It fascinates me how we human beings underestimate the imprint of what's happening inside our bodies and brains on the people and the world around us.

And I believe we are now walking around with the years of pandemic and lockdown, still

working on us powerfully from the inside.

But we're not really acknowledging or metabolizing this. It's as

though we're living with the echoes of those years, but we've forgotten what made

the sound. So the conversation that follows took place in the dark

middle of pandemic, but we're offering it up again now because it helps make sense

of our present of still unfolding epidemic distress as individuals, as communities,

as a species.

Christine Runyon has cultivated as her quiet calling a reverence for the human nervous system.

She tells truths about our bodies that Western medicine is only fitfully learning to see.

And this conversation is not just revelatory, but healing and calming.

It holds prescience about some of what we're navigating now, and it offers self-compassion

and welcome simple strategies for finding ease within ourselves and with each other

as we live forward from here.

I'm Krista Tippett and this is on being.

Dr. Health at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She also supports the

mental well-being of health care providers in a clinical consulting practice called

TEND Health. I interviewed her in 2021 with a pandemic adult brain

and a lockdown weary spirit.

Why don't I tell you the story of how this came about,

just as we start.

...