started The Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM) in 1991 because I wanted to bring together many of my interests and concerns — working with children; bringing self–care into the center of all healthcare and all professional education; and ensuring that the spiritual dimension helped to shape our understanding of our lives and the practice of medicine. I also wanted to create a community of healers and a healing community that would catalyze larger change in the world.

I wanted to create a structure that would somehow accommodate all of these disparate interests; have an organization in which interested people could participate; and be able to raise funds. Since I wasn’t concerned with profiting from this work, we incorporated as a non–profit.

I felt a bit like Tom Sawyer and the fence, telling, trying to show, friends and colleagues in Washington DC, what fun this could be. People gathered around: physicians, nurses, and mental health professionals who were hoping to recover the joy of serving others and the commitment to healing partnerships that had drawn them to their professions in the first place; school and yoga teachers; mothers of small children; and writers and dancers; many people who wanted to explore the healing potential of their own work and to help and heal themselves, and wanted to do it with a like–minded group.

We had no money and no paid staff, but lots of energy, imagination, and enthusiasm. In the years since then, we’ve raised money, established a full time Washington staff of 12 and a part time international faculty of close to 100. I think, too, we’ve even enhanced the energy, imagination, and enthusiasm, and developed greater focus as well as far greater range.

Our primary work now, as in 1991, is to make self–awareness, self–expression, self–care, and mutual help central to all of healthcare, to the training of health professionals and the education of our children. Each of our programs embodies these goals. Each addresses an area of great and urgent need. Each is based on self–care and self–help. And each is intended to catalyze far larger changes in national, and indeed, worldwide attitudes and approaches to healthcare.