I am a purported expert in change and personal growth; that’s the work I do with patients, and what I lecture and write about. I say that growth has nothing to do with adding on; it’s always about letting go. Alas, it’s always easier to tell others how to welcome shedding their skins than it is for me to do it myself. Letting go of the old and familiar is a necessary prerequisite for growth, but it’s hard to do because no matter how much we may know we have to move on, it always makes us feel vulnerable, which can inspire fear.

I want to make some lifestyle changes, because racing through airports with such frequency is getting tedious. I want to be doing more of the things I really want to do: play more, join my fly-fishing brothers on the Pere Marquette during the salmon spawn, finish my next book, and organize a community mental health program that will serve as an antidote to today’s anorexia of the soul. I want to accompany my friend Brad Keeney to Botswana and dance with the Kalahari Bushman, clown with Patch Adams in the jungles of Ecuador, and teach smaller, retreat-based groups of healthcare professionals how to expand their healing power.

This could all be done if I changed my lifestyle and downsized my palatial home of 36 years. It’s too big for the two of us and is getting more burdensome to maintain; the thought of leaving, however, is not easy for me. Our home has been the ceremonial center for three generations. Every tree and bush is rooted in soil in which the afterbirths of my grandchildren have been buried. The sweat lodge has been continuously used for decades. This home has been the scene I imagine when I go to my meditative place of peace.

Although I know this decision will free me up to move proactively into my future, there are times I wake up weeping. At those times, I tell myself that we are only leaving the place, not the heart and soul of what we have celebrated here. And I remember what my Native relatives have taught me: that nothing really belongs to us except us, we come with nothing and whatever we accumulate we will leave behind. What we keep forever is the love which gives our life meaning, the discovery of joy in each other, the joy of challenge and of growth.


I keep telling myself I’m shedding my skin to accommodate new growth, and it seems to me good practice for the shedding still to come. I know it’s all about letting go and taking with us only the certainty that we have loved well, but Friday they planted the For Sale sign out front, and Saturday I woke up with tears.

Registered for the Healing Cafe? If not, click here

I've recently described my ex brother-in-law’s battle with Myasthenia Gravis and his journey through a Neurology-Intensive Care Unit on life support systems. During his 2 month hospitalization, Joe and I often talked about the traumatic awakenings to our expanding fragility.

Once he asked me if I would perform his wedding ceremony; he wanted to marry Pam, his companion of the last 20 years. I loved the idea, not only to celebrate Joe’s survival, but also to honor our shared existential mindfulness about what we want to do with the rest of our lives.

I had to find a way to officially sign a marriage certificate. It turns out it’s easy to get ordained: for $39.95 and a very basic questionnaire, you can get it online. It is official and legal in most states for you to perform weddings, burials, and baptisms. I sent $49.95 (the deluxe package) which included sample ceremonies, prayers, and the option to choose what you want to be called. Four days later the mailman delivered the package; inside, was a laminated card for my wallet announcing the Rev. Dr. Carl Hammerschlag, a clip-on badge for a jacket pocket, sample services, and a car window sticker that announces I am “engaged in religious duties as an ordained clergyman and parked here on official business.” (When my wife saw the parking permit she decided she’d also get ordination.)

I will do Joe and Pam’s wedding as soon as the family all arrive, but in the meantime I just performed my first wedding. A dentist friend, Mike, was going to attend a workshop I was doing in Austin, entitled The Head, Hands and Heart of the Authentic Healer. As part of this workshop I have groups create healing ceremonies. Mike asked me if I would marry him and his fiancée while I was there. My recent certification was good in Texas, so I told him if he and Maura let me perform their wedding as the healing ceremony, I would love to do it.

We met together the night before the ceremony and talked about what they wanted for themselves and for the rest of us. At the end, I said if we came from a place of open-hearted love and trusted in the spontaneity of the moment only good things would happen.

On the morning of the wedding day we met at the retreat center’s beautiful sanctuary. The multi-tiered Temple combined the architectural elements of a tipi, yurt, and Buddhist shrine. The structure was surrounded by waterfalls and gardens, and completely enclosed by a stone wall. When the time for the healing ceremony came, I announced that today the ceremony we would create was a wedding and this was the first time I would officiate. Then to the audience’s complete surprise, I introduced Mike and Maura as the bride and groom.

Mike and Maura told the participants why they decided to get married at this retreat. Mike said this was his third marriage, and that he’d about given up on ever finding someone he could love and trust until he found Maura. Maura said this was also her third and never wanted to re-marry. She had come to the place where she liked flying on her own wings. Then she met Mike, and said, “I knew we both had broken wings and that we could fly better together.” Both said they hoped the participants would feel their love and that this ceremony would be a healing for them too.

The group was randomly divided into four groups of eight, and each group was instructed to prepare a five-minute wedding ritual. The groups could use any of the instruments and objects we had already used and could also create their own symbolic elements. The bride and groom were sent off by themselves and asked to focus on what they hoped would happen. Maura and I went back to our rooms and dressed up; she was radiant in a white flowing skirt, and I wore an open-necked white shirt with an embroidered ceremonial shawl draped around my shoulders. The shawl was given to me at a wedding by a Native American spiritual leader. Woven into the shawl were the symbols of all the great religions, and feathers dangled from each end.

I led the bride and groom into the sanctuary, and we walked around the circled assembly as they sang Amazing Grace in English and I in Chippewa-Cree. Then each group performed rituals of such creativity and beauty that words alone cannot capture their intensity. One group tied their “broken wings” together; with their hands clasped their forearms were bound with a vine into which flowers had been woven. Another picked them up and rocked them back and forth, while visualizing themselves as one bird each lifted on the wing of the other. One group supported them as they walked over their past of unsteady pillows onto the solid ground of their new journey together. Another created a poster with their words and symbols, as well of those of great poets, adorned with pictures, flowers and which left room for every participant to sign. At the closing, I read the traditional marriage vows, they exchanged rings and I introduced them as husband and wife.

The place broke out into cheers, whistles and hugs — you could feel the love. It is in these moments that you know what you’re feeling is not purely physical. When I signed the marriage certificate, my hand was illuminated by an aura. The power of love and seeing joy in each other is the light, even in these dark times.



I signed as the Rev. Dr. Carl Hammerschlag.

View all of the Wedding Photos

Registered for the Healing Cafe? If not, click here

I just read The Monk and the Philosopher, a best-selling book in Europe for a number of years. It’s written by the distinguished philosopher Jean-Francois Revel and his son, Matthieu Ricard, France’s most celebrated Buddhist monk. This is a wonderful tale about the path to enlightenment. If you’re looking to take some time for introspection and reflection, take this book along with you; it’s a good start to getting serious about what we are doing here.

Matthieu Ricard was a 25-year-old Parisian jet-setter from an exceptional, intellectually gifted family who was surrounded by artists and intellectuals. He had read Socrates and St. Francis but felt he was missing something and that his life was slipping through his hands. He had the facts but was missing the soul; he wanted to sit at the foot of a wise man who could teach him practical wisdom.

He happened to be watching a documentary about the Tibetan Buddhist masters who fled the Chinese invasion and were living in India. He thought these monks might be approachable and decided to go to the Himalayas. There he found his first teacher, Kangyur Rinpoche. He sat in front of him for three weeks without exchanging a word, but Matthieu was moved at a deep level; he experienced the strength, serenity and a love that emanated from the Rinpoche so intensely that he said it opened his mind.

When I was 25 I had a similar mind opening experience. I arrived in Indian country to work as a family doctor; a newly minted physician, I thought I was hot and couldn’t wait to share my therapeutic brilliance. The vagaries of life and death etched away at my certainties, and I was feeling the reality of my limitations. That’s when I met an old medicine man who asked me where I learned how to heal. After I recited my litany of academic achievement, he told me if I wanted to be a healer, I had to learn how to dance to my own music; that encounter changed my life.

When my friend Swamiji (Schlagbyte, 9/20/04) was 25, he was working for his father in the family hardware business which left him unfulfilled and wanting some spark to light his inner fire. He went to the ashram in Pondicherry founded by the visionary yogi Sri Aurobindo. That’s where he saw the face of God who directed him to found a new teaching and healing community.

As a psychiatrist who once believed sitting in an office several times a week and rehashing the traumas of your life was the way to open your mind, it was an awakening to discover that the mind is opened like a bolt of lightening.


All that is required for opening your mind is to be prepared and find yourself in the right place at the right time.

Registered for the Healing Cafe? If not, click here

I was surrounded by teenagers for the last couple of weeks and had a chance to marvel at their skills as multitaskers. Adolescents can simultaneously speak on the telephone, type e-mails, listen to ipods and have a conversation (albeit not a long one); how do they manage it?

Through brain imaging of 11 to 14 year olds (American Journal of Physiology, December 2006) scientists have revealed that adolescents develop the part of their brains requiring short neuronal chains. That’s why they have such incredible hand eye coordination that’ll annihilate you in computer games, can memorize the lyrics of 100 rap tunes, and recite complete movie dialogues.

Thinking and reasoning, however, seem to be less developed because information processing and high-level reasoning require longer neuronal chains and fully developed frontal lobes; that only happens in one’s twenties. The teens are rapidly pruning away at their neuronal connections, getting rid of unnecessary wiring to make room for complex problem-solving,

As a culture, we are in the adolescence of the Information Age. Only in the last 15 years has computer technology been at our fingertips, allowing us to become masters in multitasking.
In the December 2006 issue of the journal Neuron, scientists reveal how the brain loses much of its efficiency when it tries to handle two tasks at once. Using a cell phone while driving a car is dangerous because it delays a driver’s response time, and a one second delay at 60 miles per hour can be fatal. They also found that it takes people an average of 15 minutes to return to their serious work-related tasks after responding to incoming e-mail and instant messages.

We are Computer Age adolescents who have mastered short connections and instantaneous gratification; it’s time to grow up and make some rest stops on the information superhighway.


The primary task in this age is to prune our adolescent multitasking brains and learn how to manage our technology instead of merely yielding to its incessant tug.

Registered for the Healing Cafe? If not, click here

The single most studied artifact in human history is a tattered piece of cloth, the Shroud of Turin. This cloth is thought to have wrapped the beaten and crucified body of Jesus. It is an object of such veneration and fragility, that it is rarely displayed publicly.

I have a sacred piece of cloth — it’s a fringed prayer shawl called a Tallis, which is worn by Jewish adults in the synagogue during prayer. My first one was given to me at my Bar Mitzvah by my father. It was one of the few belongings he brought with him when he escaped from Nazi Germany in 1936; it’s now frayed and fragile; there are holes it. I gave it to my new son at his wedding eighteen years ago. I knew he would give it to his son, if and when he had one, and imagined what that would be like.

Last Friday night, my son gave it to his son during the Sabbath welcoming ceremony. He told him the story about how he received it. Then I told him his great-grandfather had given this Tallis to me on my Bar Mitzvah; he had said it was proof that the Nazi’s could not take everything from him. They could take all his possessions, but they could steal his future.

I said to my grandson, “I’m telling you the same story today. Don’t forget where you come from. Tomorrow you will be called to the Torah wearing his Tallis; I want you to remember your relatives who are not here, because you speak for those on whose ashes you stand and whose mouths are still open but cannot speak for themselves.”

Yesterday when he approached the Torah, both his grandfathers placed the tattered shawl on his shoulder, and when I chanted the Hebrew blessing, I felt my father’s presence and reached out my hand to his head and heard my father’s voice blessing him too.

What binds us together as families and tribes are the ceremonies and rituals through which we transmit the soul of our being from generation to generation. It is through our stories, and the tattered shrouds that hold our memories, that we transmit sustaining wisdom.

Registered for the Healing Cafe? If not, click here