Spring 2022: Letter from the Director
Welcome to Spring, with all its beauty, turbulence, challenge, and change. Just as mother nature is birthing something new, we at the Center are too—perhaps a new way of seeing ourselves and the world with resilience and optimism in the face of all our difficulties both individually and globally.
Daffodils bloom in our outdoor session room at The Center for Family Well-Being
For us, if we’ve learned nothing else through this pandemic, it’s the value of community and collaboration—the theme of our spring newsletter, and core tenets of who we are as a Center and as integrative mental health practitioners. Our interdependence is our strength; through collaboration and connection with one another, and with other practitioners, we expand and enhance our definitions of community.
Since the founding of the Center for Family Well-Being in 2015, my aspiration has been to integrate the best of western psychotherapy with eastern mindfulness awareness practices and other healing traditions, both ancient and modern, for optimal health and well-being for all human beings across the lifespan. I’d experienced first-hand the ongoing benefits of harnessing the mind-body connection in a holistic whole person-centered collaborative way and wanted to extend that to clients and families.
So I set out to find kindred therapists to join me in “walking the walk” and not just “talking the talk”—to find those who had both experience with, and an authentic desire to cultivate further, their own contemplative practice; who had a passion for western psychotherapy; and who had the capacity and openness to learn about diverse mind-body-spirit healing modalities so we could continue to serve our community with a strong, holistic, individualized, and integrative vision.
With the addition of two more therapists in the last year, our wonderful Center community of therapists continues to grow! There are now eight of us (and we’re looking to add at least one more soon). And one of my great joys as director is to continue to nourish our growth as integrative practitioners and to expand our lens of collaborations and communities. Together, we’re studying Qi Gong (you’ll learn more about that in our interview with Lana Reed in this issue), polyvagal theory, and SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions). We’re also learning more about anxiety and depression through the lens of Ayurveda and discovering what functional medicine and neuroscience can teach us about mental health through brain imagery scans.
Through it all, we’re committed to our learning and growth for ourselves—and for all of you in our community.
Heart-to-heart,
Kate
On behalf of all of us at the Center for Family Well-Being
PS: Don’t forget to check out our Summer “Tune In and Tune Up” mini-session groups for 4th/5th graders; middle schoolers; and high schoolers!