This 2-day workshop is designed for anyone working in the healthcare field — physicians, nurses, mental health professionals, hospice workers, health coaches, and others. This experiential training provides easily adaptable lessons, activities, and guideposts to use with your clients and patients.

The course will be taught May 3-4, 2018 at Duke Integrative Medicine. 

Instructors, John F. Evans and Karen Jooste, will lead you through progressive learning that incorporates Reasons for Writing for Health including... 

• creating vision and setting intentions
• clarifyng values
• stimulating thinking that leads to insights and understanding
• changes in perspective and perception
• facilitating a mindfulness practice
• expressing readiness to change
• building confidence and resilience
• affirming strengths
• Communicating gratitude, empathy and compassion

Early Registration Deadline:  April 13, 2018

Last Day to Register:  April 27, 2018

With carefully chosen, evidenced-based writing prompts, you bring closure to the challenges of the old year and begin the new one with a fresh vision for health, vitality, and your best possible life.

Through this writing retreat, you will learn seven types of writing: mindful, healing, expressive, transactional, poetic, affirmative, and legacy writing as you honor the experiences of the past year and transition mindfully into the New Year.

Join me at 1440 Multiversity for an immersive weekend including daily wellness offerings, nourishing meals, and holistic amenities.

Duke Integrative Medicine is hosting a new session of Transform Your Health: Write to Heal beginning November 1st. This class is open to the public and no previous writing experience is required. 

This is a transformative 6-week class that has been researched and proven to

• decrease depressive symptoms
• reduce stress

Expressive writing has also been shown to 

• reduce blood pressure
• boost immune systems
• improve self-esteem

Here's what people are saying about Write to Heal. 

A new series of Transform Your Health: Write to Heal begins on November 1st. Classes are held at Duke Integrative Medicine in Durham, NC and is open to the public. 

This is a 6-week workshop on Wednesday evenings from 6-8 pm. The class is open to the public and no previous writing experience is required to participate. As the instructor, I will guide you through several restorative writing exercises.

Expressive writing has been shown to have a variety of health benefits including reduced blood pressure and stress level, as well as improving the immune system and your self esteem. 

Register by October 16th to receive the early bird discount! Click here to learn more. 

Here's what some previous students had to stay about the class. 

Recently I was a guest speaker on the Like Mind, Like Body podcast with Laura Seago. Below is an excerpt from the interview. Click here to listen to the entire segment. 

So why does WRITING, specifically, help with healing… as opposed to just talking things out with a friend or your therapist?

Well, you know…. talk therapy is pretty ephemeral. It’s here and then it’s gone. Many times, people can’t even remember what they talked about when they leave their therapist’s office. And yet, in writing, you can actually make the abstract concrete. You make implicit processes explicit. You can then EDIT your story in a more lasting way, because you’ve written it down, and you have words that you can change. You can decide what impact that vocabulary has on you. We have this internal conversation going on all the time in our heads…. some people call it the interior monologue, other people have called it the stream of consciousness. What they’re talking about it something that mindfulness practitioners call "monkey mind.” We have this gibberish that’s going on in our heads all the time… and many times, the language that we use inside our heads is not all that compassionate or loving or kind. In fact, it can keep us trapped in a mindset of victimhood or pain. When we begin to realize that, we can change our language to something that is more positive and more uplifting.

FULL PODCAST