The Best Mind-Body Practice Is Other People

A couple of months ago, at the suggestion of a friend who practices adult palliative care, I went on a mind-body skills facilitator training retreat. It was held at a small inn in Amish country, Ohio, at the tail end of winter when everything just feels flat and exhausting. Twelve academic professionals, a few days, and a curriculum full of practices I fully expected to be the point of the whole thing.

I came home a different person. Not because of the practices, exactly. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

(Here's how much it mattered: I now have a meeting scheduled with the director of our Osher Center to talk seriously about doing an integrative medicine fellowship. So there's that. Collecting pieces of paper to prove what I know is still a thing after all these years.)

I went partly because it sounded genuinely interesting, and partly because a retreat format offered something a traditional conference never quite does: the possibility of actually resting while also learning something new. Conferences are their own special kind of exhausting: the schedule, the socializing, the performance of enthusiasm for it all. For those of us who run a little more introverted, there's a weird bind: either you spend yourself freely and come home depleted, or you protect your energy carefully and wonder why you bothered going. A retreat in the middle of nowhere, learning something that might also help my own life? That felt like a new third option.

Our teachers, Sian Cotton, PhD, and Adi Haramati, PhD, were the human equivalents of a mug of hot chocolate while wrapped in a blanket just taken out of the dryer. Kind. Patient. Gently curious. Impressively non-judgmental. Generous with everything they knew while honest about their own vulnerabilities. And armed, quietly, with data.

They didn't lead with the data, though. I think there were two reasons for this. The first was that the whole point was for us to experience the practices ourselves, to understand viscerally that they work before we ever tried to teach them. The second was simpler: we'd all signed up voluntarily, which made us a self-selecting group of, if not outright believers in the mind-body connection, at least people curious enough to show up. We didn't need to be convinced; we were already in the room.

Each session, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, opened with a brief guided meditation. Then we'd check in: how are you doing, what did you take from the last exercise, what's been turning over in your mind since we were last together? In a group of twelve, that check-in sometimes took the bulk of the session.

Those check-ins turned out to be where the real learning happened.

We moved through guided meditation, journaling, autogenic training (biofeedback is real, friends — I raised the temperature of my fingertip by 4 degrees just by meditating and loosening my apparently chronic peripheral vasoconstriction), and something called "wise self" work. And after each practice, we'd sit together and talk about what came up.

What came up was a lot.

Journaling surfaced the parenting struggles members of the group had, which the rest of us held with genuine tenderness for people we'd known for less than 48 hours. The "wise self" work drew out, more than once, someone quietly grieving a parent who had died — a highly accomplished, deeply intelligent person who just needed to hear, even from their own imagined inner voice, that their parent was proud of them. (Yes, I was among that group.) I sat in those moments and felt something loosen in me. It turns out that holding others gently leads me to hold myself more gently, with all my messiness and hard edges.

I left the retreat feeling calm. Connected. Centered. Grounded. Happy in a way that was quieter, more durable, and less shaken by the just-back-from-a-conference EMR and inbox overflow.

I came home thinking the practices had done that for me. The more time passes, the less sure I am.

Because here's the thing: loneliness has been declared a global epidemic. The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 100 deaths per hour are linked to it. In medicine specifically, loneliness at work is associated with significantly higher rates of burnout. We can be utterly alone, surrounded by an entire institution’s worth of people.

What the retreat gave me wasn't primarily a set of techniques. It was four days of being genuinely witnessed by others, and of genuinely witnessing them. The meditation helped. The journaling helped. The biofeedback was, frankly, a little thrilling. But the thing that changed me was the community. Twelve people in a room in Ohio in February, deciding to be honest. That was the medicine.

I started writing this piece intending to make a case for mind-body practices. And you should try them. I’m sure I’ll want to tell you all about them after I finish the integrative medicine fellowship, though our Osher Center doesn’t know they’ll be accepting me yet. But where I've landed is this: the most powerful mind-body intervention most of us could undertake right now is just seeing our people.

When's the last time you had dinner with a friend? Had a breakfast meeting instead of a Zoom? Reached out to someone outside your immediate work circle just because they crossed your mind?

This isn't a call to acquire a bunch of new friends (though if that's your thing, go for it). It's a nudge to invest a little in the ones you have. Or even to just let yourself think warmly of someone who isn't a lifelong ride-or-die, but who you remember with kindness. The person who just crosses your mind now and again and makes you think: I remember them. I hope they're doing well.

That's the connection. And it turns out that's the whole thing.