Daniel Kerlinsky:
CLASS OF 1971
Longmeadow High SchoolClass of 1971
Longmeadow, MA
Daniel's Story
Education:
Harvard College was awful - too many self-centered people in one place. Medical school was awful -whatever individuality one took pride in was burned away by grueling hours and a pressure for professional conformity. Internship at Charity Hospital in New Orleans was a blast- Mardi Gras, broken glass, jazz musicians on the locked psych ward, sweet old ladies talking in tongues, and a horseback ride through the swamps. Residency at the psychoanalytically-oriented NY "Bloomingdale" Hospital was like a strange dreamtime mixture of a Civil War era asylum cloned into neo-corporate culture. Child Psychiatry fellowship and then teaching as a professor at the University of New Mexico for 17 years gave me time to decompress. I spent time with protest politics, yoga, tai chi, native american sweat lodge, cross-country skiing in the mountains, and with a great wife raising a son who is now a computer game designer.
Notable experiences:
In 1985 our antinuclear organization, International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War, won the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1994 it came to me to play a small part in the battle for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty when I was appointed to the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board Task Force on Alternative Futures for the US nuclear weapons laboratories. It was a strange and magical journey into a secret world that led up to the Presidential decision in 1995 to stop the nuclear arms race. At the end, by chance, I was in Washington DC when the news was announced. Hardly anyone knew how it happened but Greg Mello and I were there, we knew, and were allowed to give roses and a public thank-you to Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary for her hidden and successful battle to stop the secrecy-cloaked nuclear weapons labs from running the country . We were in front of hundreds of Congressional interns at the start of a speech Hazel O'Leary was about to give. She thanked us, the non-profit advocacy groups, for being a rudder through the changing political winds. For five years after that I helped lead the Physicians for Social Responsibility into a new public health prevention battle arena, fighting to stop toxic pollution and global climate change, threats nearly as larg...Expand for more
e as nuclear war. In 2000 I finished my political career by running for Congress on the Green Party ticket in New Mexico. It was a blast. 14,625 votes later I crawled to the voting booth with my first kidney stone. My ambition for changing the world was spent.
Strange Turns:
In 1989 at an osteopathic cranial-sacral therapy course my world changed when I found there was an established way to study the mind/body interface. Up until then I had believed that physicians could not be healers and that healers, if there were such a thing, were rare people who had some special gift they were born with. I thought the gap between mind and body could never be bridged. Since then, the last 22 years of study and hands-on practice have taught me more than I thought would ever be possible. The hands can tell as much as the eyes and ears.
I had gotten as far away as Rishikesh when I left the university in 1999. On a yoga retreat, in an ashram, on the banks of the Ganges river, I was asked to take a look at a young priest who had come down with a mysterious malady, a painful limp just before he was about to get married. Afterwards, we were shown a mysterious warm spring full of minerals that appears for only a few months a year along the banks of the sacred river. Fish were swimming in an endless circle and the water seemed to bulge upwards like a lens. When my toe touched the water suddenly everything was sparkling bright and time slowed down. I had nearly given up on the notion of inner peace but here was a glimpse of a nearly-fabled experience and the inner quest was on again.
At the SIkh Center in Espanola on the campaign trail the next year, in the emergency medical tent, I met my current wife and professional practice partner when she got her patients (who had fallen down) up off the table faster with acupuncture pins than I could. It took me further Eastward again - into Chinese Medicine - and led into a strangely accelerated treatment approach she wants to call the Kerlinsky method. It also led to a whole new family, four wonderful kids, and a house halfway up the mountain overlooking Albuquerque.
I never intended to go away and be gone for forty years. But what a long strange trip it has been.
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