlers show kindness to others, it’s motivated by innate feelings of compassion — not just a desire to please the adults in their lives. In the study, when toddlers saw someone in need of help their pupil sizes increased — a sign of empathic concern. After toddlers did something nice for that person, their pupils got smaller. Researchers say this means their kindness came from deep, genuine concern. In fact, toddlers showed greater signs of happiness when they gave away a special treat, than they did when they received one. Performing truly altruistic acts—acts that involve some measure of personal sacrifice—made the kids happier than helping others at no cost to themselves. This is the first study to show that altruism is intrinsic to who we are, and is rewarding even to very young kids, and that it makes them happier to give than to receive. When a behavior is intrinsically rewarding like this, especially at the earliest stages of life, it suggests to scientists that it has deep evolutionary roots. Other studies on compassion and kindness show that kids prefer other kids who are kind and, contrary to popular belief, being kind can even help kids boost their “popularity standing.” Researchers asked 400 students between the ages of 9 and 11 to perform three acts of kindness — or choose other easier tasks — over four weeks. Afterwards the kids who showed kindness saw a much greater spike in their popularity, gaining twice as many friends as their counterparts. And they also had more positive feelings about themselves. Kids said they did simple things like gave their mom a hug when she seemed stressed (always a welcome gesture at my house!), or shared their lunch with someone at school. But clearly, as we grow up and come of age, and especially when life gets more stressful, or life is hard, our innate sense of compassion goes underground. We compete at work. Drivers gesture angrily on the freeway, and turning on the news shows us that too many politicians and sports heroes choose to treat themselves well rather than others kindly, and that too many young people die in personal or gang violence, or spree shootings. It can seem there is too little kindness to spare. We face so much stress in our own day-to-day lives and see such callousness around us that we can become a little numb. And yet, even so, that innate compassion that we had at 2 or 9 or 11 is there, ready to bubble up, if we just call it up. And even those who’ve faced the hardest of lives can call it up. Researchers introduced a type of brain-changing practice known as compassion meditation — sending kind wishes to themselves, those they love and those they find problematic in their lives — to teenagers living in a foster care group in Florida. These were kids who faced a lot of day-to-day stress and adversity. Their lives were tougher than most of us can imagine. The foster teens underwent an eight-week loving kindness meditation class, keeping journals on how much they practiced.  Researchers measured their stress responses both before and after.  They also asked the teens to wear an electronically activated recorder that picks up the ambient sounds in a person’s environment – including disagreements, harsh words, altercations. And here’s what happened: the more troubled teens practiced loving kindness meditation on their own – about four or five times a week  – the more compassionate they became in their day-to-day interactions and the less altercations ensued.  Not surprisingly, teens’ stress hormone levels and inflammatory markers also went down, which we know is critical to improving physical health. Troubled foster teens, living calmer, healthier lives, simply by letting their innate compassion emerge from within for a few minutes a day. Similar work is going on in high security prisons where, after meditation classes using both compassion and breath as a focus, violence has gone down by twenty percent or more. Things haven’t changed that much from when we were 2 and 9. We feel better about ourselves when we extend kindness. Others feel better about being with us. We feel less stressed. Life is sweeter all around, for our brains, bodies and cells. I’ve found that it’s a decisive act to be compassionate — we have to choose compassion in our rush, rush lives. But learning to choose it — along with practicing the other techniques I test drove in my one year experiment to find The Last Best Cure — is a life-changing gift not only to others, but to ourselves.

Countdown Reason # 7: Life Channel or Pain Channel?

Research tells us that although 70 % of our day is relatively good, 28 % of it neutral, and only about 2 % of what happens to us is actually bad, we think about that negative 2 % almost all the time; it’s what we ruminate over as we shower, drive, and fall asleep.[i] It reminds me of that old saying that we wear 2 % of our wardrobe 90 % of the time. We button ourselves up in our misery cloak a lot. I think of it this way. For most of us, two different sound tracks are playing simultaneously in our mind. I call them The Life Channel and The Pain Channel. It just depends which one we tune into — and turn up. The Life Channel is the channel on which uplifting and joyful moments play. It’s the feeling I get when I am braiding my daughter’s hair. Watching my family doubled over laughing at a bad joke at the dinner table. Holding hands with my husband, or my daughter (if she lets me) as we cross a parking lot. The feeling I get when I am staring at the snow covered trees as the sun transforms their icy branches into twinkling silver lights. Or when I am meditating, clearing the mind, focusing on nothing but my breath, and I manage (now and then) to reach that sweet spot of inner quiet, inner smiling. The aha of being half way through a yoga class, and realizing I’m in a peaceful place of well-being as I focus on every muscle and breath that goes into my downward facing dog. The joy of looking into one of my best friend’s eyes and feeling the inner love that’s exchanged in our haven’t-seen-you-in-far-too-long glance, in just an ordinary instant. The Pain Channel is where we live, however, most of the time. It blares our anger, resentment, fear. Our ruminations over what happened, how it shouldn’t have, what should be happening instead. Our self-doubt. Our regret and recrimination. Our physical pain and fear over any health issues we’re facing. Sometimes we have to be on The Pain Channel; it’s what wakes us up to deal with difficult situations, make change, take action. But we don’t need to be listening to The Pain Channel 90% of the time. We just don’t. We know The Pain Channel doesn’t feel good. We just don’t know how to shut it off. It’s powerful and seductive to get wrapped up in what’s playing on The Pain Channel, especially when we are feeling at our most vulnerable. We have to have the tools to reach out and turn The Pain Channel off — and turn The Life Channel on. THE LAST BEST CURE is about having a high-speed connection to dial up to The Life Channel, especially in those moments when we need it most. So we have a real chance at living life on the right track. [i] it’s what we ruminate over as we shower, drive, and fall asleep: Rick Hanson, Ph.D., and Richard Mendius, MD. Buddha’s Brain: the Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom. New Harbinger Publications, Oakland, CA, 2009.  To see a fascinating talk given by Hanson at Google in June 2010 see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EM45CpeQb4.