Diane Cirincione and Jerry Jampolsky
October 2005
Heal Thyself; Heal the World
Thirty years ago, a book and a hospital cleaning lady changed Dr. Jerry Jampolsky’s life. Today, his Centers for Attitudinal Healing are changing the world, one person at a time.
by Jason Victor Serinus
It began with a book, a boy, and a lot of booze.
In 1975, child psychiatrist Gerald Jampolsky, M.D., received a visit from Judith Skutch, who flew cross-country to deliver a copy of her as-yet-unpublished manuscript for A Course in Miracles. Jampolsky, who told Common Ground that his life then was “really going down the hole from alcoholism,” figured he would read one page.
He got far more than he bargained for. One page later, the self-proclaimed atheist heard a voice saying: “Physician, Heal Thyself.”
“It was an experience of God I’d never had before,” he said. “I knew that my whole life was going to change, that I’d be devoting my whole life to service, and that God’s will and my will would be one.”
A few months later, while making the rounds on UC Medical Center’s child oncology ward, Jampolsky overheard a child ask his doctor what it was like to die. After the doctor hurriedly changed the subject, Jampolsky discovered that doctors and parents alike constantly avoided answering questions about death. Instead, it was the hospital’s compassionate cleaning lady who would answer the children’s questions by sitting on the edge of their bed, speaking from her own experience, and dialoguing as an equal.
Jampolsky meditated on his discoveries and gradually distilled the essence of A Course in Miracles into 12 practical, non-sectarian Principles of Attitudinal Healing. He then drew from the cleaning lady to create the peer-to-peer support group model now used worldwide.
From Booze to Birth
“I had some guidance to start a Center,” Jampolsky explains. “I thought I’d take a short journey with these children and learn something about myself with them. These kids would be wise spirits in young bodies teaching me and other people another way of looking at life and death. I didn’t have a vision that the Center [for Attitudinal healing (CAH)] would be worldwide or anything like that.”
When the kids began to use Attitudinal Healing, they became less fearful, even as long chemotherapy needles were plunged into them. The parents saw the shift and asked for their own support group because they were in grief. Next the kids’ siblings wanted a group, then other children who were healthy whose parents were either ill or had died. All groups were facilitated without charge.
Jampolsky convinced AT&T to fund conference calls between kids in his group and other kids around the country who were sick, and the pioneering peer-to-peer PhonePal/PenPal program was born. Morley Safer of 60 Minutes heard about it in the late ‘70s and flew to California to film a segment on the Center. Subsequent exposure on Phil Donahue, The Today Show, and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood generated national interest in Attitudinal Healing.
In 1979, Jampolsky wrote one of the first self-help books ever published, Love is Letting Go of Fear. The same year, Orson Beane appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, pulled the book out of his pocket, and declared: “This book changed my life.”
As the Center’s phone rang off the hook, groups and services proliferated. CAH soon initiated trainings to empower people from other areas to start their own groups and centers. Peoples’ lives changed as they awakened to their spiritual core.
The first AIDS support group was founded in 1982 after Jampolsky, his new life-partner and future wife Diane Cirincione, Ph.D., and others from the CAH visited SF General Hospital to learn about the disease. Together with hospital staff, they created a model support group for health workers and called a national conference on AIDS, Health Care Workers and Attitudinal Healing. In 1987, the couple helped co-found the CAH’s AIDS Hotline for Kids.
Core Philosophy
According to Don Goewey, CAH’s Executive Director, “Attitudinal Healing defines health as inner peace and healing as letting go of fear. The endemic problem of all human beings is fear. It’s not episodic; it’s pervasive. Anxiety is what people struggle with. It’s what makes our lives fear-filled and often seem unbearable.”
Goewey helped develop Pro Attitude, CAH’s new, fee-based corporate training program (www.proattitude.com), which facilitates peak performance by healing workplace fear and stress. He likes to quote Mark Twain’s adage: “My life has been a series of terrible calamities, most of which never happened.”
“We’re victims of our own wild imagination,” says Goewey. “It’s all connected to our pain; to how we felt isolated and unloved; how we judge ourselves and refuse to forgive ourselves for mistakes we’ve made.
“We help people live in a consciousness of healing, forgiveness, and unconditional love. Healing the past, healing the pain, releasing ourselves from the guilt of the past and the burdens of judgments and unhealed relationships. Forgiving is as important as breathing.”
Mission to Croatia
Cirincione receives inspiration from Gandhi’s assertion that in order to be a truly spiritual person, one needs to be socially conscious. CAH staff have traveled to at least 54 countries to answer requests from communities in need. A call from a lawyer in war-torn Croatia led to visits from Cirincione and Jampolsky over a three-year period. For the first time, Croatian bishops and priests, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and Muslim imams were brought together. “People realized that maybe there was no one to blame,” says Jampolsky, “and that they needed to move on by letting go of the grief and anger of the past and finding new ways to communicate.”
“You can either get your energy out of anger,” says Cirincione, “or get your energy out of love.” Anger breeds more anger. Eventually you fry out. You become part of the problem, rather than taking complete responsibility for your anger and finding that place of deep, deep love inside you for what you would like to see happen in the world. Attitudinal Healing helps someone make the transition.”
Healing Youth
The International CAH hosts 28-30 groups weekly, serving up to 300 people in its expanded Sausalito location. CAH also provides 2,000 hours of home and hospital visits a year to people who can’t make the trip to Sausalito. All these services are free. Only consultations, trainings, and education are provided — locally and internationally — on a fee basis.
A third of CAH’s adult attendees and half the youth they serve are dealing with life-threatening illness. Others come for the Center’s Person to Person Program, meeting weekly to learn how to apply Attitudinal Healing to their lives.
Jimmy Pete, CAH’s Director of Children and Youth Services, spends half his time offsite, running Power to Choose groups in more than a dozen high schools and middle schools and at the SF California Youth Authority.
“The exciting thing about working with kids in schools,” saysPete, “is that we’ve begun to replace what’s been called ‘anger management.’ It’s not very effective in the long run to define children only by anger and try to manage that. Instead, we’re able to work with the whole person. Within a year or two of being in a group, we find a kid who’s been getting in fights every week is now creating peace by inviting fighters not to fight.”
Don Goewey likes to focus on the big picture.
“People who come here are at profound edges and making heroic choices to shift their lives. They discover that deep-down, underneath this stuff that gets warped and twisted from our past, there’s a nature in us that’s transcendent, that is larger than anything that has happened to us. It makes me hopeful for the world.”
Jason Serinus is a Berkeley-based freelance writer.
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