After years of caring for his patients, local palliative and end-of-life physician Michael Kearney has found a way to bring palliative care to the earth.
Kearney has learned from Native American elders, Buddhism, and Mother Nature.
Experienced in helping patients with serious illnesses, or at the end of their lives, the time came when Kearney realized his own need for healing.
“I knew how to help with my patient’s pain, but didn’t know how to deal with my own pain,” Kearney said.
Kearney was born in Ireland, and trained at St. Christopher’s Hospice in London with Dame Cecily Saunders, pioneer of the modern hospice movement.
Early on Kearney considered discontinuing his medical studies, when a mentor suggested he visit St. Christopher’s, saying, “It’s a place of healing.”
Although people were dying there, Kearney said he also saw the healing of many inner wounds.
That visit confirmed Kearney’s decision to study medicine. He finished his training, became a doctor, and returned to work at St Christopher’s.
He was one of the first physicians to become Board Certified in palliative medicine, and has worked in both the palliative care and end-of-life field for more than 40 years.
Palliative care is a holistic approach to relieve suffering and increase the quality of life for those with serious or chronic illnesses.
Hospice care seeks to increase the comfort and quality of life for those approaching the end of their lives.
“Even when our body is dying, we can come into a greater wholeness,” Kearney said. “And become wounded healers to everyone around us by coming home to our deepest nature.”
Later Kearney came to North America and moved to Santa Barbara where he now lives with his wife, psychologist, meditation teacher and author Radhule Weininger, Ph.D., M.D.
Some of Kearney’s experiences can be found in his early books, “A Place of Healing, Working with Nature and Soul at the End of Life;” and “Mortally Wounded, Stories of Soul Pain, Death, and Healing.”
“From working in palliative and hospice care, I have seen how an experience of deep inner security can make all the difference for someone who is living with great uncertainty and change,” he said. “This is not something that can be prescribed, but a state of mind and heart, a state of being, that many come to in their own time and their own way.”
Can dying be a time of spiritual growth?
“It can be. There are places and times where the veil between the worlds is thin,” Kearney said, “Dying is one of those times.”
All the defenses we’ve learned up until then are exhausted, Kearney said. Defenses are walls we build up inside us to protect us from people and situations.
“But these defenses may also cut us off from our inner resources,” Kearney said. “When we go through the dying process, the body and mind are exhausted. The defenses then break down.
“What may otherwise be the work of a lifetime can be catalyzed by a terminal diagnosis,” he said.
In his book “The Nest in the Stream: Lessons from Nature on Being with Pain,” Kearney writes that how we deal with pain matters.
Nature has always been important to Kearney, but he said it became even more so when someone introduced him to Wolf and Lisa Wahpepah, Native American elders. They are the second generation in their family to carry a traditional Inter-Tribal Fireplace that receives all people for the benefit of life.
Working with the Wahpepahs, along with his mystical Buddhism meditation practices, brought Kearney to a place of inner healing, he said.
“The traditional models of self-care weren’t enough to mitigate burnout,” he explains.
During one walk into nature, Kearney came to a stream. He noticed a pool with something in it that caught his attention. It was a fallen bird’s nest.
He noticed that the water was flowing through the nest. Thinking about this later a phrase came to him, “the loose and open weave of the heart.”
“The nest in the stream was teaching me that we don’t need to be afraid of our suffering. That, like the nest, we can open to it, let it flow through us, and let it go, while all the time allowing ourselves to be held in the flow of the deeper stream,” Kearney said.
“The nest in the stream became my teacher. I saw a different way of being with pain through seeing it.”
Kearney’s fourth book “Becoming Forest” deals with finding deep inner security. Aishling, a young Irish woman, discovers a note to her from her beloved grandfather Bran, who has died. He asks her to pass his message on to her generation.
Bran noticed that people who have deep security within themselves, however they’ve gotten there, “are rooted in what isn’t afraid and what doesn’t die,” allowing them to be in a crumbling world and still have an open heart.
He wants Aishling to pass this resilience on to young people, who face the uncertainty of the future because of climate change.
Aishling travels to India and sits under the Bodhi tree where the Buddha received his enlightenment. She meets a monk named Dorje, and the two travel together, learning from one another.
Thirty years later, Aishling passes on what she has learned to her daughter Tara, who will pass the wisdom on to her friends, many of whom are weary climate-activists.
In 2023, Kearney founded The Becoming Forest Project, which offers “deep resilience training for uncertain times.” It began with a Think Tank of scholars, contemplatives, scientists, activists, artists, and others, funded by the Mind and Life Institute.
“The primary focus of The Becoming Forest Project is to tend our inner ecology so we can better and more sustainably take care of the outer ecology,” Kearney said.
Information is at https://www.michaelkearneymd.com/ and Mindful Heart Programs, a Santa Barbara-based nonprofit created and founded by Kearney and Weininger.
Mindful Heart offers free meditations and training in mindfulness, compassion, nature connection, and non-dual awareness practices.
The Becoming Forest Project will network with Mindful Heart and other organizations and will offer one-on-one consultations on self-care and deep resilience, teach inner resilience skills, and trainings to help therapists bring these skills into their therapy and teachers into their schools.