Keeping Calm in the Midst of Chaos

Dr. Beth Frates and I get together to discuss how WE all can keep calm in the midst of chaos. Remember WE are in this together. By keeping a healthy mind and body we can thrive during the most unimaginable times. Social distancing and compassion for one another is key to not only slow down COVID-19 but to come together as ONE HUMANITY.

Listen here:

 

 

Beth Frates, MD, is trained as a physiatrist and a health and wellness coach. Her expertise is in lifestyle medicine, and she works to empower patients to reach their optimal level of wellness by adopting healthy habits. Elected to the Board of Directors of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) in 2016, Dr. Frates is helping to shape the scope of this new specialty. She is an award-winning teacher at Harvard Medical School and developed and taught a college lifestyle medicine curriculum at the Harvard Extension School, which is one of the most popular courses offered at the school. As the Director of Wellness Programming at the Stroke Institute for Research and Recovery at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, Dr. Frates has created and implemented a twelve-month wellness program for stroke survivors and their caregivers.  She is co-author of the book, Life After Stroke: TheGuide to Recovering Your Health and Preventing Another Strokeand co-author of three chapters on behavior change in different medical textbooks, and multiple journal articles on lifestyle medicine topics including exercise prescription, connection prescription, lifestyle medicine case series, and walking meeting for sustained weight loss. She shared a lifestyle medicine syllabus, which can be downloaded through the ACLM website, in hopes that her work can serve as a template for other instructors and professors hoping to teach a course in lifestyle medicine.  Dr. Frates is the co-author of the Lifestyle Medicine Handbook: An Introduction to the Power of Healthy Habits.For the past 9 years, Dr. Frates has been the faculty advisor for the Lifestyle Medicine Interest Group at Harvard Medical School, and she works with the Professionals In Training (PiT) group at ACLM to help create more LMIGs in medical schools and other health care professional training schools.  Dr. Frates is passionate about developing programs focused on lifestyle medicine and wellness.

and….

Want to increase your sense of well-being in this chaotic time? Please join Dr. Frates  for an online 6 week workshop. Starts March 30. Email SRHStrokeInstitute@partners.org or call 617 952-6149. You can join from anywhere in the Earth globe europe-africa by Zoom Meeting. Financial aid is available.

 

WE have got this….

I get it. We are all facing this together. Right NOW.

We are working from home.

Our kids are attempting to do online school.

Restaurants, bars, venues are closed.

Hand sanitizer is sold out.

Toilet paper is the hottest item of our time~ it is as if the more we buy the more we are feeding into our fears.

Right?

Will I get the Coronavirus? Will I unknowingly be asymptomatic and pass it to an elder relative or someone that is immunocompromised?

What will happen to my job? How will I pay my mortgage? My rent? Should I dump my stocks?

It is so important that WE stay sane, calm and prevent a greater spread of COVID-19.

Let’s do this together, ok?

Today was day 1 of homeschool and I worked from home via FaceTime to have appointments with my patients.

There were mixed feelings by all, yet a sense of HUMANITY was the shared sentiment.

Whether it was a patient, a friend, a relative or my son we all are feeling the uncertainty.

I recommend that while we are in our homes we reflect on what we are grateful for.

Do I have food, shelter and clothing?

Am I healthy?

We need to follow common sense recommendations from the CDC and adhere to social distancing.

The more we prevent the spread the sooner we will be back to business, our children at school and life will go on.

Tips:

Boost your immune system with healthy nutrition, exercise and rest.

Practice meditation and mindfulness.

Limit the amount of news each day. Grab the facts and go.

Tell someone you love them.

FaceTime each other while practicing self quarantines.

Do not hoard all supplies as the grocery stores are still open.

Stay home as much as you can.

If you are having any symptoms self quarantine and go to doctor if symptoms escalate.

Laugh.

Prevent.

Have hope.

BE a GOOD Human.

This can unify US and allow us all to live with more humility, grace and love for one another.

Be safe. Be well.

With love~

Dr. Denise

 

Top 100 Health and Fitness Influencers

Wow, what an honor to be Top 100 Health and Fitness Influencer!

I AM. Grateful. Honored.

Thank you to everyone for helping raise awareness about changing the way WE think talk and act about mental health.

Here is one of my favorite interviews on The Dr. Denise Show with Harvard Life Style Medicine Pioneer, Dr. Beth Frates (Top 100 Influencer):

Listen to BE Inspired by Life Style Medicine Pioneer, Beth Frates M.D. from The Dr. Denise Show on Apple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dr-denise-show/id1130367790?i=1000448681541
or find at DrDeniseMD.com (podcast section!)

Top 100 Health and Fitness Influencers for 2020

WE Lead!

It was an absolute honor to collaborate and present “Your Best Self” at the WE Lead Malibu conference in January! I was inspired by the ambitious women that attended as well as the creators of WE Lead! ~Dr. Denise

WE Lead

written by Lisa Jane Vargas and Christi Cessna

Yes, we do!  WE Lead is a leadership forum that offers a fresh perspective for growth and elevation for ambitious leaders in the healthcare field.

 

For the last 15 years, co-founders, Lisa Jane Vargas and Christi Cessna, have worked together in multiple roles in behavioral and mental health.  They experienced mergers, acquisitions, sales, marketing, and leadership roles and the many changes our field has lived through.  All the while, ruminating on the seed of curiosity to what it would be like to help develop leaders in ways that will support their ambitions and dreams in an authentic and ethical way.

 

In the summer of 2019, the concept and development of We Lead was created.  LJ and Christi decided to host the first workshop in Scottsdale, AZ in July!  Yes, hot July for a two-day experience.  The focus was on ambitious women.

 

“I had noticed that while most behavioral health conferences were comprised of women, we were still under represented in leadership positions in many organizations.  So, after much discussion, it seemed very natural to focus our workshop initially on women”, says Cessna.

 

Women from all over the country came for the inaugural workshop and left refreshed, renewed and questioning where they are now and ways they could stretch professionally and personally.

 

This brand of women’s leadership development was created to focus on giving women the opportunity for personal discovery to heighten her self-awareness through:

  1. tools to understand her behavior and communication style
  2. concepts, tools and planning to manage her brand
  3. holistic strategies to optimize her physical health
  4. discovery of her beliefs and values with money and how to honor her value

 

This workshop is about a collective in collaboration, helping one another, hence the “we” in WE Lead was an essential meaningful component of its creation.

 

In addition, each presenter is selected because of their wealth of experience.  The venue is selected to be a comfortable, relaxed environment to allow the safety and honesty to flow in each session.  All while empowering participants to connect, talk, share, feel and express what they need to in order to flourish.  Incorporating a mindfulness yoga practice and encouraging participants to dress comfortably, yoga attire is welcomed!

 

“The space we choose means a lot to us so that we can give ourselves permission to be who we are today and feel comfortable in this time of illumination”, says Vargas.

 

The second WE Lead workshop was held in Malibu at the Calamigos Ranch which offered an incredibly beautiful backdrop providing a calm, natural element for all of the senses.

Among the sponsors were J. Flowers Health Institute, Integrative Life Center, Assured Strategy, Milestones Ranch Malibu, Discovery Behavioral Health, Origins Behavioral Healthcare, Meadows Behavioral Healthcare, Avalon Malibu,Viewpoint Dual Recovery, and The Bridge to Recovery.

 

“It’s such an honor to collaborate with these esteemed programs to help so many leaders”, says Vargas.

 

The incredible women delivering the messages in their presentations elevated this event to bring value and thought leadership for each women’s contemplation.  It was an honor to have Denise McDermott, MD, Debra Kaplan, MA, LPC, LISAC, CMAT, CSAT-S, and Keyne Petkovic, MS co-present with us.

 

Some of the highlights we experienced include an exercise like the trauma egg but around our relationship to money and how that may relate to our personal and professional behavior today with finances and our perceived worth related to it.  We dove in to creating our personal mission statement and how that shed like on to how we brand ourselves in our various roles in life. The DISC assessment tool was completed prior to arriving for the workshop. The results were discussed in our table talk where we shared ways to communicate better with our teams and others.   We ended our time together with a bang in conversation with Dr. Denise exploring the expansive opportunities we have to serve and still take care of ourselves with a holistic approach.

 

There were many special and memorable moments in between and nuggets of take-aways for each participant to plant and implement into their professional and personal lives.

 

For more information about the WE Lead workshops, please email weleadevents@gmail.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Best of 2020

It is an absolute honor and privilege to see my clients go from crisis to thrive for the last 20 years in the South Bay!

Every day I show up with gratitude and a deep passion for being sought out for medical opinions, therapy and life solutions.

I am a Mother, a Healer, an Influencer.

Every one that I have ever met in this lifetime is also part of my thrive.

The challenges, the successes, the road blocks are all opportunities to grow, integrate, evolve and ascend.

I thank all of you!

I love living and working in the South Bay and you all mean something to me.

Let’s make 2020 and the next decade a decade devoted to achieving OUR own personal best!

With love & gratitude~

Dr. Denise

Rocking A Betrayal-Sisterhood

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

 

Dr. Denise has shared an intimate and painful chapter of her life in her series Rocking A Betrayal.  While leaning in to the shame that can accompany falling prey to a financial fraud, she showed us how to take betrayal and, using “cognitive re-framing,” find the positive facets of a difficult situation.  In doing so, Dr. Denise discovered other individuals who report that not only were they betrayed too, they were also betrayed by the  very same operator.  In this podcast, Dorothy Simons shares her story of betrayal, embarrassment and the wonderful world of support and sisterhood she found when she received an unexpected call from our very own Dr. Denise.

Listen here:

Rocking A Betrayal-Red Flags

Hopefully you’ve never experienced the heart-stopping moment of the realization that you’ve been betrayed.  But if you tuned into to Dr. Denise’s Rocking A Betrayal, Part One, you’ve learned that it can happen to any of us and Dr. Denise cast aside shame to stand up and say, “It happened to me.”  In telling her story, she wants to help us all learn from her experience. What could she have done differently?  What were some Red Flags that she overlooked?  Answering these questions is crucial fo self-love and protection.  Dr. Denise is always pushing forward in her pledge to #InspireALL with awareness, self-love and altruism.  And she is generous enough to share the details of this incredibly difficult time to assist any of us needing help in Rocking A Betrayal.

 

FaLaLaLaLa ‘Tis the Season

Fa La La La La — Holidays & Altruism

“’Tis the season” — just those words can make some of us jubilant while leaving others close to tears with all the extra work and commercialism that come with the holidays.  Dr. Denise invited me to talk about stop seizures meds, gift-giving and gratitude during this sacred time of year.  Dr. Denise shares how she used Cognitive Reframing to change her own thoughts about the holidays.  Don’t worry, she explains what it is and how to do it in her unique, down-to-earth style.  We also talk about letting kids be kids and how to infuse our core essential values into the holidays and all year long.

Here are some of the links you’ll hear about in our Fa La La La La Show:

~Cathleen O’Toole, CoHost

https://www.focusingphilanthropy.org/kristof/?utm_source=hkip-org&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=rdr

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/opinion/sunday/holiday-gift-guide.html

https://nypost.com/2019/11/18/dad-shares-10-year-old-daughters-ridiculous-10000-christmas-list/

Listen Here:

Rocking A Betrayal Episode: SHAME

It is with great care and discernment that Dr. Denise decided to tackle this very personal experience on her podcast.  Countless hours of prayer, meditation and consultation with trusted confidantes led her to share an intimate story of betrayal.  Why?  So many of us have felt we’ve been betrayed at one time or another:  your secret told, a partner who strayed, a financial associate who swindled.  Often times, our first response is to feel the heat of shame rise up.  How could we be so foolish?  What will others think?  Dr. Denise walks us through her betrayal, her decision to share with trusted friends and then a greater audience.  She and I talk about turning into shame, instead of running from it.  Her powerful story shows us how to take control of our own narratives by Rocking A Betrayal.

Listen Here:

PlayPlay

 

 

Modern Prayer & Spirituality Summit
I wanted you to be the first to know that a very powerful and valuable FREE resource will be available to you starting December 1st . It’s called Modern Prayer and Spirituality, and this free video series is packed with tools, strategies, and insights from various experts in the field of spirituality, prayer and a relationship with the Divine, including myself.
This resource is a must have for anybody who has questioned their spiritual path or connection to the Divine.
Have you wondered what being spiritual looks like, where you fit in or even felt like there was more to experience, but don’t quite know what that is?
There are over 20 experts featured in Modern Prayer & Spirituality, and availability is limited so make sure you register now before it’s full.
Here are some of the topics that will be covered in the video interviews:
  • How to create a deep connection with the Divine without identifying with organized religion
  • How to incorporate Modern prayer into your spiritual practice
  • The power of meditation and intention
  • How to recognize the relationship and work with your Angels in your life
  • How to deeply and intentionally co-create with the Divine
  • What are limiting beliefs and how to clear them to open up possibilities in your life and practice
  • You also get to experience the work of every expert in an online retreat experience!
And much more…
Imagine being able to sit front row and listen to the top experts in the field of spirituality giving you insight about enhancing your connection with the Divine and creating a more personal spiritual practice. That would be empowering and invaluable!
Register Now and don’t miss out!