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Author of Minding the Body, Mending the Mind

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Guy Spiro: Joan, it’s been years since we last talked, can you start with a thumbnail sketch of your work?

Joan Borisenko: My work has combined psychology, biology and spirituality into a tapestry of healing and an understanding of the mind, body and spirit connection. I’ve been doing this work since the 1960s, before the time that people were generally interested. My degree is from Harvard Medical School. I have a doctorate in medical sciences that I got in 1972, and by 1978 there was a newly emerging field called Behavioral Medicine. I went to work in that field, having by then gotten licensed as a clinical Psychologist. I went to work with Dr. Herbert Bensen, a cardiologist who was interested in meditation and what he called the relaxation response, or the physiological antagonist to the fight or flight response. I was fascinated by how our thoughts affect the brain, how that affects the hormones in the body, the immune system, the heart, and virtually every physiological system. I had been meditating since my early 20s, both to reduce my stress and also because I’d had a lifelong interest in the world spiritual traditions.

I come from a Jewish background but I’d been interested for years in early Christianity, Jesus, of course, having been a Jew. What was early Christianity? What were the Essenes doing? I’d been very interested in Hinduism and Buddhism and Lakota spirituality, so I had a chance to combine my interests in science, psychology and the world spiritual traditions, starting by working with Bensen in 1978. I’ve now been doing that work for more than 20 years. My interest in it, to tell a very quick story, started when I was a ten year old and developed a serious mental illness. I became psychotic and developed obsessive/compulsive disorder. I recovered through what the scientists would have to call a spontaneous remission, but it wasn’t. It followed from prayer and an experience of cosmic consciousness. That is what got me interested originally.

What is spirituality? What is that experience of the sacred that I had? A wisdom larger than my base of knowledge was able to be tapped that allowed me to recover from a mental illness. That is what I’ve been interested in all my life. What are these larger powers? How is that we tap into them in a way that heals? What is the nature of healing, and how can we live a happy life and a whole life that contributes to the harmony and beauty of this world?

GS: There are a great many wide and apparent differences between religions, but when you go beneath that to the spirituality, you find how similar they are. Now the utilization of prayer for your healing … was that something you did, or was that done for you?

JB: No, it was something I did, just the way that I think many people pray when they are sick and hoping in some way for healing or curing. I certainly was. When you are really praying from a place of a broken heart with a tremendous amount of emotion, that is when truly remarkable things can happen. It seems that that sense of powerful emotion is somehow a vehicle that carries prayer, but we really don’t understand how. It’s just that you hear this anecdotally time and time again. Emotion seems to be the vehicle, and when you’re in the midst of a dark night of the soul, and you’re alone and frightened, you have a power about you that you may not be able to tap into in the same way when things are calmer. It’s remarkable.

GS: Yes; at some point I’d like to have a word with whoever came up with this plan that we make all this progress through suffering. Whose idea was that?

[laughter]

GS: You’ve been very busy. You’ve come out with several books over the years.

JB: Yes, my eleventh book is coming out at the end of September which has a very apt title based on your last comment, Inner Peace for Busy Women – Balancing Work, Family and Your Inner Life.

GS: Would you talk about your recent books as well as the one that’s coming out ...

JB: My books have all fallen into categories that have to do with Biology, Psychology and Spirituality. In addition to that, I’ve written a couple books specifically for women. Over the last several years I wrote a book The Woman’s Book of Life – The Biology, Psychology and Spirituality of the Feminine Life Cycle. That looks at women’s life cycles from birth to death, and looks at them in seven-year increments because we change biologically, psychologically and spiritually quite significantly in those increments. Childhood to young adult years, from 0–21, is three cycles, then the mother years from 21–42, the midlife years from 42–63, and then the elder years from 63 onward. That has been for me a really exciting thing as a women, to recognize that I’m not going downhill as I’m getting older but that my potential continues to blossom throughout the life cycle. That is one of the threads I’ve been picking up on in my recent work — the work with younger women and with baby boomers, and how we age and how we can learn both from the women younger than we are and the women older. I’ve been doing spiritual retreats for women for the last fifteen years so — that work really feeds the women’s retreat work and also stands by it.

Then I wrote a second book specifically for women called A Woman’s Journey to God. Over the years, I’ve become fascinated with the fact that all religious traditions are based on someone’s experience and they are all based on the experience of men. They’ve all been the practices that have evolved in the way a man might make spiritual progress. But what I’ve understood in my gender studies is that men and women are complementary with one another. In all traditions, in one way or another, you get into an understanding of the Hieros Gamos, the sacred marriage of male and female. But if you just assume that women are like men and need the same set of spiritual practices, there is no feminine for the man to marry. The feminine aspect has been left out of most religious tradition. So A Woman’s Journey to God looks at spirituality from a feminine perspective.

What are the ways within and outside of religious traditions that women make spiritual connections? I think that there have always been secret women’s traditions, the women’s schools, but they have never been put into writing the way that the men’s side was. I think that in order to reach balance between the male and the female, we have to recover that strand. Certainly the strand of recovering the feminine is very much afoot in the culture today. For example, now everyone is reading Jan Brown’s book, The DaVinci Code. I have to laugh because I haven’t read it yet and I’m an aficionado of Mary Magdalene, and that’s what that book is about. There is in A Woman’s Journey to God a wonderful love scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. In my imagining I had Jesus actually in the Temple of Ashira who was the Goddess of that time of the Middle East, learning from the High Priestess of the Temple. I had Mary Magdalene as a young girl growing up in the Temple at the same time that Jesus was there, and her eventually being installed as the High Priestess. The two of them, Mary and Jesus, reenacting the Heiros Gamos together, so that in the fullness of the blending of the male and the female, he could then go forth and do his mission. So I can’t wait to read Jan Brown’s book, which I hear is a great mystery and a great source of information about the Divine Feminine. This is something that deeply interests me in every sphere of life. How do we honor both the male and the female in terms of our bodies, our medical systems; everything from medical research to how our bodies respond to pharmaceutical agents? In work and corporate settings, how do you get a full potential approach that honors both the male and the female within every given system? How do you honor the male and the female aspects within individuals?

GS: One thing I’ve seen over the years is that in a push for equality, there’s been a seeming attempt to negate the differences.

JB: Absolutely, and that’s ridiculous! I was brought up like that. You’re a woman forced to wear men’s clothing. It’s like being in drag, wearing a guy’s business suit. I think it’s very hard on women. Women reach their 40s and we’re so tired of acting like men, and know so little about being women, that that fuels the general discontent. What happens then is that women tend to defect in large numbers from academia and corporations. We need a way for women to remain women within these situation so that we can help bring our academic environments to their most functional and beautiful levels; for us to grow in that system and not become spent, and then have to leave, and then try to find out how to change.

GS: In the early days of feminism, I thought it was great that there was going to be an equality. But then there seemed to be a sameness that was insisted upon that I thought was retrogressive.

JB: I think so, and that’s often the way that change happens. Instead of happening in small increments, we push the pendulum till it swings completely in the opposite direction, and then it has a chance to come back to center. I think we’re at that point now, where women have realized, “hey, the feminine is important, we’re not men.”

GS: That’s what I’ve been trying to tell some of my more hysterical, liberal friends. Politically, the pendulum is going to swing back, it has to.

JB: That’s the only thing you can count on, that happens all the time.

GS: There’s nothing in manifest existence that doesn’t.

JB: It creates change and causes people to really think. To think, what is it in my life, in my world, that requires healing? What would it be to bring forth harmony, to bring forth beauty? What would really be required?

GS: Talk about your newest book.

JB: Inner Peace for Busy Women looks at one of these women’s issues. As we have been able to have more equality in the work place, our duties in the family haven’t lessened. What we have is this generation of women spread out, spread thin and going nuts with some idea that balance is a possibility. That somehow or other we’re going to keep all these balls in the air at the same time. The reality is that you’re not. Things don’t stay in balance. The idea that somehow other people have got it together and everything, in some harmonious balance all of the time, just makes the rest of us feel guilty. If you look, for example, at work habits of very effective executives, they don’t function in balance. They do nothing in particular for a while while things are incubating underneath, and then they work like crazy for several days. Maybe if you look ten years down the line you may see some pattern of balance, but things don’t look balanced in the short run. I think that’s certainly the case when you look at women’s lives, and it’s particularly true for working mothers, who I think are the guiltiest, most strung out of the lot. Quite a bit of my book is simply about understanding that, and about speaking the truth.

The truth is that the hardest job you will ever have is trying to work and mother at the same time. It’s an extremely hard thing. For women, what protects us most against stress and keeps us sane is the presence of other women to talk to. So I talk about all kinds of things like that and strategies for staying sane in an insane time of your life. I think that the book is a lot of fun and is practical, but it tells the truth. It’s the kind of book that a woman will read and say, yes, that’s true. Yes, that’s me. She’ll laugh and she’ll cry, and she’ll feel relieved and think maybe she’s doing a better job than she thought. Truly if we can just lighten up on ourselves, we’ll do ourselves a big favor.

GS: It often looks like other people tend to have it more together. And yet we know that we’re always going to suffer when we compare ourselves to others.

JB: That’s for sure, but that doesn’t stop us, does it?

GS: No. You mentioned getting older. I’m 51. I turned around three times and there it was. It’s very surprising.

JB: Considering the alternative, it’s a relief.

GS: Sometimes I look forward to going, but there are things to be done here. I feel far from finished.

JB: The older I get, the more precious it seems. We’re told that all the time when we’re small, how precious life is and how fast it goes, but the reality of it strikes you when you get older. There’s an old Seals and Crofts song about drinking life up from a paper cup and that’s what I feel like. I can’t drink it fast enough or taste it deeply enough. It’s so beautiful that I don’t want one iota of that beauty, one molecule of that fragrance, one instance of the opportunity to love to pass me by. I feel the longer I’m here, the less ready I am to go, because I recognize how much of life has passed me by while I was not in the present. The older I get, the more spiritual I become. As you enter into this state of the now and being present, you see that the only reality truly is love. If you get that right, everything else will flow from it. And I think we become so grateful that we become like a transmitter, transmitting these messages of gratitude and praise back to the source of life.

GS: That became real clear to me a couple years ago when my oldest, who is now twenty, had just graduated high school. I was annoyed that I had to drive her somewhere when I wasn’t supposed to have to, someone else was going to do it. I was very annoyed by it, and on my way to go pick her up it dawned on me that it was almost over. Every chance I got to drive her somewhere was a privilege. It was really a revelation to me in that moment.

JB: It’s true, that’s how it happens. Suddenly the kids are grown up and they’re gone. They may be living somewhere far, far away from you and you think, oh my, how we took each other for granted.

GS: I was so glad that that happened when it did. What’s cutting edge for you right now?

JB: Right now I’m working as little as I can. I’ve taken the summer off and I have enjoyed it immensely. As I get older, I realize that I don’t have that long. So every time I can take my bike down these beautiful mountain trails, or go for a hike, or be with my friend, or be with my beloved — that’s where the juice is for me, in living a simple and rich life filled with nature and filled with love and filled with friends. That will enrich my work. Right now my work is not what’s primary to me. Living is primary.

GS: What’s your next project going to be?

JB: There are a couple of projects I’m working on. One of them is a book project that I’m developing with Loretta LaRoach. She is a humorist and author. We do a workshop together called Twisted Sister and the Fairy Godmother. Those are two voices that most women will recognize in their own mind. I think we’re going to develop that into a book. The other project that I’m really thinking of developing is a kind of spiritual school over the Internet. I’ll probably have meetings with people over a phone bridge a couple of times a month, and then there will be ways in which people connect with one another and do small group work. Things of that nature. I’ll be developing that this year.

GS: Is there anything else you’d like to say?

JB: I think the main thing for people to recognize is that spirituality is about enjoying and being present. That sounds like an easy thing, but there’s often a lot of healing that you have to do on your path to get into that place where you can be in the present moment. The other side of it that I just want to mention briefly is to say it’s wonderful when we get to that place ourselves, but that we have to be socially responsible and socially active to do what we can in our communities within our countries to make sure other people have what they need to do their healing work, to be educated. We all need to do our piece to make the world a better place.

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