Unconditional Healing with Jeff Rubin
Can a person embrace immense adversity in their life to not only cope, but to thrive and discover their most authentic self?
As a teacher of Buddhist meditation and psychology for four decades, and someone "blessed" with a chronic illness for two of those decades, Jeff Rubin has been obsessed with answering this question. This obsession led him to develop a program called Unconditional Healing, a new model of health that has helped countless people transform their relationship to pain, adversity, and illness, and unlock their own storehouse of confidence and resilience.
In this podcast, Jeff explores the principles of Unconditional Healing with talks, healing practices, and interviews with those who have discovered how to thrive in the face of adversity. He also features guests who are experts or thought leaders in a particular aspect of health and well-being. If you are dealing with an acute or chronic illness, the loss of a loved one or your livelihood, the dissolution of a relationship, or any other adverse circumstance that has you feeling anxious and confused, then this podcast is definitely for you. Especially if you’re looking for a more nuanced, more spiritual way to work with life's inevitable difficulties.
Please note the podcast is currently on hiatus, but all episodes remain available on all the major podcast platforms.
Unconditional Healing with Jeff Rubin
Interview with Hackie Reitman - Humble Renaissance Man
Harold “Hackie” Reitman is one of the most interesting and multi-talented folks I've ever met. In his very “out-of-the-box” career, Hackie has been a distinguished orthopedic surgeon, a professional heavyweight boxer, an author of books and screenplays, a filmmaker, and an advocate, mentor, and entrepreneur for the neuro-diverse community. With all that under his belt, Hackie is humble, self-effacing with a great sense of humor, and I came away thinking someone should make a movie about this guy’s life because it’s so fantastical.
As a teen, Hackie developed some skills in basketball and boxing and after high school was accepted into the six-year medical program at Boston University. As a first-year medical student at Boston University, Hackie entered and won the prestigious amateur Lowell New England Golden Gloves Boxing Championship at heavyweight, with all four wins coming by knockout. He was then offered a very lucrative contract to box professionally but turned it down to return to medical school, (and boy, is there a great story behind that)!
In 1987, Hackie’s only daughter, Rebecca, age two, required emergency surgery for a brain tumor and it turned out to be a life-changing event for both. Hackie made a pact with God that if Rebecca survived, he’d return to boxing at the then “way-too-old -to-be-doing-this” age of 38 and direct all his prize winnings to children’s charities. (I vaguely remember at that time the media frenzy about “the Boxing Doctor” and his unlikely career change at age 38). Rebecca survived and Hackie went on to fight 26 bouts with a record of 13 wins, 7 losses, and 6 draws. Most impressively, Hackie was knocked down, but never counted out in any bout.
Hackie went on to become the founder of a media company, PCE media, and wrote, produced, and directed the movie, “The Square Root of 2”, a full-length film starring Darby Stanchfield from the hit show “Scandal”. The film is based on Rebecca’s struggles with learning disorders while pursuing a mathematics degree at Georgia Tech University. After her graduation, Hackie discovered that Rebecca was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, an illness with which he was totally unfamiliar even as an M.D. So of course he studied up and wrote the book, “Aspertools: The Practical Guide for Understanding and Embracing Asperger’s, Autism Spectrum Disorders and Neurodiversity.
Hackie became a huge advocate for the neuro-diverse community, arguing that our brains all work differently and one size does not universally fit all. He is the founder of the neuro-diversity website DiferentBrains.org. which is a repository for his various advocacy, mentoring, interviewing, and video projects dedicated to bringing the neurodiversity community and education into the mainstream.