Christine Runyan, a clinical psychologist and UMass Chan Medical School professor, discusses the ongoing emotional impact of the pandemic. She emphasizes the need for self-compassion and offers strategies for finding peace amidst collective trauma. The conversation explores how past experiences of stress affect our responses to current events, the healing power of connection, and the mind-body relationship. Runyan also highlights the role of imagination in shaping our physical sensations and the importance of mindfulness for mental well-being, especially in healthcare.

Clinical psychologist and mindfulness teacher Christine Runyan shares wisdom on befriending the body, delving into healing distressed nervous systems. The podcast offers practical guided practices to blanket the body with tenderness, exploring self-compassion and promoting gratitude towards the body. Runyan emphasizes finding inner refuge and strength amidst challenges, guiding listeners through body scan exercises with kindness and awe.

The years of pandemic and lockdown are still working powerfully on us from the inside. But we have trouble acknowledging this, much less metabolizing it. This conversation with Christine Runyan, which took place in the dark middle of those years, helps make sense of our present of still-unfolding epidemic distress — as individuals, as communities, as a species. She has cultivated a reverence for the human nervous system. She tells truths about our bodies that western medicine itself is only fitfully learning to see. This quiet conversation is not just revelatory, but healing and calming. It holds startling prescience about some of what we're navigating now. And it offers self-compassion and simple strategies for finding ease within ourselves — and with each other — as we live forward from here.Christine Runyan is a clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at UMass Chan Medical School. She is also a certified mindfulness teacher, and she co-founded and co-leads Tend Health, a clinical consulting practice focused on the mental well-being of medical and health care workers.This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Christine Runyan — On Healing Our Distressed Nervous Systems." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.