FELIPE A. JAIN, MD

I bow to the sunrise, to the wonderful play of light, to the wispy and languorous clouds.  To the pastel pink scraped across the sky.  I bow to the trees, whose branches black in the dawn fan and extend thousands of fingers into the sky.  I breathe.  This body breathes, rather.  I laugh.

The ego is... an incredible and intricate survival system. Nothing more complex has ever emerged in the past 4 billion years of life on this planet. It is what gives you a sense of personhood, enables you to respond to threats, set goals and accomplish them. Yet with that ego can also come a sense of importance and sensitivity to not reaching those very goals or living the life you dream. When I found bliss -- an expansive and joyful awareness -- I had been afflicted by a sense of striving, needing to act, needing to carry out my goals. This left me personally quite serious, most of the time. Stressed out. Trying to manage a daily grind of details and finding only partial success amid big goals. I was trapped by what I felt I needed to do. When awareness unfolded, I could clearly see the difference between it and the ego - between the unbound and the bound. I laughed at everything I thought I knew about myself, about my failures and successes, about my persona, about my likes and...

I am extremely excited to share that my new research study was published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, a top 5 international psychology journal. It studies a population that has high levels of chronic stress: people who care for family members with dementia. Dementia is a chronic and progressive illness with no cure that robs the person of memory and normal behavior. Family caregivers - whom we also refer to as care partners - provide support and aid for their relative that is the most essential help they receive. I chose to study family dementia caregivers because research shows that they are among the most stressed and depressed people on the planet: the CDC recently found that about 40% of caregivers had suicidal thoughts during the COVID-19 pandemic. A whopping 60% of "sandwiched" caregivers - those caring for older adult relatives as well as for children, experienced suicidal thoughts. If my new psychotherapy - Mentalizing Imagery Therapy (MIT) - could work for these...

How do you counter “existential angst”?  A direct way is to focus on your connection to everything.  You can’t see this connection with your eyes.  You must infer it based on scientific reasoning and remember it repeatedly.  If you only focus on your own thoughts and feelings inside your body/head, you cannot reach beyond them.  You will be trapped inside a cycle of self-reinforcing drama.  Einstein said that our sense of separateness from other things is due to an “optical delusion of our consciousness”.  What this means is that, from the perspective of particle physics, everything is connected.  Although we might perceive ourselves as individuals and the universe around us as an object outside of ourselves, this perception is flawed. One way to help free yourself from this sense of separateness is by focusing on your awareness, your sense of presence in the body.  Take a few minutes to close your eyes.  Scan through the body from...

“My wife says I lack empathy.  I can’t understand why she’d say that.”

 ~ (almost) every married man

OK, that’s a joke .  Most men are quite empathic.  Yes, there are also many men who lack empathy, meaning they cannot put themselves in another person’s shoes.  They’re probably not reading this website though.  The cool thing about the mindfulness and guided imagery techniques I have developed is they help people who are already empathic become even more so.