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
