Spirit in Action

Forgiveness, Holistic Therapy and Ann Recine

Ann Recine is working for the world's healing in many ways - she is a Nurse Practitioner with a Holistic Therapy LLC (715-379-5331, 515 S Barstow, Eau Claire), specializing in forgiveness and mindfulness meditation. She is a Third Order Franciscan, and she is also an organizer in the Voices for Peace Institute.

Broadcast on:: 10 Aug 2008
Audio Format:: other

[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ Welcome to another edition of Spirit in Action. Before I turn to today's guest, I want to make a special invitation for you, my listeners, to introduce yourselves to me. You'd be doing me a favor if you went to my website, northernspiritradio.org, and did one of a couple things. Leave me a comment on this or other programs, including where you hail from and a bit about yourself. I'll have a short survey there that you can fill out soon, and you can also just email me at the email address on my site. One way or another, I would very much like to hear from you, but on to today's program. There are so many wonderful workers for peace and justice, and the other manifestations of a life filled with spirit, and I'm delighted to introduce you to another approach to healing work today. We'll be speaking with Anne Racine. Among other things, Anne does work as holistic therapy LLC, a practice specializing in forgiveness and mindfulness meditation. Anne Racine is a nurse practitioner, so her emphasis is perhaps a bit more medical and concrete than many psychotherapists and alternative practitioners, although there is significant overlap in their work. Anne Racine is also a third-order Franciscan, so we'll learn more about what is involved with that Catholic lay order. Finally, Anne and her husband are principal organizers of a new activist group in Eau Claire, the Voices for Peace Institute, which is organizing a war and peace learning event on September 14, 2008 in Eau Claire. Find details of that event on their site, voicesforpeaceinstitute.org. Right now, though, let's go beyond word bites and learn something of spirit from Anne Racine. Anne, it's wonderful that you could join me today for spirit in action. It's good to be here. I'm really glad to have the opportunity. I've gotten to know you from the Voices for Peace Institute organizing, and that's been a blessing in itself. But a delightful side effect is that I've learned about your forgiveness practice. First of all, when I first met you some years ago, I knew you as someone in the nursing field. What's your background there? I've been a nurse since, I always like to say, since the Nixon administration, but I think it was actually Gerald Ford as when I graduated. I have worked with chronic disease, people hospice, people with addictions, people as inpatient psychiatry, and I am now a nurse practitioner. I focus in my private practice on people with stress-related illnesses. Do you also practice now as a nurse practitioner? Do you actually work in that field, or did you only work for a while, or what happened? I went to graduate school recently. I graduated last May. I worked part-time as an employee doing case management and physicals, mostly for the elderly, and part-time in a private practice in which I practice as an NP. I prescribe medicine as well as do research for a complementary alternative medicine, as well as apply theories in forgiveness or other kinds of things like Victor Frankel's theories, or any kind of theory that nurses apply to helping people with their health. But part of your work is as part of holistic therapy, LLC. What is that, when did you start that, and why did you start that, didn't you have enough work elsewhere? I started it this January, and I started it partly because during my graduate work, we are asked to do things like use various theories and apply them in our practice with patients as a student, and one of the things I did in my practice in my graduate work was work with patients on forgiveness. I had some doctors and some other providers who were referring to me as a student for groups of patients or individual work with patients on forgiveness or on mindfulness meditation to help them with pain or blood pressure or rumination that was affecting their health. I had some of these providers say, "What are we going to do when you graduate? Can we still refer to you? Are you still going to be out there?" I was asked by Tina Frank, who was one of my preceptors, if I would join her at least part-time so that she could refer patients to me to continue this work. You know, for a lot of people, this is a major jump. In one case, you're talking about nursing and giving medication and doing the things people normally think a nurse does, and then you're talking about forgiveness and mindfulness meditation as part of your nursing work. How did those two go together? How did you get from one to the other? Weren't you used to just giving them drugs and inserting an IV and doing all that kind of stuff? Well, I do do that kind of stuff. You know, I've given a lot of medicine and I prescribe medicine here, but if you look here on the wall in my office, the model for my graduate program for clinical nursing at University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, was a theory by Lumison Wood, and it was talking about human responses and how nurses, the ANA has a position paper of what is nursing, and its nursing is helping with the human responses of human beings. Those responses are physical, emotional, cognitive, family responses, social, cultural, and spiritual. We diagnose those human responses and see if the physical responses is okay or the social, and then we evaluate, treat, and plan based on that. So somebody may need some medication, but they also may need something else. So it's really a holistic way of looking at a person with their chronic disease or acute disease, taking all of those things. You know, some people call it mind, body, spirit, but that was the approach of my graduate program, and so I don't see a dichotomy between looking at a person's body, mind, or spirit. That's the whole human being responding. If someone comes in here and I think they need an antidepressant, I definitely prescribe that, but they may also need to let go of rumination or understand how to forgive in order for them to sleep okay. I take it when you started out nursing, you weren't aimed at forgiveness. I think you were probably just doing what a nurse typically is seen to have done. From a very civilian point of view, mostly I imagine that people believe that that means you just follow the doctor's directions, and you do basic care. You change the bedpans, or you massage the feet, or you put on the stockings, or you administer the medication that you're supposed to do. That's what I think a traditional view of nursing is. How did you get from there to this concern for forgiveness, or for the more holistic point of view? I think there's been a transition in nursing, and it maybe started in the 70s, that nurses see themselves as independently collaborating with physicians, but we have our own discipline, and I went to school in Madison in the 70s, and we saw ourselves as really assessing and planning and implementing and diagnosing the human response, and putting together nursing care plans that really weren't just following doctor's orders. We definitely need to follow if the doctor's writing an order, but we have our own discipline, and so in a way, from the beginning, I've had that philosophy in my undergraduate program, as well as my graduate program. Also, the places I've worked have been very much that way. They've been, like nursing homes, don't have very many doctors at them, so it's very nursing driven. On report, we get not only whose morphine needs to be given to somebody, but also this person has some problems with guilt, they're afraid to die, and we collaborate with the chaplains, and work there because we're there at the bedside. So I guess my experience in nursing, I was actually asked to be a chaplain at St. Joe's Hospital, as a chaplain for three years, as well as working as a nurse there, but my experience in nursing has been very holistic because of the places I've worked at St. Joe's Hospital as that way. Severson Home was that way. I guess I think there was that kind of just salute and follow orders and wear your nursing cap and keep your lipstick on straight, but it was probably previous to my educational situation in the '70s in Madison. I'm thinking, Anne, that there must be something about your background and your personal beliefs that has led you into this area that has made this more prominent for you. What background did you have, Anne, religiously or spiritually? I guess I feel like I was raised Irish Catholic. I'm not sure if I'm completely Irish or anything, but I was in a parish that was Irish Catholic, and my relatives, you know, are kind of that way. On my mom's side, and I think people understand what that is, you know, whether you're from New York City or you're from the Midwest. My parents were very civic-minded. They were very involved in helping people, and my mom was incredibly hospitable. So I was raised in a home where we had a sense of solidarity with other human beings as Catholics, and I also was influenced as a child. I was a third-order Franciscan child, and I was very influenced by a third-order Franciscan monk, and today I am a third-order Franciscan. As is your husband, were you involved with Franciscan before meeting, or how did this come about? Actually, my husband, we became adult third-order Franciscans together because I had taken vows as a child which you can't make a permanent vow when you're under 18. He became interested in Catholicism. We were Protestants. Previous to that, we were Anglican, and we were involved in third-order Franciscan order there, but that's much more informal. So when we became Catholics, it's a very formal process in which there's a ceremony and study that happens before it, and we did that on the same day, a few years back. Okay, I think we're getting closer to forgiveness and some kind of seed or nurture court in your life, but I think you're going to have to explain to people what a third-order Franciscan is. Is that like first-class, second-class, third-class, or what does it mean? A third-order Franciscan is a person who is in the world as a lay person. Franciscan actually was a third-order Franciscan. What that means is the first-order priests, the second-order are cloistered clergy like nuns, and the third-order are people who are devoted to following St. Francis in the world. So you can have nuns, the nuns that started Sacred Heart Hospital, and St. Joe's Hospital are third-order Franciscans. They're Franciscans in the world. You can have clergy or lay people that take those vows to follow St. Francis in the spirit of peace and love, and there's a Franciscan what we call careism, a Franciscan gift, where we try to seek Christ in all human beings, and try to promote peace, and try to, I don't know, understand people, some people know that Franciscan prayer, I seek to understand rather than be understood, and to heal. Just simply, it's part of the Catholic Church, and most people have seen a birdbath picture of St. Francis, you know, but he loved nature, and he also loved human beings, and really tried to rebuild the Church as well as have solidarity with other human beings in the world to build peace on Earth, or God's Kingdom on Earth. So I'm still trying to figure out, and is there a chain of command you report up to? Is this usually when you become part of any religious order, there's a rule that you take part in, and so I think one of those is usually some kind of obedience or something like that. So how is this organized? Are there other hidden third-order Franciscans lurking in Eau Claire that we don't know about? There is a group of third-order Franciscans that meet at St. Joseph Hospital. I don't know if they're lurking or anything, but there is a rule of order. The rule of order has been redone in the last hundred years, but we are basically under the Vatican. We are loyal to the Pope. If you want to know the authority of Catholics, we are trying to follow Francis, but we're also in communion or in unity with the work of the Pope, and I know Pope John Paul, and even our recent Pope have talked very much about love and forgiveness, and very much about peace and justice. And forgiveness is integrally related to peace and justice. So which came first, the chicken or the egg, or which came first, forgiveness, practice in your life, or your nursing? Is it something that you brought with you when you went to nursing because you said something about having taken some kind of vows when you were a minor still? Yeah, I think that certainly my desire to bring about good in the world and follow Christ came first, and nursing is something I chose in order to touch people's lives. You know, I have to give some credit to my parents and my grandparents, and the way I was raised, you know, to be a forgiving person, forgiving your brothers and sisters and your family when you're a little kid, and so all of that desire to spread the word about forgiveness, I probably got from my parents and from the nuns who taught me before I went to nursing school. Well, let's get into some of the specifics about forgiveness and how you practice that as part of holistic therapy, LLC, because it still is unclear to me how you help anybody with forgiveness. The only forgiveness that I've heard about is when someone in the pulpit has lectured about it, or maybe a friend has given me some advice like, you know, you kind of hold on kind of tightly to that grudge, and maybe it's time to let go of that. I mean, I've heard those kind of things, but how do you do it as a therapist? But first of all, what is forgiveness? What are we talking about here? Are we talking about, let's forgive and forget? Or what exactly are we talking about? My understanding of forgiveness is based on an academic perspective, and that I have done my graduate work at the University on Forgiveness and written some academic papers, so I look through what the academic people and many disciplines have done to define forgiveness as they've done research through populations of people throughout the world. What we've come up with is that it starts with a personal injury unless you feel personally injured by something you don't need to forgive, and it's a letting go of a negative response to the person that hurt you. And it's a giving of an unconditional or altruistic gift to that person, to yourself, or in some cases to God. It's a giving of a gift, even if you look at forgiveness linguistically, there's two parts of it, and one is the letting go of the negative part, and one is the giving of a gift of a benevolent attitude to someone who does not deserve it, because they did do some objective wrong that hurt you personally or hurt a group of people that you identify with personally. So it isn't just, you know, forgetting about it, that you can still require restorative justice, but it isn't because you're rejecting that human being, you're seeing that human being did something wrong, but you're distinguishing between what they did wrong and them. The person is still valuable and has potential for good in forgiveness. So who's gonna make the first move? We're both wounded by life, sharpening each other like knives. What do we have left to prove, and how will we heal? Tell me, how will we heal forgiveness? Moving on with our lives, getting past this. When that moment arrives, we'll see the obvious we miss. Find forgiveness. How do we find what we've lost? Never been here before, never had love turned a war. Will it be worth what it cost if we don't survive? Tell me, how will we survive? Forgiveness. Moving on with our lives, getting past this. When that moment arrives, we'll see the obvious we miss. Find forgiveness. What doesn't mean we forget that we live with no regrets? Only that we'll do our best for a human after all. Forgiveness. Moving on with our lives, getting past this. When that moment arrives, we'll see the obvious we miss. Find forgiveness. It's about forgiveness. [music] Sweet Sweet Song by Dennis Warner. It's called Forgiveness. You can also find out more about Dennis Warner on my northern spirit radio.org site as he's been my guest for my Song of the Soul program. But this is Spirit in Action, and I'm Mark Helps-Meet, and Anne Racine of Holistic Therapy LLC is my guest. We're talking about a lot of things, but foremost is Forgiveness, a specialty that Anne brings into her practice. You can call Anne at Holistic Therapy LLC at 715-379-5331. That's 715-379-5331. Let's go back to Anne Racine with some more questions about the importance of forgiveness therapy. So why the big deal? Why do we care about forgiveness? Is it really that important? Obviously, you're seeing them as a therapist. You also have your orientation as a nurse. Is there something really important about forgiving that makes a difference in people's lives? Yes, as far as nursing goes, I actually collaborate with psychotherapists. I don't consider what I do psychotherapy. It's nursing from my discipline. Nursing comes up with interventions that help people's health. There's clear evidence, I give patients sometimes something from Harvard Women's newsletter, but there's clear evidence that there's a connection between people's health and forgiveness. By many, many studies, you can correlate, you do correlative research. It's a kind of quantitative research, if anyone knows. The difference between qualitative and qualitative in the audience. So you crunch numbers, and you can come up with a correlation between sleep and forgiveness between pain and forgiveness, and between functional status in an older person. Meaning how well they're able to do the things they want to do, overcome pain, recover, resiliency, those kind of health variables that we look at. If we look at high forgiveness scores, and there's tests that you can give people to see how they're doing with forgiveness, we find that there's a huge impact on quality of life, on depression scores on the back depression inventory, on just emotional resilience, on anger, and on family dynamics, if you look at a family unit as part of health. So yes, forgiveness really does have an effect not just on the individual heart rate of people and cardiac status and their family life, but also on community health when we look at populations in nursing. And those populations, especially in war-torn situations, post-conflict situations, they have tremendous health problems that we look at as terms of vulnerability. If we can work on forgiveness in those areas and not reconstituting that conflict on war, it has a huge effect on health of children. I mean children in wartime die of measles and all sorts of treatable diseases because things are so disoriented. And if we can get some forgiveness between the groups and working together as communities, that has a huge effect on world health. Yes, forgiveness really does matter. So how do you, Anne, as part of holistic therapy LLC, how do you actually help people get to forgiveness? Is it that they come in here and they sit in the chair where I'm sitting right now, and you give them a pep lecture about how forgiveness will be good for them? Or is there, how do you go about getting people to that point? Because a lot of people hold on very tightly to their grudges and to their anger. One of the things in nursing is that we talk about knowing the patient. So I can't say that I have a pathway of doing it for each patient because different people are holding on to grudges for different reasons. And so first I have to know the person. But I do draw from, one of the papers I did at the university was basically looking at all sorts of interventions for forgiveness that are done in other disciplines and their effect and how the process works. So I have a very eclectic approach where I pull from various different people's way of helping people forgive. I recently had a paper accepted to a holistic nursing journal in which I talked about the components of teaching someone to forgive. And they're not really step-wise and that okay, you do this first, but they're components that you bring to bear on the situation. One is persuasive information, as you say, kind of helping people understand this does affect your health, it does affect your immune status. It's pretty clear from the research that this will help you. So that's motivational information. And I may give them an article for the lay public about what kind of effects it has on your heart or your cardiac status or whatever so that they are motivated to work on this because it is some work. Another thing is having to do with helping them with physiological feedback, that sounds like a kind of a funny thing to be working with with forgiveness. But if you want to teach someone to walk with a walker, if they're in pain and they're all anxious and fearful and not sleeping, they can't learn that kind of new skill. And so helping people to become calm, physiologically calm and at peace. And that may need some medication if they're in pain or mindfulness meditation is very helpful for that. So first helping someone to be able to become calm enough to see things, physiologically calm enough, is really important. And then there's something called vicarious learning. And that means looking at other people who are successfully forgiving. And it depends on the person, it may be their parent, it may be in their religious practice, looking at what Abrahamic religions believe that God is merciful. So we see God as someone to imitate. If I curiously we see, oh God forgives and we can imitate that. Or we can see Gandhi as an example. Or what happened in South Africa with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Whatever the person, what would help them to view someone successfully doing it, just like back to the walker thing. When you watch somebody else walk successfully with a walk, you begin to think, maybe I can do that. So you put those things before them of examples. The most powerful form of learning is when you've done it before, back to the walker thing. If you've walked with the walker yesterday, you think you can maybe try to do it better, you can do it today. So helping people have an experience with forgiveness, remembering I had one woman come in here, she was super angry at her daughter. But she remembered during our time that she was the only one around her father's death bed who actually forgave him, who was an alcoholic. So she had successfully done that there, so she could bring that to bear on the next things she needed to do. Or I can use guided imagery where I can help them imagine themselves perhaps at the grave of the person that they need to forgive. And then imagine the most spiritual person in their life. Maybe it's Aunt Susie, or maybe it's Jesus Christ, or could be the Dalai Lama, coming next to them and then seeing what new things unfold in benevolent attitude towards that person. Right, it's not a simple thing, but those are ideas of some of the approaches I take as I listen to the person. I will say many people, they come in here, they're very angry at someone. But as I begin to work on themselves, what is really true is they themselves have not experienced love, at least not sufficiently. They may be a Christian, or a Jewish person, but they have not been affirmed by the parenting they received. So it's very hard to give away something that you don't have. So oftentimes working on self-forgiveness, and working on experiencing love, and being the beloved. And then they sort of automatically find it easy to forgive. Did you think you were so big he could not forgive you? Did you think you were so thick he could not see through you? Well, ain't it amazing what his grace will do? He's forgiven you. Did you think you were so wrong he could not correct you? Did you think you were so lost he'd probably forget you? Well, ain't it amazing what his grace will do? He's forgiven you. The creator who made us, is in us. And he sees his own image as sinless. And despite all of what's same, it all comes to nothing. He's never once condemned you. We drag all these burdens from lifetime to lifetime, never thinking. Just drop them, just reach for the lifeline. It's there like the springtime, like sun on the dew. He's forgiven you. And so bless them, our lessons are stumbling and bumbling. For as long as we choose them, they'll keep right on coming. Forgiving ourselves may be all we need to. Please, forgiven you. Ain't it amazing what his grace will do? He's forgiven you. Carol Johnson gave us that song, "He's forgiven you." Carol has also been my guest, so you can find out more about her on my northernspiritradio.org site. While you're there, please leave me a comment or drop me an email as I'd really like to get to know my listeners. I'm Mark Helpsmeat, and my spirit and action guest today is Anne Racine, a nurse practitioner specializing in mindfulness meditation and forgiveness as part of healing therapy. So Anne, how long does this type of therapy take? And is this a process that the insurance companies want to cover? As far as whether the insurance companies want to cover it, I can't speak to that. I, for the most part, am doing private pay. I'm beginning to bill insurance, and if someone has a diagnosis and I am approaching it with various different things, including medication or this kind of approach, whatever teaches them. As far as billing insurance, I don't need to tell them exactly if I'm telling them what exact approach I'm using. They may call the records and decide, yes or no, I don't know how they'll respond to these kind of things. But many other people I know are billing insurance for this, but myself, I am mostly doing private pay. As for how long it takes, it does depend on the person, but the research shows that a longer amount of time working individually with a person is more effective than a short-term group intervention, and a longer-term group intervention is more effective than a short-term group intervention. So, I think just to say, it's not done overnight if a person has fairly difficult time forgiving. I've seen people make great deal of progress in four sessions, but people are different and they may need more. It certainly seems to me that for you, there's a spiritual element to this. Often, as you were speaking, you were grabbing what I think are, for the most part, spiritually rooted examples of people doing forgiveness. Is spirituality always related to the kind of forgiveness therapy stuff that you're doing in? I think so. I think that spirituality in a very broad sense, in nursing, we sometimes categorize different interventions. We have a thing called nursing intervention classification system, and forgiveness is under the spirituality, is under the category of spirituality and interventions. It doesn't mean necessarily that anyone has to believe in God, but spirituality in the sense of connectedness to other human beings. There's sort of two aspects of spirituality. One is a connectedness to transcendence, either in nature or with God, and then there's a spirituality that's a connection between other human beings. So, at least that part of spirituality, solidarity with other human beings, and regaining that sense of being part of a community is part of the spirituality that forgiveness interventions are part of. And does this forgiveness, does this process of forgiveness, and does it always imply that you're going to go and talk to someone? Or can the person just decide that they've forgiven here and they don't have to go out and talk? I think in 12-step processes, there's always the point where you go and actually you address the people that you've had some history with. Does this forgiveness thing actually imply going beyond this room with your forgiveness? Actually, forgiveness and reconciliation are two separate concepts, and so I would say no. The reconciliation piece, if you want to work on that, as far as now what do I do to make amends or to myself or others, that is a separate idea than letting go of the negative and having a benevolent attitude towards a person. And that may unfold, but it isn't necessary, and particularly in a case where someone has been abused. People who test out with high forgiveness scores on some of these tests also test out to be more likely to return to an abuser when we've done some of these studies in places where women go for refuge when they've been abused. And that is a danger, so I think it's really important for people to distinguish between the idea that you can forgive someone and have a benevolent attitude toward them. You still need to have a relative level of self-protection so that sometimes it's not the best thing to physically or emotionally be in a situation where you've reconnected with the person. That would be a great idea in many situations, but you have to look at each one individually. I read one of the articles that your co-author of, Ann, and it talked about the definition of forgiveness, and it also talked about some of the consequences of it, the correlates of forgiveness. One of the things I found interesting was there are a whole number of things that correlate strongly with high forgiveness scores, the ability to forgive. One of them, interestingly, was not belief in God. That is to say whether a person says they believe in God or not wasn't correlated with how forgiven they were, but if they attended religious services regularly, participated highly in their religious community, they were more likely to have a high forgiveness score. Do you know that in the population that comes to visit you? Do you notice who's easy, who's not easy to help work on this forgiveness and then releasing of the anger and the other stresses? You know, I know that study I really believe is true, and as I kind of review in my mind the people that I see, I do think that the ability to put yourself in the situation where you're sort of constantly hearing a similar message, and I think that's because whether it's a mosque or whether it's a synagogue or any kind of Buddhist community, the message about being forgiving and the nobility and power of forgiveness, you see, spoken of in Hindu religion, I certainly am at the Catholic Church, I think if you're exposing yourself over and over to that, and you're rubbing shoulders with people, let's face it, in churches, I mean, sometimes you wish that person was maybe going to a church like across the river or something. So you're working on projects together and somebody's kind of picky and someone's kind of bossy, you're having to learn to apply those things. Yeah, so I do think it's easier, it is easier for me when people are exposed to that idea, even if they're having trouble doing it. They believe that they want to do it from hearing it enough times and being part of a community that believes in it, and then that desire and intent to want to do it makes it easier to work on the process that would get them there. I'm also interested in the mindfulness meditation part that you practice in your work. Now, you're as a nurse, again, you're doing this, mindfulness meditation, I don't know if it's vipassana or some related practice like that. How did you get into mindfulness meditation and how do you implement it with your clients here? How I got into mindfulness meditation is actually my first exposure was in pathophysiology class. There's a section in pathophysiology class called psycho neuroimmunology, which there's a huge amount of research done. I know that's kind of a mouthful, but it means that the mind, psycho, is connected to your neurology, is also connected to your immunology. And Celier was one of the first people to do some research on this, and there's a huge burgeoning of research in this area. So everyone had to pick, you know, pulmonary or cardiac or whatever to do a presentation to the class on, so I picked this area. And I was so fascinated with the research that what is in your mind affects your neurology, as well as what is in your neurology affecting your immunology, your fighting of diseases. And so, you know, there was a little paragraph in the pathophysiology book that talked about interventions that actually addressed this. And our studying this, and one was Dr. Cabot Zinn, who's started the Stress Reduction Clinic at University of Massachusetts Medical Center. And he teaches mindfulness meditation and has many studies funded by tax dollars and other things on the connection between mindfulness meditation and healing, like healing of psoriasis. You know, if just major, he got a lot of the doctors, he went to MIT and studied in biology and then became a psychologist. So he used biological research principles to show how mindfulness meditation helped the most challenging patients. He asked all these doctors who were friends, "Give me the people you can't help." There's fabulous research on all sorts of disease entities and the effect of teaching mindfulness meditation. And so most primary care doctors are getting some of this information in either their journals or in their seminars. And when I was at Mayo Rochester, there was certainly a doctor there who had just come back from like a long session. I mean, I think it was, I don't know, maybe eight-day seminar on this. A lot of doctors are going to these seminars to teach this. I actually just spoke to the University Clinic, to just doctors, nurses and professionals, to how to teach this to patients. So I'm not alone in wanting to apply this because we know it helps pain, we know it helps sleep, it helps all sorts of areas that pharmaceutical things alone are not able to do. Things alone are not able or surgical things alone are not able to handle. So am I correct that here with holistic therapy, LLC, that clients come in, you might teach them mindfulness meditation. You might do a forgiveness process with them. Are there other things you do here? Well, yes, if someone comes in and, you know, I really try to listen and evaluate what is really going on with them and come up with the right diagnoses. And it could be a physiological problem of their thyroid. You know, I can say, well, I think, you know, we had at least check that out. Or it could be that they have obsessive compulsive disorder and I have clinical standards for tests. If someone may be referred to me, someone thinks they have depression, but I will, as I'm doing my diagnostic review, I think they have attention deficit disorder. So I really try to come up with what they have and then give them the options, including, you know, forgiveness, mindfulness meditation, other options I have. So I may prescribe for them for depression or anxiety, but that's not all I'll do. I will address diet and prescribing seminars that you'll be told, you know, we can't do that much for anxiety. This is what we got pharmaceutical, but they also need to be taught meditation. They need to be taught certain kinds of diet, things to help with anxiety. So I try to take the best in the research over in the complimentary alternative and traditional medicine and apply it after I've diagnosed what the person has to that person. And then teach them in a treatment plan their best way of learning to do this. And I've seen great progress, I mean, wonderful progress with people. When you look at them as a whole and don't just say, here's a pill and good luck. Well, tell me on about some of the great progresses that you've seen. What kind of dramatic changes have you seen that maybe weren't achieved by giving them a pill? Sometimes I have people who are not interested in coming here for a pill, particularly I did a radio program on forgiveness. So then I got some patients who knew that that's what I did and they had heard the radio program and they told others, they came specifically wanting that. And I would say, well, for example, I had a woman come in here, she was very depressed, she felt her major problem was that she was her husband. And that she was just super angry and enraged at her husband. So I didn't have her husband here and I don't do family therapy. So I just worked with her, she had very good medication on board and she was already taking fish oil and some of these other things that help with anxiety. So I worked with her on really, she needed to grasp how much forgiveness she could receive from God. She didn't really experience that. And so I had her doing some meditation from her religious point of view or perspective to help her experience forgiveness and love. And then slowly we worked on letting go of anger toward her husband and then her husband came in. So I didn't work on him about his wife, just on him about him and reconnecting with a sense of being beloved and forgiven and wanting to give that to others. And then they asked if they could come in together, which made me a little nervous since I don't do family therapy. I said, well, I don't do family therapy, but you certainly can come in together. And the first thing that the wife and husband said to each other was how much they loved each other. And they got kind of choked up and I thought, well, this is easy. But it was working on them individually to help them to believe how loved and forgiven they were so that they could offer it to each other. It was some, you know, changing of behavior when they realized some of the things they were doing was harmful. But you couldn't start there. You had to start with experience, them experiencing that affirmation and forgiveness from God since they were Christians. I guess that's one. Another woman came into a very, very angry at her husband and I worked with her on mindfulness meditation and on meditating on being the beloved. She was from a Christian point of view too. She worked really hard on that. It's really hard for her to get. She was a person I also was kind of a perfectionist. After about four sessions, she came into me and she said, you tricked me. I came in here because I was mad at my husband and now I'm getting along with him wonderfully and we haven't been talking about my husband at all. And so I guess those are examples. I've certainly seen some people who were very, very suicidal to have them happy and experiencing. And that's a lot of times from self-rejection, you know, maybe they committed adultery. You know, that's their view of it or had an affair and they cannot forgive themselves. They just want to die. That's how they look at their life for them to have developed benevolent attitude toward themselves. And to find that there are ways that they can, in the present, you can't go back and change the past. You can bring to bear on this present moment the things you wished you'd brought to bear on the past. So this particular man would shovel his wife's driveway. She didn't want to talk to him anymore. They weren't living together. And do everything he could to be the kind of person he wanted to be today. He began to feel at peace with himself. So it's complicated to look at, you know, each person's situation is different. People, I've certainly dealt with a lot of suicidal people because they can't forgive themselves for things that they're really not even responsible for. So sometimes you have to see, is this something that was objectively wrong and that you did that was wrong? Are there other people who are responsible too, like in the case of a soldier, you know, he's not the only person involved in why he killed someone? So to have them have a clear perspective on how much responsibility did they really have, people, you know, cannot want to forgive themselves because they tried to save someone's life and the person died. So that's not really forgiveness because they didn't do something wrong, but they feel a hatred towards themselves. So working on people in this situation to see clearly if what they did really was objectively wrong and if so, how can they love themselves and have a benevolent attitude towards themselves in spite of that? And that helps them love others. Death took the husband of a neighbor of mine on a highway with a drunk at the wheel. She told me, "Keep your clean hands off the laundry left, and don't tell me, you know, how I feel." She had a tape that he'd sent her from a holiday in, and she never played it much in the day. But when I heard him say he loved her through the window at night, I just stayed the hell away. There's a hole in the middle of the prettiest life, so the lawyers and the profit save. Not your father, no your mother, no your lover's gonna ever make it go away. And there's too much darkness in an endless night to be afraid of the way we feel. Let's be kind to each other, not forever but for you. My father never put his parachute on in the Pacific back in World War II. He said he'd rather go down in familiar flames than get lost in that endless blue. And some of that blue got into my eyes, and we never stopped fighting that war until I first understood about endlessness. And I loved him like never before. There's a hole in the middle of the prettiest life, so the lawyers and the profit save. Not your father, no your mother, no your lover's gonna ever make it go away. And there's too much darkness in an endless night to be afraid of the way we feel. Let's be kind to each other, not forever but for you. It's lucky that my daughter got her mother's nose and just a little of her father's eyes. And we've got just enough love that when the longing takes me, well it takes me by surprise. And I remember that longing from my highway days, though I never could to give it a name. It's lucky I discovered in the nick of time that the woman and the child are to blame for the hole. In the middle of a pretty good life, I only face it 'cause it's here to stay. That my father, no my mother, no my daughter, no my lover, no the highway made it go away. And there's too much darkness in an endless night to be ashamed of the way I feel. I'll be kind to my loved ones, not forever but for you. Some say that God is a lover, some say it's an endless boy. Some say both and some say she's angry, some say just annoyed. But if God felt a hammer in the palm of his head, then God knows the way we feel. And love lasts forever, forever and forever. Love lasts forever. That's one of my favorites. Also one of my song The Soul Guests, Bob Frankie, with his song For Real. Such a real song about the real struggles of the human heart. And that's what nurse practitioner Ann Racine of Holistic Therapy LLC helps her clients with healing on the many different holistic levels. You can reach her at 715-379-5331. I'm your spirit and action host going beyond word bites to soul depth with my guests. And I think Ann that we have time for a couple more questions. I note Ann that your business is called Holistic Therapy LLC. I'm assuming that you wanted to make a point of that as if you wanted to make sure that people were not thinking that you were half-istic therapy. I assume you have a critique of what happens out there in the world that you're trying to emphasize something that is not generally available or is not always viewed when you go into a place to get therapy. I think a lot of doctors and nurses who I've met really want to have a holistic approach. But, you know, medicine is business and a lot of things are driven by the fact that you're an employee of a clinic. And you need to see somebody every 15 minutes or be extremely productive and get this blood pressure medicine. And, you know, I took your blood pressure and now you got to go on to the next person. So I guess I think I'm not offering something that other people aren't educated about or don't want to do. I think a lot of doctors try to weave some of this into their practice and so do nurse practitioners. I learned in graduate school, you know, to really take a holistic approach to people. So I don't think I'm extremely unique. I just think I have the freedom to take the time with the person to look at the whole picture. I'm wondering if you're backing up your practice with your own, I guess, discipline. That's the word that I would use as a Quaker, the discipline that you have to your life. And so, for instance, I'm wondering if you do your own mindfulness meditation because you have to deal with the stresses of other people or with the world. If you do your own kind of prayer life that prepares you coming into sessions, leaving sessions, I'm wondering how you support the work that you're doing. I do have a mindfulness meditation practice and I do try to do formal mindfulness meditation practice, 45 minutes a day, at least six days a week, which is what is sort of taught in the stress reduction clinic. I sometimes will use yoga is considered meditation. I do try to practice what I teach my patients to do because it actually is very hard to be disciplined and so I want to empathize with the patient. Sometimes I think it's hard to understand what it is and how it applies to. It's informally applied mindfulness practice to your entire day where you bring your mind to the present moment to the sky and the person you're with. If you're not really with the person, then they're not really real to you. The child that's there on your porch in your neighborhood or taking a walk with someone to really be present. I try to practice it formally and informally as well as I do read the scriptures every day and I pray every day. I believe the God of Abraham is a personal God in the sense that I have a relationship with God who is a person. I know that Buddhism is more of meditation on the embodiment of loving-kindness. My meditation practice, even though it comes out of a Buddhist tradition to do mindfulness meditation, it's really more of leaning toward meditating on the words at times, words of scripture or Franciscan nuns. They've done studies with Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns doing their meditative practice. The monks are doing some meditation that's more on something non-verbal, just the essence of loving-kindness. And Franciscan nuns will do something more on like a word, you know, like the word loving-kindness. So I think my meditation practice is a little bit of a combination of both, but I do lean towards meditating on the words of scripture or on the words of Christ. That gives me a lot of strength. So that's your discipline that you use, the combination of prayer, mindfulness, meditation, reading of scriptures. What do you think that for you is personally the big goal, what's the real reason that you're doing this work? Mother Teresa said the reason that she did the work she did was because she wanted to quench the thirst of Christ and that she, you know, had an image of Christ really thirsting for something. And I believe that Christ, God, you know, how whatever you want to call the transcendent being has a deep pain over the conflict and the lack of reconciliation between people and nations and human beings. God is relieved when people are kind to one another. And so I have a desire to relieve God's suffering, I guess, is the way to put it, to make an effort to have God go, "Oh, I feel so much better about that." And I think it's partly like my father, you know, if his kids are quarreling, it really is hard on him. Of course, he's 80 years old and that would really, really just totally stress him out, or even when my cousins aren't getting along. It really stresses out my dad and he really tries so hard to get them to be kind to each other. It's like a big thing for him. I would do the same thing, try to get my brothers and sisters to be kind to each other for my dad's sake. And so I kind of feel that part of it is I want to help God feel relieved that all his children are getting along. That seems like a very noble goal and a very big one, and I'm grateful that you've undertaken to do it. Both in your individual work as part of Third Order Franciscan, in your professional work with hospice, nurse practitioner, and now in your practice specifically as holistic therapy, LLC. What a wonderful, wonderful gift you're giving to us. Thanks so much, Anne. Thank you very much for the opportunity to talk about it. Thank you. This has been a Spirit Naction interview with Anne Racine. You can reach Holistic Therapy, LLC, at 715-379-5331, or just check out my website. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit In Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radial. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit In Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. [MUSIC PLAYING]