A Two-Day Live Online Workshop with Lissa Rankin, MD & Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv
Your Impact & Your Legacy
Review Your Past To Reprioritize Your Future
A Healing Writing Workshop Designed To Facilitate Gratitude, Reorient Priorities & Reframe Regret Into Opportunity
Saturday, November 23 and Sunday, November 24, 2024 from 9:00am to 3:00pm PT
“Where there is no struggle, there is no strength.”― Oprah Winfrey
Anyone who’s faced their own mortality- or lost someone way too young- is likely to experience a sort of life review. When death is in your face, it’s natural to begin to reflect back on the life you’ve lived so far- to take inventory of our bucket lists and accomplishments, to reflect on the quality and moral integrity of our relationships, to remember our traumas and also remember how resilient we are. It also kicks up questions about whether the life we’ve lived so far is also the life we wish to live moving forward.
Many people only go through this natural developmental stage in their elder years- or when they first experience a life-threatening illness. But right now- we all just went through a pandemic. We all could have died. So now is a wonderful time to skip ahead a bit and consider making good use of the opportunity we all experienced to touch our own mortality- and for those of us still alive today, to survive the brush with death.
It’s natural to take for granted the gift of life until we touch its impermanence first hand- or at least second hand. We hope there’s some sort of afterlife or reincarnation, some second chance to get a do-over or try again to get life right- or to enjoy perpetual bliss in some other dimension.
But we have no real proof that this is so. So why not do what’s without our power to create “heaven on earth”- right here, right now, while we’re still in a body and have the chance to look back reflectively, so we can move forward more intentionally?
It’s natural to take for granted the gift of life until we touch its impermanence first hand- or at least second hand. We hope there’s some sort of afterlife or reincarnation, some second chance to get a do-over or try again to get life right- or to enjoy perpetual bliss in some other dimension.
But we have no real proof that this is so. So why not do what’s without our power to create “heaven on earth”- right here, right now, while we’re still in a body and have the chance to look back reflectively, so we can move forward more intentionally?
- You’re considering writing a memoir or autobiography and would like support in getting started;
- You’re in a time of transition, trying to make some big decisions and hoping to get in touch with your inner wisdom;
- You’ve just experienced a disappointing let down- and you need an intentional process to bolster your morale and uplift your mood- authentically;
- You’re feeling humbled by life and wanting to milk this humbling for all the wisdom you can glean from it;
If so, we invite you to a Zoom weekend retreat focused on what the future can hold.
*Butler, R. N., & Ciarrocchi, J. W. (2016). The legacy project: An intergenerational program for the end of life. Springer Publishing Company.
We all just survived a deadly pandemic! Why wait until we get diagnosed with some life-threatening illness or wind up in nursing homes to begin to digest the lives we’ve lived so far and give ourselves a chance to pivot when necessary? We don’t need to twelve-step something in order to take advantage of our chance to make a moral inventory, feel our disappointment, healthy shame, and regrets, so we can make amends where possible, grieve and accept our failures, let downs and disappointments, and make changes in our lives aimed at reducing regrets in the future.
Engaging in an intentional life review is also helpful for anyone considering writing a memoir or leaving behind an autobiography for future generations. With facilitated support, we can write about key moments in the lives we’ve lived so far, not only to keep a record of our lives, but also as a way to jog our memories, reflect back on the lives we’ve lived so far, and foster appreciation for the happy memories that can uplift us when we feel down. Reminiscing about positive life events can even activate the release of feel-good hormones endorphins and dopamine. Reviewing your life also promotes a more positive outlook on life- while you still have time to enjoy it.
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”―Khalil Gibran
*Fiese, B. H., & Spagnola, M. (2005). The interior life of the dying: The development of a life review program for palliative care patients. Omega-Journal of Death and Dying, 50(3), 187-206.
The research is clear that conducting a life review improves mental health, helps improve and makes us more resistant to depression, assists with integrating life experiences and gaining life acceptance, gives us a chance to reprioritize what really matters, acknowledges and celebrates our strengths, benefits our interpersonal relationships, helps us reframe regrets and squandered years into radical gratitude, and supports us to become mentors and wisdom keepers for those younger than us. It also helps us conjure up memories, details, and emotions so we can enrich our memoir or autobiography writing with more depth, feeling, and rich sensory detail.
As the facilitator of Your Impact & Your Legacy I was lucky to go through a spontaneous life review when my physician father was diagnosed with two different cancers in one year when he was 59. He was cured from the first one but died right on schedule three months after being diagnosed with the second.
I was a 35 year old doctor at the time of his diagnosis, and this spontaneous life review caused me to question every choice I’d made thus far and realize that I regretted most of them. I asked myself, “What if I was given three months to live? Would I be living the life I’m living now?” The answer from a small still voice inside that I came to call my “Inner Pilot Light” was a resounding “Hell to the no.”
That same voice met me on the floor of a bathroom when I was pregnant and suicidal right after my father’s diagnosis. She whispered in the kindest, most gentle, most compassionate voice possible, “Sweetheart, you’re going to have to quit your job.”
It took me a year and a half to follow through on that inner instruction, but leaving the hospital and retiring from practicing as an OB/GYN is what I did- permanently. I made a major decision to never again choose professional ambition over relational intimacy, reprioritizing my life to bring to top priority a close inner circle of chosen and birth family. I also left San Diego and moved to a small coastal town right on Highway 1 in Northern California and wound up leaving my marriage a few years later.
“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” ―E. M. Forster
- In Your Impact & Your Legacy, we’ll hold your hand and guide you, step by step, during a weekend Zoom workshop that can jump-start you into a process that can take as long (or as brief) as you wish to stay in the process.
- You’ll participate in writing prompts aimed at facilitating life review, enjoy the community elements of sharing and appreciating the details of our lives, receive witnessing, mirroring, and appreciation from others in the class, and perhaps, begin to create a legacy to share the wisdom of what you’ve learned with future generations- through your writing.
- We’ll also set you up to continue more of the life review process once the weekend jump start is over- and give you the opportunity to partner up with one or more people in the class to get together and share your life review material on your own time afterward. Since having witnesses to your life review improves mental health, fosters connection, and benefits both the one sharing and the one listening, ongoing support can make this a practice you engage in, not just for one weekend, but for as long as you need or wish to engage in the life review process.
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We’ll also play with music as a memory aid. Much more than intellect, music can elicit the kind of emotions that facilitate healing and recollection of the details of your life- and also make for great writing.
“But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.” ― Martin Luther King, Jr.
Your Hosts
Dr. Lissa Rankin
Dr. Jeff Rediger
*All sessions will be recorded with unlimited availability.
“In a time of destruction, create something.”― Maxine Hong Kingston
Schedule
9:00 am - 3:00 pm PT | 11:00 am - 5:00 pm CT | 12:00 pm - 6:00 pm ET
For each life review writing prompt, we’ll guide you through a series of provocative and exploratory questions designed to stimulate memory and guide you through the life review. Then we’ll give you space to respond to a writing prompt while instrumental music is playing, followed by sharing, witnessing, and celebrating what we’ve written in large and/or small groups
Saturday, November 24th, 2024
9:00 am - 9:30 am PT
Opening Circle
We’ll discuss the importance of frequent life review practices and give examples of how life review can deeply and positively impact the course of a life. Then we’ll open our circle and build safety and trust with a ritual intended to help you celebrate the life you’ve lived so far and engage in letting go of the regrets you can’t undo. We’ll use music, writing, movement, and art to process what arises when we begin to honor- and also grieve- what has happened to us so far.
9:30 am - 10:30 am PT
Life Transitions
Prepare for a dive into the sanctuary of your own heart, using a gentle version of the Internal Family Systems model. We will help you touch lightly into the pain at the root of the child who did not get their needs adequately met. With our wise, loving Self preparing the sanctuary for reunion, we can connect with and welcome the broken-hearted child that might cause us to choose relationships in adulthood that retrigger the wounds of the broken-hearted child. We will take that pain and get it out of our bodies and onto the written page, where it can be alchemized into beauty, healing, and medicinal art. Offering medicine to the wounded parts through the unconditional love of our own Self energy can be a balm for parts that may feel sad, lonely, rejected, and hopeless. The best antidote we have lives right inside. To prepare the heart to love someone else again, we have to start with loving even the most unlovable parts inside. IFS makes it easy to do this, and when we invest the energy in doing so, we prepare ourselves to be easier to love, warmer, less needy because we’re meeting some of our own needs inside, more available to both give and receive, and more attractive to those in our outer world.
10:30 pm - noon PT
Family of Origin & Chosen Family
Whether you like it or not, the family you got born into has impacted your life in crucial ways. The distribution of kind, loving, and securely attached families and those that are abusive, dysfunctional, and traumatizing is not fair and never will be. Part of the life review process is coming to terms with the arc of your life based on the family you were born into. It’s also about the families we make when the families we were born into weren’t supportive. We’ll talk about how to make meaning out of your lot in life and how to write the stories of your birth family and/ or chosen family in a way that fosters agency, appreciation, autonomy, and authenticity- without sugar coating reality. We’ll give you priming questions and prompts to jog your memory, while also holding a safe, brave container for whatever arises.
Lunch Break
Money, Power, Achievement & Callings
We’re all on this earth for a purpose. Finding that sacred purpose and living out our calling impeccably is part of the recipe for a good, meaningful life. And yet, our callings often wind up being something other than we thought they might be. We’ll prompt you with areas for self-inquiry around the values you’ve prioritized- and whether you want to reconsider any of these values going forward. Taking some time to reflect on your major life’s work and how it’s impacted your identity-, whether that’s a career, how you made money, taking care of a home, or caregiving family members- helps make sense and make meaning of the ways we spend the majority of our days can help us orient to what really matters.
Sunday, November 24th, 2024
9:00 am - 10:30 am PT
Religion, Spirituality & Belief (Or Lack Thereof)
Regardless of religion or belief, we all have a timeless aspect of our being that searches for truth, values, integrity, meaning, and some kind of transcendence, not just the religiously devout, but also the atheists and agnostics among us. No life review would be complete without exploring some of the more mysterious aspects of our life history- the stories we can’t easily explain with our rational minds, the experiences that changed us or divided life into “Before” and “After.”
10:30 am - noon PT
Health, Sex & Your Body
We spend this life housed by one body we did not have much say in choosing. That body we inhabit unavoidably impacts the course of our lives. We’ll take some time to reflect on how our bodies have served us well- and also where they’ve given us challenges. Whether through health or disease, whether through sexual pleasure or pain, whether through race, culture, gender, or sexual preference, we can’t help but be impacted by the physical form we live life through and how easeful or challenging our body makes our life.
Lunch Break
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm PT
Your Bucket List
Now is a good time to consider what else you might want to experience before you “kick the bucket.” Your goals and aspirations, dreams and desires are a key part of your inner compass for the remainder of what’s left of your life. We’ll pay some attention to dreaming and do some writing about what you hope to check off your bucket list in the time you have left, however long that might be.
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm PT
Continuing Your Life Review At Home
We’ll spend the last hour helping guide you through how to self-guide an ongoing life Do-It-Yourself life review and/or memoir or autobiography at home. We’ll arm you with a guidebook of prompts, and if you wish, you can self organize with others in the Your Impact & Your Legacy class to witness and celebrate your life stories in an ongoing fashion, helping each other make meaning and reframe various life experiences into a narrative of a life well lived. For those who feel complete at the end of this process, we’ll support you to gain clarity on a few changes you might wish to make based on the life review you’ve done thus far.
TESTIMONIALS
Thank you so much, Lissa. This has been profound and inspiring and world changing. (Christina T)
Thank you for this offering. It has been insightful and you both are great guides on this journey of relationships. — Julie O
Thank you both - this was so valuable and opening. I’ve realized / learned more about myself and feel so reassured. — Judy G.
Thank you both so much. The timing of this course was like a god send for me. Thank you for helping me on my journey to healing and growth. — Zoe B.
I crave this kind of authenticity. This is deeply compelling and satisfying. Thank you both. (Nancy G)
Thank you for the time, info and energy you put into the workshop; I am taking much with me. — Lynn W.
Image Credit Monique Feil Photography
You will lose everything. Your money, your power, your fame, your success, perhaps even your memories. Your looks will go. Loved ones will die. Your body will fall apart. Everything that seems permanent is impermanent and will be smashed. Experience will gradually, or not so gradually, strip away everything that it can strip away. Waking up means facing this reality with open eyes and no longer turning away.
But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost, and realizing this is the key to unspeakable joy. Whoever or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you. This may sound trivial, obvious, like nothing, but really it is the key to everything, the why and how and wherefore of existence. Impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heartbreaking gratitude. Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar." –Jeff Foster
Bonuses
With Lissa Rankin, MD & Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, author of Kitchen Table Wisdom
Our entire culture suffers from what the shamans call “soul loss,” a loss of meaning, direction, vitality, mission, purpose, identity, and genuine connection; a deep unhappiness that most of us have come to consider as simply ordinary. The soul is our source of absolute uniqueness, a place within that connects you not only to your own value and essence, but to the value and essence of every other living being. What makes soul loss so subtle and dangerous is that very few people have realized that it has happened. Most of us do not know that we have disconnected from our soul and have come to accept as normal a numbness and lack of meaning in our lives. Because we all belong to this culture, we all suffer from soul loss. Soul loss is epidemic and blinds us from seeing the potential for joy and wholeness in ordinary life. When you heal from soul loss, you see familiar things in new ways so you can increase your joy in what you already have.
When doing a life review, connecting to the soul and the joy that can only come from deep soul work nourishes the journey. This bonus class is intended to support you along the way.
Medicine For The Soul consists of:
You WIll Also Receive:
Vulnerability and Health
Audio Recording
Access to the recording of a 60 minute teleclass Lissa recorded with Brené Brown, New York Times bestselling author of Daring Greatly, about vulnerability and health
Becoming the Artist of your Life
Audio Recording
60-minute call with SARK, artist and bestselling author of 16 books, on becoming the artist of your life
Building Community
Audio Recording
One 60-minute call with depth psychologist Anne Davin, PhD
Use Music to Connect with your Own Soul
Audio Recording
Mustering up the moxie to reflect back on our lives, dive into what's working and what's not, appreciate the beauty of the life we've lived so far, take stock of what might need to change if we wish for the rest of our life to be different, accept responsibility for changing the things we have the power to change, grieve what we've lost and won't ever have, and be intentional about creating our future can generate countless gifts.
We can directly experience the unspeakable joy of what we have not yet lost. We can be more present for the lives we have left. We can actually take in the nourishment that's already here, ready for the taking.
We can take risks we might be frightened to take but that we know are necessary in order to create the lives that will allow us to hopefully die spent, all used up and grateful when we look back at how fully we've lived, expressed ourselves, loved and been loved, fulfilled our callings and our dreams, and left the world a better place because we touched it for a brief moment. We invite you to journey with us...
Your Impact & Your Legacy
Review Your Past To Reprioritize Your Future
A Healing Writing Workshop Designed To Facilitate Gratitude, Reorient Priorities & Reframe Regret Into Opportunity
Early Bird Special $297
Ends Sunday, November 11th at midnight!
Only $197
USD
If the cost of this workshop presents a financial hardship, we hope you will contact us for tuition adjustment options. Please write to support@lissarankin.com
Please Review Our Terms HERE
Dr. Lissa Rankin
Lissa became a devoted student of many forms of trauma therapy, including Richard Schwartz, Ph.D.’s Internal Family Systems (IFS), Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, Lawrence Heller’s NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM), and Asha Clinton, Ph.D.’s Advanced Integrative Therapy (AIT.) She also teaches about spiritual bypassing recovery for those who have used spirituality as a way to avoid healing their trauma.
In addition to her public health advocacy and health care reform activism, Lissa leads workshops- online, at US retreat centers like Esalen, 1440, Omega, and Kripalu, and internationally. During the pandemic, Lissa played a public role in debunking “Conspirituality,” the Covid denialism, anti-vaccination propaganda, and conspiracy theories promoted by many wellness, yoga, mind-body medicine, alternative medicine, and spirituality influencers who got “red-pilled” during 2020. This shakeout anchored her as a physician influencer to trust who is grounded in science, open to the mystical, spiritually aware, and trauma-informed. Lissa is currently co-writing her eighth book with Harvard psychiatrist Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv about the link between relational trauma and medical illness and how healthy boundaries and Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy can help reverse diseases related to nervous system dysregulation caused by relational trauma. Lissa lives with her partner Jeff Rediger and her housemate April Sweazy in the Bay Area, now that her daughter has flown the nest. She thrives on daily hikes in nature, dancing with her Bay Area dance community, singing, writing, DJ'ing music whenever she can, and healthy gourmet cooking.
Dr. Jeff Rediger
He has been nominated for the National Bravewell Leadership Award and has received many awards for leadership and patient care. His best-selling book, Cured: Strengthen Your Immune System and Heal Your Life, has been published in 22 languages so far and is available at both local bookstores and online.
Jeff is excited to participate in this class because the topic is very near and dear to his heart on a personal level. Having just survived a devastating series of traumas during the pandemic that caused him to rethink how he'd been living his life and the priorities he'd been putting first, he just took a leap of faith, stepped down as medical director at Harvard's Mclean SE into the uncertainty of his next creative career choices, sold his home in Boston, moved to California after decades on the East Coast, started aggressive trauma treatment, signed a book deal so he can write about what happened to him and make good use of everything he's learning in his trauma recovery, and is actively reviewing his life in order to reorient his future. He's motivated to co-teach this class in order to help people who might be stuck and in denial about how their lives are going so far live more authentically and do what's within your power to accomplish your dreams.
Frequently Asked Questions:
How do I contact customer service?
Please contact us by sending an email to support@lissarankin.com
What kind of technology will I need in order to participate?
All you’ll need is a computer or a smartphone and internet access in order to participate. All live calls will be on Zoom.
What if I can't attend a session when it takes place ?
All sessions are recorded so if you can't attend the live session you'll be able to soak up the juicy teachings, healing intentions, and spiritual energy of this course at any time it’s convenient for you.
© 2024 Lissa Rankin INC · All Rights Reserved
Image Credits: monique feil photography
