Mind & Life

In this episode, Wendy speaks with psychiatrist and contemplative researcher Zev Schuman-Olivier. Zev has been working for more than a decade to integrate mindfulness and compassion into health care, with a focus on addiction, depression, and chronic illness. This conversation covers many topics, including:

• weaving mindfulness and compassion into clinical settings;



• lessons from his own experience of chronic illness;



• the key role of behavior change in health;



• balancing individual responsibility for health with systemic factors;



• mindfulness and addiction;



• making interventions trauma-informed, inclusive, and broadly accessible;



• how signals from the body help motivate action and emotion;



• how mindfulness enhances trust in the body and changes the brain in depression;



• Internal Family Systems and the critical role of acceptance;



• and next steps for integrating mindfulness and compassion into complex healthcare systems.

Full show notes and resources